The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor-gctid176186

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http://www.thenation.com/article/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor/


The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

Years after ALEC's Truth In Sentencing bills became the law of the land, its Prison Industries Act has quietly expanded prison labor across the country.

By Mike Elk and Bob Sloan

AUGUST 1, 2011

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.)

ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

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That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

This started to change in 1993, when Texas State Representative and ALEC member Ray Allen crafted the Texas Prison Industries Act, which aimed to expand the PIE program. After it passed in Texas, Allen advocated that it be duplicated across the country. In 1995, ALEC’s Prison Industries Act was born.

This Prison Industries Act as printed in ALEC’s 1995 state legislation sourcebook, “provides for the employment of inmate labor in state correctional institutions and in the private manufacturing of certain products under specific conditions.” These conditions, defined by the PIE program, are supposed to include requirements that “inmates must be paid at the prevailing wage rate” and that the “any room and board deductions…are reasonable and are used to defray the costs of inmate incarceration.” (Some states charge prisoners for room and board, ostensibly to offset the cost of prisons for taxpayers. In Florida, for example, prisoners are paid minimum wage for PIE-certified labor, but 40 percent is taken out of their accounts for this purpose.)

The Prison Industries Act sought to change this, inventing the “private sector prison industry expansion account,” to absorb such deductions, and stipulating that the money should be used to, among other things: “construct work facilities, recruit corporations to participate as private sector industries programs, and pay costs of the authority and department in implementing [these programs].” Thus, money that was taken from inmate wages to offset the costs of incarceration would increasingly go to expanding prison industries. In 2000, Florida passed a law that mirrored the Prison Industries Act and created the Prison Industries Trust Fund, its own version of the private sector prison industry expansion account, deliberately designed to help expand prison labor for private industries.

The Prison Industries Act was also written to exploit a critical PIE loophole that seemed to suggest that its rules did not apply to prisoner-made goods that were not shipped across state lines. It allowed a third-party company to set up a local address in a state that makes prison goods, buy goods from a prison factory, sell those products locally or surreptitiously ship them across state borders. It helped that by 1995 oversight of the PIE program had been effectively squashed, transferred from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), a private trade organization that happened to be represented by Allen’s lobbying firm, Service House, Inc. In 2003, Allen became the Texas House Chairman of the Corrections Committee and began peddling the Prison Industries Act and other legislation beneficial to CCA and Geo Group, like the Private Correctional Facilities Act. Soon thereafter he became Chairman of ALEC’s Criminal Justice (now Public Safety and Elections) Task Force. He resigned from the state legislature in 2006 while under investigation for his unethical lobbying practices. He was hired soon after as a lobbyist for Geo Group.

Today’s chair of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task force is state Representative Jerry Madden of Texas, where the Prison Industries Act originated eighteen years ago. According to a 2010 report from NCIA, as of last summer there were “thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations.” These included such states as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve more. Four more states are now looking to get involved as well; Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation and New Hampshire is in the process of applying for PIE certification. Today these state’s legislation are based upon an updated version of the Prison Industries Act, which ALEC amended in 2004.

Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country. In addition to Florida’s forty-one prison industries, California alone has sixty. Another 100 or so are scattered throughout other states. What’s more, several states are looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. In Wisconsin Governor Walker’s recent assault on collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs in Racine, where inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work. According to the Capitol Times, “inmates are not paid for their work, but receive time off their sentences.” The same is occurring in Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Georgia, all states with GOP Assembly majorities and Republican governors. Much of ALEC’s proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners.

“It’s bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China,” says Scott Paul Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of business and unions. “They shouldn’t have to compete against prison labor here at home. The goal should be for other nations to aspire to the quality of life that Americans enjoy, not to discard our efforts through a downward competitive spiral.”

Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, says prison labor is part of a “confluence of similar interests” among politicians and corporations, long referred to as the “prison industrial complex.” As decades of model legislation reveals, ALEC has been at the center of this confluence.

 “This has been ongoing for decades, with prison privatization contributing to the escalation of incarceration rates in the US,” Friedmann says. Just as mass incarceration has burdened American taxpayers in major prison states, so is the use of inmate labor contributing to lost jobs, unemployment and decreased wages among workers—while corporate profits soar.    

