“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” — Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance…
On the supply side, the U.S. holds captive 25% of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people. It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president
Prison slavery benefits nobody. In addition to the harm it does to the prisioners themselves, it undercuts “legitimate” labor on the outside, making it hard for US workers to compete with such cheap workforces. Meanwhile, the profits that companies reap create incentives to put more people in prison…whether they belong there or not. And when they get out, a lack of opportunity often means ex-convicts have to live a life of crime to survive. The only ex-convicts I’ve ever heard of who were able to find any kind of real success in life are the tiny handful who have managed to escape abroad and re-invent themselves away from the “land of the free.”
In many places, as other business opportunities dry up, the prison itself becomes the only game in town, and people who in an earlier age would have been farmers or factory workers instead become prison guards to make a living. I don’t blame the guards and others who work for prisons – often its their only choice of honest work. But when one becomes a guard and enforces inhuman conditions day in and day out, one’s personality changes, leading to psychological desensitization and dehumanization.