subject: Understanding The History Of Prison Labor [print this page] Prison provides many programs to its prisoners, some voluntary, and some involuntary. One of these most successful programs is labor.
The history of this labor force is very interesting, and as colorful as some of the prisons that it takes place in. The concept of prison labor was popularized in the early 19th century following the introduction of New York's now famous "get-tough" state prison, Auburn, where inmates worked together in workshops, ate together in dining halls, and slept separately at night.
It was a system based on the untreatable moral resistance of criminals, and was designed to forsake rehabilitation efforts in favor of confinement, punishment, and discipline. Since that time, the industry has flourished.
The penal system has encouraged policy makers to "get tougher," creating a lucrative niche market for criminal justice stakeholders profiting from increased convictions. The advance of prison privatization and so-called "warehousing" remerging from its Civil-war-era past in the 1980's, follows from the profound increases in offender populations, and the subsequent increases in prison maintenance costs coupled with increased budgetary constraints.
Currently, the largest employer of convicts in the United States is Federal Prison Industries, with 18,000 prisoners making some 150 products, including safety goggles, air force jet wiring, body armor, and road signs. Combined with the nation's entire fleet of private prison industries, the number of convict laborers across the country reaches 72,000.
The products are generally considered poor quality, and consistently inferior to the private sector's products. They cost more to make, have higher defaults, and take longer to procure, even in Texas, where prisoners do not even get paid to work.
Part of this is because Correctional Officers often feel in danger and unable to control inmate labor, fearing homemade tools will be fashioned into weapons and used against them. As a result, resource-heavy frisks, searchers, supervision, and pat-downs become commonplace.
There is also, of course, the lawsuits, which can deter private businesses from investing in this kind of work. One historic instance of prisoners running a mutiny occurred in February of 1924.
License-plate production at the state penitentiary backfired on the state government when convicts inside Ohio State Penitentiary began secretly conducting a license-plate manufacturing and distribution scheme, smuggling duplicate plates out of prison to recently paroled accomplices. The practice lasted two weeks.
Such incidents today are rare occurrences, if not unheard of, much to the satisfaction of correctional departments. For these intensive programs to function properly, it must gain majority consent from the public, and with the otherwise state-stigmatizing media reports such as these failing to threaten the infrastructure upon which the ideology rests, we can say that this work has gained that majority consent.
Concurrent with this need to gain consent for these institutions, state-sponsored public promotion of convict-made license plates attempts to legitimize the seemingly oppressive character of penitentiary employment. Instead of concealing the underbelly of this work force from the public eye, as has been the trend for decades following the criticism by human rights groups, state authorities instead flaunt it, declaring that the license plates citizens use everyday are made by the hardworking men of this state's fine industrial-prison system.
Instead of portraying this intricate system as an object of shame, the state portrays it as an object of pride. The state does not simply hole up prisoners in the murky confines of archaic forms of incapacitation, but makes them "productive," not just for the improvement of themselves (which would backfire in a contradiction of "get-tough" ideals), but the improvement of the state.
In fact, the very product that these inmates provide can even "moralize" convicts, turning them into "real" people with real ambitions and work schedules, real salaries, and by implication in a capitalist-driven economy, real motivation. It is in a sense an affront to the pathologizing of prisoners indigenous to the asylum-era, where inmates were zoological specimens, captured from their natural habitat, and confined in a laboratory to be studied by those morally superior and committed to the public good.
While these systems are usually successful, all of them of course have flaws. There is no way to perfect them, but officers are doing the best they can.
The next time you get a new license plate, it may just be one that has come out of one of your local penitentiaries. Whether you are grateful or not, is entirely up to you.