MIKE ELK TWITTER Mike Elk is a labor journalist and third-generation union organizer based in Washington, D.C. He writes frequently for In These Times, AlterNet, and theAmerican Prospect. You can follow him on Twitter at @MikeElk.

BOB SLOAN Bob Sloan is a former offender, Stop ALEC organizer and blogger who has spent the past decade researching the PIE program and its impact on civilian and public sector jobs. His writing can be found at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Bob%20Sloan/. He is currently writing a book on prison labor in the United States.

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Bob Sloan on the new slavery of the American prison factory systemBy Mark | June 19, 2012
When I flew into Providence a few weeks ago, to attend the Netroots Nationconference, I caught a taxi from the airport to the hotel with a fellow by the name ofBob Sloan. Bob, like me, had won one of the Democracy for America scholarships, and we talked about our work as we made our way downtown. Bob told me about his investigative reporting on the growing use of prison labor by multinational corporations, and, somewhat embarrassedly, I told him about the often inconsequential nonsense that I spend my nights working on here. My hope was to meet up with Bob later, and interview him properly about his work, but I never had an opportunity. So, a few days ago, I sent a list of questions to Indianapolis. What follow are his answers, which, I think you'll agree, are pretty amazing, and completely terrifying.
MARK: Can you start by telling us a little about who you are, the work that you do relating to prison labor, and how it is that you first became interested in the subject?
BOB: ...Back in 1981 I was convicted of a white collar crime and went to prison in Florida. While serving my sentence, I worked most of the time for the prison industry there, Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE). Back then it was run by drugstore magnate, Jack Eckerd. During my tenure with PRIDE I worked closely with Eckerd and PRIDE President, Floyd Glisson on product development and inmate issues. I was a college grad with a degree in architectural drafting and design, and my abilities earned me the position of head of PRIDE's "Tiger Team," responsible for developing and prototyping new customer products, and designing new seating and modular office systems (office cubicles, work stations, panels, etc.). I designed the new factory for PRIDE's office systems industry, and, when complete, I headed up their CAD training program, instructing other inmates in computer drafting and engineering.
At that point in time, PRIDE's pursuits were in keeping with a mission statement that stressed the training and job placement of prisoners, in order to reduce recidivism, and keep these people from reoffending once released. PRIDE not only trained them, they had a job placement service on the outside that got them employed after release.
By 1990, I was home, and continued to work with Eckerd on youth programs, and helping inmates who were released to find jobs. In 1990, Eckerd and Glisson left PRIDE, with Eckerd publicly saying he did not like the direction the new PRIDE executive staff was taking the company, and expressing concern over new "accounting" procedures put in place by the same administration. From 1989 through 1996, I continued to work in my spare time finding jobs for those released from prison, and performing some free-lance consulting with PRIDE's corporate MIS in Clearwater, Florida. During that time, I saw firsthand that Eckerd had been correct – PRIDE had gone from a company dedicated to rehabilitating inmates to one that was profit-driven. Inmate wages stayed where they had been since 1983, inmates were trained on antiquated equipment (and thus not employable for the same work when released), prisoners were being worked longer (with no overtime), etc.
I moved to Indianapolis in 1996, and, from that distance, lost track of PRIDE, concentrating on my life up here and working like everyone else. In 2002, I had an unfortunate "mistake" created by the Florida authorities, who decided that I still owed them some time on probation from the 1981 case. I was picked up, taken back to Florida, and sent back to prison, where it took me two years to get the court to realize that they were incorrect, and release me. During that period, I was again assigned to work for PRIDE, in a factory in north Florida. When I got there, everything was different than it have been previously... except the pay was basically the same. (It hadn't really changed over the intervening 20 years.) There was no longer a real job training effort, rather everything revolved around filling orders and shipping them out on time (regardless of the quality).
