Convict Labor - What's the Big Deal?

Great Debates
21

Prisons price themselves on ‘Cost per inmate place p.a’

My jail is a cheaper one as half of it is the lowest possible category and the othe rahlf is the next lowest, even so it we are still talking about £15k per inmate per year and we have around 700.
There is a huge amount of pressure to get this figure as low as possible and prison governors would much prefer to do commercial work rather than reduce staff which has the potential to compromise security.

In lower category jails it is easier to get work from outside companies as the prisoners have a longer working day plus there are not the major hold-ups caused by security searching which also adds hugely to the cost of producing in Cat A and Cat b jails.

Searching will tie down at least one dog, handler and two officers and the goods/vehicle have to be checked both on entry and exit plus escort the whole time it is inside.

It is currently the aim in finishing off jails such as mine to try to get employment before the inmate leaves and in the open half of the prison we try to find suitable employment where the inmate goes out to work and returns to jail on an evening.
Truthfully this only works for a minority , dare I say it-a small one at that, so we have to find some compromise for the rest.
Our aim is to bring work in from private companies to provide inmates with a work ethic.
That is the official line, the unnofficial line is that the majority are unemployable with poor education, no skills, no motivation and are basically lazy bastards who want everybody else to provide them with a luxorious lifestyle.

Because we have such a low grade work force it is hard to find the sort of work that will earn good money, usually we have to set the work targets low, far lower than real people, and the skill content is also low.

We have lately increased our work targets and slowly our reputation for standards of work has improved so that we can now bid for better work, which is more interesting for the cons but it can all be lost in a very short time.

I have seen one disgraceful episode where a company bought another one out, provoked a strike which allowed them to sack the workforce without severance and bring the work into prisons, result something like 70 or 80 people jobless.

OTOH one staple of prison work was doing charity mailshots.These are done for an agency which then supplies the charity concerned. It is pretty mindless stuff but is idea for many inmates and since it is charitable there is less resistance to it. This work is now done in China (possibly by their prisoners) as it is cheaper for them to do it and ship all the way over to us.

Doug
Private jails make their money not from the work they carry out but from a contract with the government/state where they bid to incarcerate inmates for a certain fee.This is subjected to certain contract standards which are independantly inspected so it is nort just a case of underbidding other service prviders.
Money they make from prison workshops is nice but is only a small part of their income.
In our place out of a population of 700 only about 150 at most are employed doing work for non-prison private companies and they only operate at about 1/3 the capacity of a regular person.

22

Well, out here they “run” the parking ticket concession to make a profit, as it adds to the general fund, in cash-strapped cities(which are currently not so cash-strapped). They actually try to get folks to park illegally, so they can write tickets. They complain about the sad state of “downtown retail”, when every think-tank, or independent expert has told them the fastest way to increase retail is to get rid of the meters, and add more parking. Parking ticket $$ is very addictive. The City is supposed to funnel it all into parking improvements, but it has all gone to general fund stuff for the last 7 years or so, do to the “emergency”. Hah. Could they do this for real crime? Well, when they had the unrestricted “RICO” confiscations, the agencies were targeting those with nice assets they wanted to sieze. So, “it could happen here”.

23

Including the cost of housing and watching over a prisoner, which is always expensive(26,000 per in California), we must also look at the cost of convicting that prisoner. Today, trials and appeals can run into the millions of tax dollars. Figure in the cost of a criminal investigation and you can see it would be much cheaper to just hire people.

24

I’m just going to bring up a few points on this matter (some of which were already stated)

  1. It costs HOW MUCH to keep a person in jail?
  2. Don’t inmates already have the opportunity to get a University or College education?..for free?
    (Last I checked, I had to PAY a few grand for mine…)
  3. Legal costs in getting them in there in the first place.
  4. In some (not all, mind you, but…) cases, the inmate walks out a millionaire because he sold the book and movie rights to his story.
    (Gotta love America, huh?)
  5. The inmates get TV, gym equipment and books to keep themselves (relatively) busy.

Now, I want to say that I’m not necessarily complaining. But when I hear about prisoners complaining about how they have nothing to do, poor conditions, etc. My first instinct is to say, “Cry me a river. It’s jail, what did you expect??”

In some regards, a person’s life in jail seems to be better set up than if (s)he were living on the street. We’re not talking about some backwater Middle Eastern cell, here…

So, (after I’ve got that rant out) I’d like to say:

  1. If the inmates are doing federal or labour work (such as roadwork, highway cleanup, forestation projects, furniture building for government offices, garbage collection, licence plates, etc…you know, stuff our taxes are already supposed to pay for), I’m all for it.
  2. I am against large for-profit companies being able to hire inmates in place of a standard workforce.
  3. Inmates should not earn any wages/money/credit during their incarceration, no matter how low. As far as I’m concerned, they are getting paid-for, on-the-job training.
  4. Profits made from selling movie/TV/book rights of “the sick story” should be awarded to the suvivors of victims of the crime the charged person had commited.
  5. I also feel that a certain percentage of a person’s earnings should go back into the system after they’ve been released, but only for a few years (say 2-3), as a way of paying back the “student loan”.
  6. And yes… it’s certainly better than sitting around all day.

…of course, that’s just my opinion…

25

Darqangelle

In higher security jails it costs far more to keep an inmate, and in some jails they have special security units which cost even more.

I’ll bet it can cost well above £50k or around $75k to keep the highest risk inmates inside.

