Good old American capitalism. I bet you thought slave labor was just for China and Apple. No sir. Your job can now be done in prison by convicts paid slave wages by a corporation with connections to politicians and government bureaucrats. No conflicts of interest here. No payoffs to anyone. Just good old American crony capitalism at its finest. Just be happy your job didn’t get shipped to China.
IN TOUGH ECONOMIC TIMES, PRISON LABOR IS UNDER FIRE
Workers, some in Congress fear federal inmates siphon away jobs
By JAY REEVES Associated Press
Monday, November 5, 2012
TALLADEGA, Ala.
On the outside, Unicor, with its big oaks and magnolia trees, looks like it could be part of a landscaped industrial park. Step a little closer and it’s clear the apparel shop lies in the middle of a medium-security federal prison in east Alabama.
The factory and those like it that employ convicted felons are at the heart of a simmering debate about whether prisons should be siphoning away jobs — at much lower wages — that could be filled by those who need them during the nation’s toughest period of unemployment in decades.
Congressional Republicans, a handful of Democrats and private-industry critics want to clamp down on Unicor, the trade name for Federal Prison Industries.
Almost 13,000 inmates working in federal lockups around the country for a few dollars a day make everything from military uniforms to office furniture to electrical parts that are sold exclusively to federal agencies. With annual revenues that reached $900 million last year, Unicor is the federal government’s 36th-largest vendor.
Corrections officials say the program teaches prisoners invaluable job skills and personal discipline that help cut down on their return to prison. Inmates who work in the program are 24 percent less likely to commit more crimes than other prisoners after being released, they say.
“While it operates as a business, the real output is inmates who are trained in marketable job skills so that they can return to the community as productive members of society,” Philip J. Sibal, senior deputy assistant director of Federal Prison Industries, told a congressional committee earlier this year.
But Misti Keeton’s eyes welled with tears at the thought of losing her job to a convict. She sews military apparel in the west Alabama town of Fayette at American Power Source. The company is laying off about 50 workers at her plant and another one in Columbus, Miss., after losing a contract to make Air Force exercise garb to Unicor.
“I’m terrified,” Keeton said as she fed camouflage cloth through a machine with one hand and wiped away tears with the other. “I’ve got two teenagers at home. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to them if I lose this job. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feed them.”
Critics of the program say Unicor undercuts private companies because of lower operating costs and laws that require federal agencies to use inmate-produced products when able.
Inmates in the Talladega prison factory are paid by the pieces of clothing they complete and average around $150 a month, which goes into an account at the prison. At American Power Source, workers make $9.25 an hour average, or about $1,480 a month based on a 40-hour week.
Federal prisoners, though, haven’t taken huge numbers of jobs away from private industry. Private groups supporting limits on Unicor’s operation have documented only 300 or so layoffs directly linked to private companies losing work to federal prisoners, all at four textile plants in Alabama and Tennessee.
And, though Unicor doesn’t have to pay benefits like many private employers, Talladega plant manager Robert Bynum said the factories face a challenge other businesses don’t: Making quality products with convicted felons, many of whom don’t know how to work.
“Every day I get guys who’ve never had a job,” said Bynum. Correctional officers are stationed all around the prison, but not inside the factory unless needed.
The tension between private jobs and rehabilitating prisoners has hounded the prison industry program since it began under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression in 1934, when the national unemployment rate was 22 percent.
Back then, the American Federation of Labor opposed creating a prison-based manufacturing network, arguing it would suck jobs away from the private sector at a time when working people needed every job they could get. The arguments today against Unicor are similar as the nation tries to escape lingering high unemployment following the worst recession since before World War II.
Federal agencies are now required to purchase items when possible from Unicor. However, Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., is the primary sponsor of legislation to change that.
Among other things, the proposal that has drawn bipartisan support would subject prison factories to direct competition with private business by removing a requirement that makes Unicor the “mandatory source” for some products for government agencies.
The House passed such legislation in 2003 and 2006 before it stalled in the Senate both times; this year’s version got stuck in the committee that held the hearing where Sibal spoke in June.
“We’ll get started again early in the next Congress, and I think we’ve got a good opportunity to get something done,” said John M. Palatiello of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition, which supports the bill.
But with Unicor plants at 66 prisons nationwide, critics say prisoners are doing work that law-abiding citizens could be performing. The operation isn’t nearly as big as just a few years ago because the sluggish economy and tight budgets have reduced government orders, forcing the Bureau of Prisons to close or downsize 43 Unicor factories nationwide.
James Hamm isn’t following the Unicor debate closely, but he knows all about prison factories: He’s serving 38 years for bank robbery at the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution, which houses 1,050 prisoners. Hamm is among the 210 inmates who produce military apparel in a 30,000-square-foot factory at the prison.
Hamm, 34, has used prison wages to pay his court-ordered fine of $1,200, and he earned the high school equivalency degree that was required as part of his participation in Unicor. He said the prison job has taught him about hard work and responsibility — things he didn’t know anything about on the outside.
“Every morning I get up at the same time, whether it’s a holiday or weekend,” Hamm said. “I come to work every day.”