They were participating in a program known as the "PIE Program" which allowed prisoners to earn as much as minimum wage for working on orders which were sold in the private sector. None of the prisoners knew what the PIE Program was, just that they made more money – even considering that 80% was taken back for room and board, victim restitution, taxes, etc. I had my wife get me a copy of the PIE Program regulations from the US Department of Justice, and send it to me. I sat down and read it, and discovered that it had mandatory requirements that PRIDE was supposed to abide by (mandatory payment of prevailing wages for workers, no displacement of private sector workers or interference with local labor groups and unions, etc.). I was assigned to quality control as a supervisor and discovered that the company was avoiding paying prevailing wages, and was placing "in-house" orders for products that they knew were about to enter the production stream as PIE products. In this way, they paid inmates between $.20 and $.50 an hour for labor, placed the products in inventory, and then drew them out to fill PIE orders, thus avoiding paying even minimum wage scale to the inmates. There was a lot of other hanky panky going on as well (shifting hours from one pay week to another to avoid overtime, etc.).
I filed complaints with the Governor and FDOC about PRIDE opening 9 separate for-profit corporations that were being used to exploit the PIE program, and about their policies and procedures at more than 40 separate factories. I approached supervisors at the plant and explained that what I thought they were doing was illegal under the federal PIECP regulations [18 USC 1761(c)]. I was allowed to change jobs and went home shortly thereafter, once the court ruled and released me.
I continued to pursue complaints with the Governor (Bush) and pushed for an investigation by the DoJ. All federal complaints were directed to the Bureau of Justice Assistance which in turn sent them on to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), which had been given oversight of the program by the BJA in '95. The NCIA never responded to my numerous complaints. In fact, they blocked any incoming emails from my address. While I was pursuing this from Indiana, the Florida Inspector General responded to my complaints and performed an audit of PRIDE. He discovered that PRIDE board and executive staff had formed the separate corporations, loaned themselves $18 million dollars, awarded the spin-offs no-bid contracts worth another $20 million, and had begun to write down the debts owed to PRIDE by those spin-offs. In the end, the entire executive staff were asked to resign, along with half the board (appointed by the Governor). And, in the end, only $400K, of the more than $38 million, was ever recovered.
The Secretary of the FDOC, James Crosby (a Bush Cabinet appointee) was on the PRIDE Board. He continued to turn a deaf ear to my ongoing complaints, even knowing that my complaints had caused the IG's to audit PRIDE, and catch the illegal transactions. My complaints, at this point, concerned the PIE Program, and how PRIDE had been allowed to partner with private sector companies that were using the inmates as a nearly slave-labor workforce. Additionally, from 2000 through 2005, PRIDE had simply stolen five of those companies outright. Under the contracts, the partner was to supply all of the equipment, materials and proprietary technologies to PRIDE, which then chose one of its factories in which to make the products for those companies. Once the inmates were trained, and the staff was knowledgeable about the operations and customers of the private companies in question, PRIDE would then falsely claim these partner companies owed them money for processing, etc., and demand hundreds of thounited snakesnds of dollars be paid to them immediately. When the companies balked, PRIDE had the FDOC throw the company's supervisors off the prison grounds. Then, PRIDE would seize all of the equipment and materials, and simply continued the operation on their own, selling to the "partner's" customers. At the same time, PRIDE would sue the companies in a friendly court in Clearwater, and tie them up, making them spend huge amounts of money to try and recover their businesses and assets.
One of those owners that lost his business to PRIDE contacted me and I've been consulting with him since 2005, trying to help him recover his losses. I went to Florida and met with the board three times in 2006 on behalf of the owner, and in an effort to get PRIDE to become compliant with the PIE Program requirements. To no avail. That same year, Secretary Crosby was indicted and arrested for corruption and kickbacks on a private canteen contract with the Keefe Commissary network (sentenced to 9 years, and still in). His replacement was James McDonough. He contacted me about PRIDE, and we worked together trying to reform PRIDE through January 2008. He had documents and inmate letters from workers at the PRIDE plant, order numbers, copies of pay checks, copies of time cards, etc., which I had supplied to him. In 2007, he resigned from the PRIDE Board and petitioned Governor Crist to abolish PRIDE completely, and turn the prison industries over to the FDOC to operate. The GOP legislature forced McDonough to "retire," and left PRIDE intact. (Pride has two top lobbyists in Tally, who they retain for $350,000 per year, and they spend hundreds of thounited snakesnds of dollars per year to keep the lawmakers in line with their agenda).