I could make these jails very cheap to run though, simply wall them into their cells, forget rehab most of these guys will never be released.
Putting them to work costs far more than just locking them up 24/7 because of the stringent security protocols that need to be observed.

I think there is a good case for making repeat offenders serve an open ended sentance which will only end when they have attained certain educational standards and have attained and used a real skill rather than the Mickey Mouse courses that they seem to do.
They should then only be released when they have obtained a full-time job and they should go straight back to jail if they get sacked.They should then be required to hold that job down for a post-release supervisory period.If they wish to change job during that time they should have to get permission from the probation department and they should approve it as suitable first.

Sure it would cost more to run but if the scumbags don’t want to play ball then there is no point in releasing them to cause more havoc anyway.

26

Regarding the profit issue, I would agree with Danielinthewolvesden’s summation that "some amount of convict labor might be OK, but not to the extent it turns a “profit”. There is definitely some truth to the idea that once a government gets used to any source of revenue it has a hard time turning away from it. (In some places criminal asset confiscation laws are used as a source of revenue. Speeding ticket quotas serve a similar purpose.)

One thing that has not been brought up is the presence of such incentives to prosecute financial crimes, which often result in huge fines. People are very concerned (and not without justification, as noted) about the prospect of the government going after Joe Shmoe to make a couple of bucks from his employment, but no one mentions the far greater incentives that already exist to go after Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

27

some other points to consider.
having something for the convicts to do is actually a critically important thing for safety and security reasons. Work is a valuable tool for dealing with prisoner behavior. and it does reduce the costs in general for running the prison by having the convicts do the kitchen and janitorial work.

Where I have a concern, though is when the resulting product of the inmate labor is brought out to the commercial world, underbidding other contractors.

yes, it does happen. In Michigan, the Michigan State Industries (the prionsoner labor industries) produces a wide variety of goods, and not just for the prisons. they make furniture, and there was a case recently where they’d won a bid for a big contract, marginally outbidding another outside bidder. Now, in any manufacturing enterprise, labor costs are a BIG factor of the costs. and since MSI was paying a whopping $1.50 per DAY per person vs. the outside co who was paying over $8 per HOUR per person, my question that never got answered, is HUH???

28

Some responses to a few of the comments here. As in the past when I’m describing prison policy, I’m generally describing New York state policy. However, NY is a major player in the American prison system and many other government bodies base their policies on New York.

I understand that it’s possible for a government agency to make a profit and there are certainly instances of them doing so. But overall, governments do not base policy decisions on profit making possibilities. In this regard, they’re like churches; when Pope John Paul II is planning what countries he will visit in the upcoming year, he doesn’t base his decisions on where he has the best chance of promoting his record sales.

Convicts are required to attend education classes until they have their high school equivalency diploma. After that, school’s out; convicts are prohibited from accepting scholarship money and the only way they can attend college classes is by paying for correspondence courses out of their own pocket.

The cost of imprisoning a convict varies so gretaly that it’s almost impossible to pin down. So I won’t argue with the claims of $26,000 or $75,000 that have been made. Either could be correct depending on how you arrive at your figures.

Convicts do have recreational equipment (which includes sports gear, televisions and VCR’s, library books, etc) but all of this is paid for from money collected from the convicts themselves. In my opinion, it’s money well spent even it wasn’t paid for by the convicts. If you tried to put fifty convicts in a room for several hours they’re almost certain to be problems that will require several guards to prevent or break up. Put one $200 TV in the room and they’ll sit quietly for hours (or until they start fighting about what channel to watch).

29

The principle of prison work depends on what you aim to achieve by it.What do you require of the prison service ?

Is it vengeance and punishment beyond institutional isolation or do you want those inmates to come out better equipped to make their way in the world ?

There are so many differant offender profiles that there is probably a need for all of these things.
Current emphasis is on rehab as the overwhelming majority are going to be released at some point and it would be helpful to society to reduce the ‘revolving door’ system we have at the moment.

I think that prisons demand too little of the inmates on the grounds, that it is largely hopeless they will reoffend, over 80% do, and it is just a holding job to keep them out of circulation.Eventually they settle down, or die or get too old for crime.

Maybe we should expect prisoners to work hard but for them to see some benefit from it.
Pointless, aimless work does very little to address any issues other than keeping the inmates sane and quite a lot of prison work is exactly that IMHO(but I do have the experience to back that up)

30

I would say - neither of these two options. The reason is to offset some of the high cost of supporting them. Let them support themselves (to the extent that they can). This is a responsibility that most people already have, so let’s let these prisoners in on it.

Also, if they could reimburse their victims a bit it would be a nice thing.

31

Trying to make prisons self-supporting has been an enduring theme along with making the experience miserable enough to be a disincentive to come back.

It was used extensively to open up colonies but that option is no longer with us.

Nobody has been succesful yet, the best that has been done is for prisons to supply themselves with as much as is possible but the nature of the workforce requires far more supervision which will generally make most enterprises uneconomic.

One reason is the reluctance of business to put their work into prisons as it is seen as bad PR .
Companies fear an outcry if it were to be revealed.

We have to make certain that work done for some companies does not get anything packed into it that might reveal the source of labour.
One job we had was taken from us when the directors found out (it had been arranged at a much lower level)yet the work was done exactly to specification.
Most jails would be very willing to take in work that pays but we usually end up with work from firms trying to do things cheaply and who are not very professional about it, dare I say it, fly-by-night companies.