More U.S. businesses finding cheap, untapped labor pool in
prisons
PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. (January 14, 1998 1:13
p.m. EST nando.net) - From the outside,
Broward Correctional Institution doesn't look anything
like a flourishing center of capitalistic enterprise.
Located beside the county dump at the edge of
Florida's Everglades, the women's prison is ringed
by 20-foot-high chain-link fences and coils of razor
wire. Here, the state confines its worst female
criminal convicts.
Some folks look at these inmates and see a
collection of dangerous and uneducated misfits. Ron
Gudehus sees something entirely different - potential.
For the past decade, Gudehus has transformed
convicts into skilled employees who work at a
full-service optical laboratory in the very heart of this
maximum-security prison.
It is not make-work to keep prisoners occupied
between meals. Broward Optical is a profitable
business with real customers, real deadlines, real
quality controls and a bottom line.
Although controversial, the business activity here can
help stanch the flow of U.S. jobs to Mexico, the
Caribbean and other cheap labor markets overseas,
say some economists and officials. They advocate
doing on a national level what Gudehus is doing at
Broward Correctional - seeing the country's 1.2
million inmates as potential national assets, rather
than liabilities.
Currently, only 1 in 10 prisoners in the United States
works for pay. But they receive low wages - what
prisons are willing to pay. That's usually well below
the minimum wage.
But for the 2,400 inmates who work for the private
sector - like those at Broward - pay is much better.
They get the prevailing wage for products they
produce. In Connecticut, that means the baseball
caps used every year in the Little League World
Series. In South Carolina, it's graduation gowns,
cables and furniture. And in Arizona, women
prisoners are hired to take hotel reservations.
"There is just an awful lot of untapped human
potential there," says Morgan Reynolds, an
economist at Texas A&M and a fellow at the National
Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas.
With the prison population reaching record highs and
US unemployment at record lows, Mr. Reynolds and
other analysts are asking whether a large
concentration of available workers in prisons might
help keep U.S. manufacturing and other jobs in the
United States.
When GEONEX, a computer mapping company
based in St. Petersburg, Fla., was competing for a
major project for an international telephone company
recently, executives considered hiring workers in
Pakistan or India to input computer data.
But they went instead to Liberty Correctional
Institution near Tallahassee, where American
prisoners are now performing the work. In addition to
training and a regular paycheck, some 80 inmates on
the project can expect at least a $25,000-a-year job
doing similar work when they are released.
"We are giving these people a skill set so that when
they do get out they are going to be productive," says
Kenneth Mellem, president of GEONEX.
Reynolds says the vast majority of prisoners would
gladly work for a paycheck if given the opportunity.
Sylvia Kee agrees. Kee, who is serving a life prison
sentence, has worked at Broward Optical for 12
years. She is one of only 54 inmates employed in the
14-year-old business. But she says 90 percent of the
600 inmates at her prison want to work in the optical
lab. It is the only program of its type in the prison.
But the use of prison-based labor for private
enterprise is controversial. Labor union officials and
some industry groups say prison-based industries
result in unfair competition and take jobs from
law-abiding workers. Some critics call it a new form
of slavery and warn of the establishment of American
gulags.
The prison industries movement "uses incarceration
as the remedy of choice for poverty, unemployment,
poor education and racism," writes Paul Wright, a
prisoner in Washington state and editor of Prison
Legal News. "If you've lost your job in manufacturing,
garment or furniture fabrication, telemarketing or
packaging, it could have simply been sentenced to
prison."
Advocates of employing and paying inmates counter
that the current system of human warehouses does
little to prepare prisoners to make an honest living
upon release. Learning a trade such as lens-making
or computer data input, and being paid a regular
wage, are far different than earning 15 cents an hour
to mop prison floors or wash prison dishes, they say.
"If you can help people develop the right kind of
attitude about work - a healthy, positive work ethic - it
will go a long way in helping them once they get out,"
says Pamela Davis, president of PRIDE Enterprises,
a nonprofit firm that promotes and runs prison
industry programs throughout Florida. Broward
Optical is a division of PRIDE.
To prevent adverse impacts on workers outside
prison, most prison-based businesses are restricted
by law to supplying products only to public agencies.
In a few cases, prison-made products and services
may enter broader markets when they don't directly
compete with other existing businesses.
Reynolds says the best answer to critics' concerns
about prison labor would be to permit open
competition to employ inmates. Those companies
willing to take the risks and train the inmates should
reap the economic rewards. At the same time, he
says, inmate wages would be bid up, reducing the
gap between in-prison wages and nonprison wages.
Reynolds calculates that if half of all prisoners worked
in market-type jobs for five years, earning $7 an hour
in full-time employment, they could boost the nation's
gross domestic product by $20 billion. Prison-based
industries would have a ripple effect in their
communities, as they tap local suppliers and other
services, advocates say.
Inmates who work contribute as much as 80 percent
of their earnings to pay room and board at prison,
family support, and taxes. They also pay restitution to
crime victims.
For many, their prison jobs mark the first time in their
lives they've been members of a team, given
responsibilities, trusted and rewarded for jobs well
done.
In a way it is a little taste of freedom. "I feel like when I
am on the job I leave the prison out there," says Kee.
"I always know where I am," she adds quickly, "but
when I come in here I come in to give them the best
of myself."
By WARREN RICHEY, Staff writer of The
Christian Science Monitor
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