I opened my website, continued to try and make PRIDE compliant, and began investigating state prison industries state by state. I found more than 40 states participating in the PIECP program, and that the NCIA, the a trade association for the prison industries, had worked with Congress to change legislation, allowing them to develop "Policy" and procedures for the PIE Program, which they had been given oversight of in 1995. I found that, under the program, PRIDE is supposed to turn over 40% of inmate wages to the FDOC to offset the costs of incarceration, but that they lobbied for state laws to divert that money back to PRIDE, to offset their costs of "training." So, in essence, the inmate wages deducted are used to operate the prison factories. The employees themselves are paying 40% of their wages back to the company. Unbelievable corruption... and I found that it's also happening in Minnesota, Oregon and Iowa.
MARK: As you and I have discussed, there's a sense among the citizens of our country that prison labor, while perhaps distasteful, serves a purpose, in that it provides job training for incarcerated men and women who will eventually enter the workforce. Would I be correct in saying that your research has proven otherwise, though?
BOB: The prison industry program was designed to allow for training of offenders on contemporary equipment, using contemporary technologies, to increase the likelihood that, when released, the trained former offender can secure employment and avoid a return to prison. There were several criteria that had to be met for a prison industry to participate, and, as mentioned above, those have all changed through policy amendments. Here is a link to the program overview. (The 9 mandatory requirements are listed on page 3.)
Today the focus is on profits... and training, along with other core mission goals, have been sacrificed in exchange for increased sales and profits. An example of this is that today Florida's prison industry workforce is comprised of 15% men and women serving life sentences. Overall, 28% of the workforce has at least 15 years until release or possibility of parole/probation. This helps increase production, but takes positions and training out of the reach of short term offenders who could utilize that training in the shortest time to fulfill mission goals.
MARK: Can you give me a sense of how big this is? I realize that we're talking about dozens and dozens of companies, ranging from IBM to Nordstrom's, that are utilizing prison labor, but what scale are we talking about? Does it represent a significant portion of our GDP? Is it growing?
BOB: Currently there are more than 300 full scale prison factories operating nationwide. Many are operating two or three shifts in order to keep up with orders and shipping. 109 of those factories are operated by the federal Prison Industries (UNICOR). Here is a link to the NCIA site where they list the companies "partnered" with state prison industries using inmate labor, the products made, etc. The NCIA also has a "Buyer's Guide," where consumers and companies alike can shop for prison made or related goods. The NCIA Board is comprised of all those involved in prison manufacturing – prison industry executives, vendors, UNICOR, ACA, etc., and these are the people who determine policy and have oversight over the entire PIE Program, in effect overseeing themselves.
I cannot provide the % of our GDP that prison-made goods represent. I would have to refer you to a CPA or individual with more knowledge than I on this. I can tell you, however, that a conservative estimate of the gross sales in total prison-made goods, in 2010, was $2.4 billion. This is in addition to the $75 billion spent on incarceration. And, it's worth noting, none of that $2.4 billion is returned to the taxpayers to offset their expenditures for incarceration. The total number of prisoners working in our prison factories nationwide is now estimated at between 600,000 and 1 million, manufacturing thounited snakesnds of products that include missile guidance components, aircraft wiring for Boeing products, wiring for electronic equipment, phone cables and related sub-products for companies like IBM, Escod Industries, HP, Dell, etc. Federal prisoners also make nearly 100% of the clothing supplied to our military services, canteens, helmets, web belts, back packs, boots, shoes, dress and camo uniforms, underwear, t-shirts, etc.
The actual number of prisoners reported in the PIE Program are skewed, as many who are in training are not counted, and not paid... yet the products the they make are included in outgoing orders. Likewise, any non-PIE products manufactured using standard prison wages, of between $.20 and $.50 per hour (Florida and elsewhere), put in inventory, and later drawn dawn to fill PIE orders (avoid paying even minimum wage to the workers), are also not counted.
MARK: I suspect it's different from state to state, but, in general, how are much are these prisoners being paid for their labor?