Chicago999444 says:
We are quickly and inexorably reinstating slavery.
Prison corporations are lobbying for ever more criminalization of formerly non-criminal actions, and longer prison terms for them… the better to displace legitimate workers with prison labor paid a tenth as much, if even.
So then, ever more jobless, hopeless people can commit evermore petty crimes just to survive.. .prostitution, petty theft, small-time dope-dealing… and supply the prison farms and factories with more cheap drafted labor.
Maybe this 235-year-old experiment in “liberty” never had a real chance. Maybe slavery and repression and brutality are in our DNA, because every human society ends up just where we’re going. I can’t think of one civilization in history that ever maintained freedom and equal stature in law for all its denizens, or was anything like fair, honest, and equitable for more than about 75 years.
In our case, we started off on the wrong foot, by permitting slavery to continue.
It was a nice try. Everything transpiring now makes me so goddam glad that I’m 60 yrs old and most of my life is behind me. I’m even gladder I never had kids… what do the young of today have to look forward to?
During my lifetime I have tried my limited best to be what a citizen should be and to support and defend true liberty. I did what I could. That’s all I can say.
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5th November 2012 at 1:29 pm
Eddie says:
How do you spell Gulag?
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5th November 2012 at 1:41 pm
TeresaE says:
I learned of this long ago and was appalled. We have private corporations building prisons only on the contractual obligation to keep them full at a certain percentage.
So our states are agreeing that X number of citizens will break the law. Wonder if this has anything to do with the criminalization of everything? Don’t file a 1099? Forgot a form? Make an error in computation? Weeds too tall? No money to repair your sidewalk? Too many cars in your yard? Your teen throws a party while you are out of town? Feed an alligator? Kill a Canada goose? Child gets a urinary tract infection? All these can result in prison.
We pay mega-corps to build and run them while guaranteeing criminals to fill them and huge conglomerates/ a few real rich dudes, make money. Then we offer inmates jobs. And keep in mind that this is the only place in America where fights are waged over jobs – time goes easier with money in your account and large amounts of your day spent doing something. Then they don’t even offer wages that would cover your gas to and from work if the job was on the outside. Yet they have people vying desperately to come to work. There is no other company in America that has that.
And then, to add insult to injury, the government is required to buy from their plantations, ‘er prison factories, first. The government is a HUGE portion of our economy.
We are obviously being herded into a new tomorrow. There is NO possible way that the politicians and PTB do not realize that American business (middle class) cannot possibly “compete” with slave wages, or the third world. The proof of this fallacy of globalization is literally everywhere yet the meme continues to be sold to us.
Yep, shoved into some new society. And I don’t think many of us are going to enjoy what they are creating for us. Not much at all.
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5th November 2012 at 1:49 pm
Davos says:
USA is number 1: It holds 5 percent of the worlds population and 25 percent of the worlds prisoners.
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5th November 2012 at 2:19 pm
Hollow man says:
Federal united prison workers of America. FUPA. Workers unite
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5th November 2012 at 3:11 pm
Kill Bill says:
I think from now on I am gonna type in blue. Why? Because its the color of my prison uniform
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5th November 2012 at 3:35 pm
Kill Bill says:
At this rate prisoners will become a commodity. Think about it. Private prisons getting a hundred a day to keep prisoners fed, medical and housed while also collecting some of their wages from farming out their labor. As well any infraction of the law will result in a life sentence. And when you cant work any longer…death panel.
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5th November 2012 at 3:39 pm
ecliptix543 says:
Chicago,
You’re about 24 years ahead of me but it seems we have the same general view on the declining appeal of being a good citizen within the context of recent government tendencies. Unfortunately, I’m not as close to the end of my existence on this little space rock. What does my generation have to look forward to? Well, we have the enviable position of having to compete with your generation (highly experienced with destroyed portfolios), as well as having to compete with the current crop of techno-genius/socially inept adult children flooding out of schools with tens of thousands in debt and all the dreams of avarice in their iThings. I own a Motorola Xoom tablet and a couple of Droid phones, I also owned a completely mechanical typewriter with the red and black ink ribbons. I understand carbeurated engines and have an OBD2 programmer for my cars. I remember purchasing gas for my first car at $0.67 and when payphones could still be found easily. I remember $0.18 stamps, before FedEx and UPS were considered the default choice for delivering paperwork. I remember smoking on a domestic flight from Nashville to Las Vegas. I also remember when I didn’t consider the police as a likely enemy and my potential murderer.
I have very little to look forward to – as far as the bill of goods I was sold in school. That future no longer exists. They lied. Simple as that.
I do, however, know of a number of civilisations that didn’t exploit slavery and allow greed and conceit to drive their society. Most of the tribal nations of Native Americans, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand, and as far as I know, the Inuit. Seems like we decided we had to kill all of those barbarous heathens in the name of Progress and God, though. Savages… how dare they live that way?
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5th November 2012 at 5:36 pm
Ron says:
Its somehow written in our code to enslave and control people.Most of it for power or things.
Building codes have become a sore spot for me.Dam near everything you want to do in life has a law about it that restricts you.Try to start a buisness.Or build a house.
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5th November 2012 at 10:43 am