Prison Labor.

We need to provide rehabilitation opportunities to inmates, but you might remember that the war on drugs was just getting going in the 70's:
:
A Brief History of Federal Prison Industries

Since 1934, Federal Prison Industries, Incorporated-a wholly-owned corporation of the United States Government-has operated factories and employed inmates in America's Federal prisons. Also known as FPI or UNICOR, Federal Prison Industries, Inc., has made an incalculable contribution to law enforcement by contributing to the safety and security of Federal correctional institutions... Inmates have families to help support, court-imposed fines to pay, and victims to recompense. Under the Bureau's Inmate Financial Responsibility Program (IFRP), all inmates who have court recognized financial obligations must use at least 50 percent of their FPI earnings to pay their just debts. Since the program began in 1987, more than $80 million has been collected.

Sanford Bates, the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, once observed that "Prisoners should work because it is economically necessary, socially advisable, and because it represents the most important element in the general attempt to solve the problem of delinquency." In short, if prisons are necessary to protect society, then prison industries are necessary to make those prisons function properly.

By the middle of the 1970's, FPI was working to moderate sales fluctuations through a greater emphasis on marketing and customer service. In 1974, it established regional marketing positions and organized the corporation into seven divisions, each of which handled resource management, production, and sales in a specific FPI industry (Automated Data Processing, Electronics, Graphics, Metals, Shoe and Brush, Textiles, and Woods and Plastics). A year later, it initiated a program to improve product quality and acceptability. Although the law required that Federal agencies purchase from FPI whenever possible, the corporation still had to compete in order to win customers.

Then in 1977, FPI introduced a new corporate logo and a new trade name: "UNICOR." Coinciding with its new image, FPI established a Corporate Marketing Office to develop nationwide marketing strategies and programs. The marketing initiatives of the middle and late 1970's presaged even greater efforts during the 1980's and 1990's to make UNICOR more responsive to customer needs and to base UNICOR's activities squarely on modern business principles.

Prison-based call centers are probably more common than you think -- by some counts almost every state in America runs some. But they're probably not as bad as you think. UNICOR call centers don't compete with American jobs -- they only take on contracts that were about to be outsourced overseas. Security is high -- it has to be, if only because of the perception of danger.

And, as a UNICOR salesman told me, "adherence is fantastic." That's a joke you'll hear a lot from the prison outsourcing industry, but it's true. The fact is, prison call center jobs pay more than other prison jobs. They provide work in clean, air-conditioned environments that give prisoners the chance to interact with people on the outside who don't know they're talking to a convict. Prisoners like that; being treated like a call center worker is much preferred to getting treated like a convict. These men and women covet these jobs...

We do not believe Federal Prison Industries should continue its unfettered expansion into the commercial marketplace," Tim Maney, director of legislative affairs for the Chamber of Commerce told NPR in February of last year. "The business community is extremely concerned with this."

UNICOR wouldn't talk to NPR, and they haven't been willing to speak with us either. It's a matter of protecting their clients, businesses that have opted for cheap labor in American prisons rather than cheap labor outside our borders. Is there anything wrong with this?



Some interesting statistics

For too long, the incarceration industry has gotten away with high costs and low performance. It is time to introduce accountability, competition and rational incentives into the nation's prison systems--both public and private.

Federal and state governments spend more than $35 billion a year to lock up a greater portion of the population--one out of 138 Americans--than any other country on earth. The prison population keeps growing, mainly because our recidivism rates are sky-high. Half of former inmates return to prison. It is time to ask: What are we getting for the dollars spent on this growing revolving-door system?

Certainly prisoners should take personal responsibility for their own actions and their own rehabilitation. But with smart programs, many more should be finishing their sentences and coming home to be taxpaying citizens, not lifelong drains on the state's coffers.

Why are so many failing to rehabilitate themselves? One way to ask that question is this: Where are the financial incentives for prisons to properly perform their rehabilitative function? If anything, the captains of the incarceration industry have a perverse incentive to rehabilitate as few people as possible and keep business booming.