BOB: Pay for inmates range from $0 per hour to around $10.00 per hour. The PIE Program now authorizes inmate pay to begin at the minimum wage level (it is supposed to be set at prevailing wage). After an inmate completes a "pre-training" period of approximately 6 months (without pay), they can then enter the PIE Program at the lowest pay scale. Only after completing 4-5 years of "training" do the inmate workers earn the "potential" of receiving prevailing wage scale. The NCIA has set the prevailing wage scale at the 10th percentile (which means inmate workers receive less in wages than 90% of other workers in the private sector make for the same job description. Inmates can also be transferred from position to position, requiring new training, which stalls their wage progression, saving more money for the prison industry and their partners. Of the number of prisoners working in prison industries, I estimate less than 1% ever reach even the potential for receiving prevailing wages.
MARK: So, is it safe to assume that this is a profit center for both public and for-profit prisons?
BOB: Yes. Though prison industries are self-sustaining and operate without any tax funding, the taxpayer does not share in the profits made. All profits made are to the private sector companies, with a small percentage going to the prison industry itself. In many instances today, the prison industry is both the employer and customer, not partnering with companies. Instead, they determine the products, develop the markets and sell the products under their own labels. The PIE Program provides a loophole... unless the products leave the state of manufacture, the industry is not required to abide by the PIECP mandatory requirements on pay, benefits, hours, etc. This allows them to sell to brokers who have a shipping address in the state. Once the items are received by the brokers, they ship the products all over the country with impunity, and thus avoid paying PIE wages, or having to abide by the prohibition against unfair competition with private companies, and the requirement of getting labor and unions to sign-off on the operation.
MARK: Can you talk a little about the point of intersection where for-profit prisons and the prison labor industry meet? Are there regulations in place to address the enormous conflicts of interest that must exist?
BOB: The points of intersection between private prison companies and prison industry and profits can best be demonstrated by a former company, US Technologies (UST) and their contractual partnership with Geo Group (then Wackenhut Corrections Corp). Read the SEC filing of UST here. (Begin on page 3 with the overview. Then read about the BOD of UST on Page 4.)
On page 9, you'll find UST/LTI were given facility leases for as little as $1.00 per year, with subsidized utilities by Geo in Florida and Texas. UST folded in 2006, after the CEO swindled investors out of nearly $20 million, and the SEC devalued their stock. Today, another company now takes their place, brokering inmate labor to companies wanting to reduce wage and overhead – from the same physical address in Lockhart, Texas that UST operated out of. This is OnShore Resources.
Just prior to the 2000 filing by UST... a meeting was held in DC with Janet Reno serving as keynote speaker (in 1998). Another meeting was held the same afternoon. ALECmember Rep. Ray Allen (R TX) was a speaker along with Pam Davis, CEO of PRIDE (the Florida private prison industry corporation) and Florida Rep. Bill McCollum (R). They met to discuss the expansion of the PIE Program nationwide. Following this meeting, the PIE Program exploded from state to state. Ray Allen was the Texas Chairman of the Committee on Corrections, a lobbyist for the NCIA, and, by 200,3 would head ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force. In '94, Allen introduced legislation in Texas to expand the state's prison industry program under PIECP. Once passed, he took it to ALEC, who adopted it as model legislation titled, "Prison Industries Act," and disseminated it throughout the US from 1999 on. This has served as the standard for prison industry operations since 1999. This is exactly how the Stand-Your-Ground law was born, introduced in one state by ALEC members, then adopted as model legislation, and now has appeared in more than 20 states. It is ALEC's most notable and effective MO.
There is no conflict of interest, they drown out the complaints of those in the private sector who object to the use of inmate labor and about unfair competition. The answer given to the objectors is to become competitive in their markets by partnering with a prison industry and using inmate labor.
MARK: Are you aware of any significant prison labor activities taking place in Michigan that my readers should be aware of?
BOB: Your state has the Mackinac Center (funded by the Koch brothers) that has beenpushing for using inmate labor for production needs of private companies since 2002. Michigan is pushing for privatization of prisons, inmate healthcare and food servicesright now. Included in this, they're pursuing legislation that would allow prisoners to be used by private companies as a labor source... Here's a clip from the last link:
"Michigan lawmakers are taking it a step further. They want to allow the private prison companies to employ the prisoners to perform duties within the prison, such as custodial and food service, but first the state must legislate an exemption to the minimum wage laws so the private companies can have what will amount to a free work force to run the prison where they will literally have a huge captive labor force at their disposal to contract-out to make millions in corporate profits, all while enjoying Snyder's generous corporate tax cut on their bounty."
This article also links these efforts to ALEC, CCA, Geo and the model legislation they've introduced in Michigan. What your readers need to understand is that for every job taken over by a prisoner, a private sector worker or union member loses his/her job. In this manner, the state "saves" money through reduced wages and number of employees. Corporations get nearly free labor and use that to replace American workers.
MARK: I can see how this may fly in a country that doesn't have unemployment over 8% (and much higher in places). How do legislators respond, though, when you ask why our utilization of cheap prison labor is growing at a time when jobs for tax-paying Americans are becoming harder and harder to find?
BOB: The response to my probes about employing prisoners in lieu of private sector workers generates a two-fold response depending upon whether the inmates are taking over public or private sector jobs. In both situations lawmakers respond with claims that inmates need training and the industries fulfill that need to help "reduce recidivism." This is a lie to begin with. Many studies have shown there is no noticeable reduction in recidivism rates when an inmate is employed in prison industry programs. In the case of the public sector, lawmakers state that they are helping municipalities, state departments and agencies to be fiscally responsible through reducing the number of employees, and health and retirement benefit requirements, while teaching the inmate worker a trade. Of course, when inmates are used for free, cheap or slave labor, employers are reluctant to employ those same inmate employees once released – and pay them a fair wage, when instead they can simply continue to use the replacement provided by the prison classification process.
MARK: Anything that you would like to add on the role of ALEC?
BOB: ALEC created the Prison Industries Act and the Private Correctional Facilities Actin 1995 as the above links attest. This is an agenda they have pushed for their corporate members for more than 15 years now. They have been quite successful, and, as states have approached the bankruptcy abyss due to paying for the increased incarceration, ALEC is now turning their attention to "reforming" that which they created through the "Right on Crime" initiative advanced by Gingrich and Pat Nolan of Prison Fellowship Ministries and the American Bail Coalition (ABC). ALEC pushed for abolishing parole, and that legislation served to increase prison populations exponentially. Now, Conservative politicians are saying that they were wrong in their pursuits of Tough on Crime policies, mandatory drug sentences, and similar efforts. To make it right, they now propose that, in lieu of parole, states pass legislation to allow inmates to apply for an early release bond to ensure the state that they will not reoffend. These bonds will be underwritten by the ABC member companies, and require the inmate or his family pay a 15% fee for the $25 to $50k bonds. Of course this will create a windfall of money for the ABC companies, make the GOP lawmakers appear to have "solved" a problem they actually created in the first place, and will allow the ABC bondsmen to have total control over the released inmates through GPS ankle monitors (made by an ALEC member corp) and monitored by another company (also an ALEC member corp).
Overall the prison industry and privatization legislation has been responsible for more than a trillion dollars in profits over the years, Mark. Though ALEC claims they have dissolved that task force, the legislative efforts of that group has simply been absorbed by the remaining task forces.
For more information on this very important issue, I'd encourage you to visit Bob's website where you'll find a great deal more.
And, here, for those of you who are more visual, is an NCIA ad, encouraging companies to make use of prison labor.
It's fucking chilling, isn't it?
I particularly like how the voiceover actor says, "Be part of a progressive business solution."
You asked for a solution to off-shoring, America. Well, here it is... Now, thanks to the likes of ALEC, we can bring jobs back to this country AND compete with the slave wages of China. It's a huge "Win, Win."
Oh, and guess what I just saw in the news today? According to new research, it looks as though private prisons are lobbying for longer sentences.

[Agya Kwaku]

How Mass Incarceration Developed into a Modern-Day Outgrowth of Slavery

On any given day in the United States, one in 10 Black men in their 30s is in prison or jail. In fact, one out of three Black men of all ages can expect to serve time at some point in his life. That figure is one in six for Latino men and one in 17 for white men.
This racial disparity is hardly a function of crime. Over the past quarter-century, U.S. incarceration rates have nearly doubled, while crime rates have been cut in half.
Our criminal justice system isn't broken. This glaring racial inequity is actually a result of how the justice system was designed to work — a system with an undeniable historic connection to slavery that was outlawed a century and a half ago. Any meaningful conversation about ending mass incarceration in the U.S. must include discussing racism in our prisons, our legislation, our courts, our police departments, our schools, our neighborhoods, and in our everyday lives.
How did we get to this place? Although slavery ended in 1865, America came up with plenty of reasons to lock up large numbers of Black people in the years that followed. The legal justification was established in the Black Codes — loitering and vagrancy laws passed after the Civil War to restrict freedom. The moral justification developed as white society promoted racialized stereotypes that related Black bodies to animalistic brutes to be feared, especially by white women.
The not-so-hidden financial justification was the desire to bring Black people back to tobacco and cotton fields. After the end of slavery, prisons became a new path to provide free or cheap labor for plantations. Within a century, that labor was used also for governmental contracts and private industry. Along with the new sharecropping system after the Civil War, the Southern plantation system kept churning out product — all at the expense of Black humanity.
The "war on drugs" and era of mass incarceration
The disproportionality of Blacks in prison grew over the following decades, becoming further entrenched in the 1970s and '80s. As a backlash to communities struggling for civil and human rights — for themselves and for others — new laws took hold that made it easier to keep Black people in shackles and chains.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" to quell social unrest across the country — feeding a new racially tinged narrative about "inner city" crime for the constituency he called his "silent majority." The war on drugs fueled a surge in prison populations, which continued to soar with the passage of state-level legislation like the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, and, in the 1980s, tough-on-crime measures, such as "three-strikes" laws and other draconian punishments for drug offenders.
Drug-related crimes represent the single biggest increase in incarceration rates over the past several decades. Statistical analysis show rates of drug use (and selling) to be similar across racial lines, however, Blacks are arrested on drug charges at rates that are three to five times as high as those of white adults.
Structural racism intensifies for people of color at every stage in the criminal justice system. These communities experience an over-policing that white communities — whether poor or not — never encounter. Young Black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men, according to the investigative journalists at ProPublica. And a recent Gallup poll shows that one in four young Black men recalled unfair treatment by police within the past 30 days.
For people of color, arrests often turn into imprisonment, whereas whites may face probation or shorter sentences for committing similar acts. To make matters more tragically comedic, the recent shift to legalize marijuana in several states has created a new class of mostly white entrepreneurs while thounited snakesnds of young Black men and women remain imprisoned or with criminal records for using or selling the same substance.
This is business as usual in our criminal justice system — an accepted paradigm that encourages mass incarceration of people of color to continue. Though less crude than during and after Reconstruction, American politicians, media, and law enforcement continue to draw on the well-practiced art of stereotyping the "other" to justify discriminatory treatment.
Today, the United States has both the largest number of human beings behind bars (more than 2.4 million in federal, state, county, and other facilities) and also the highest percentage of its population (nearly one out of 100) locked away. Although Black men make up 6 percent of the population, they now account for nearly half of all prisoners. After people are released from prison, their punishment continues. They face discrimination in applying for jobs, housing, and public assistance. Many are barred from voting for the rest of their lives.
Opportunity for change
Racial inequity pervades the U.S. criminal justice system, the political arena that governs that system, and the society that allows this injustice to continue. Interrupting that cycle to end mass incarceration requires change in every one of those spaces. And there are a few, but important, opportunities to push for that needed transformation.
Over the past eight years, we've seen an ebb in the total number of people incarcerated in the United States. The slight but significant declining trend began not because enlightened political leaders finally understood the devastation that these policies have caused, but because of the great recession of 2007. Economic woes meant that many states could no longer afford the cost of building and maintaining prisons.
This opening has allowed advocates and organizers to seize the part of the public narrative that has now forced and encouraged some mainstream political leaders to publicly wrestle with this issue. On the 2016 presidential campaign trail, we've seen politicians on both sides of the aisle calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration — not simply for economic reasons but because of the destruction it has caused, disproportionately for the poor and people of color.
In local communities, organizations like the American Friends Services Committee are providing support to formerly incarcerated people and their families. In the South, AFSC is blessed to work with other organizations, faith-based groups, and individuals committed to improving opportunities for people in and out of prison.
In Baltimore, our Friend of a Friend program works in several prisons in Maryland, providing training to inmates on nonviolent conflict resolution while supporting an environment where they can study the causes and effects of mass incarceration and how they can participate to dismantle this system. After they're released from prison, Friend of a Friend accompanies them as they transition back into the larger community, connecting them to ongoing community organizing work.
In Atlanta, we have started a restorative justice program that helps young people who've been charged with crimes get involved with real community work, such as designing programs to prevent their peers from walking down the same path, as an alternative to having a criminal offense on their record.
Programs like these help, one person at a time. But working toward policy changes that affect thounited snakesnds remains critical. Advocates across the country continue to chip away at the problem of mass incarceration from different angles, whether calling for decreasing sentences, decriminalizing certain drugs offenses, and alternatives to incarceration programs, to name just a few.
As individuals, communities, and organizations come together to challenge the imprisonment of our brothers, sisters, and neighbors, we can't ignore the central role that racism plays in our justice system.
In this effort, we must continue to respect the humanity of every person caught up in this modern-day outgrowth of slavery. And we must ensure that the narrative is not one that treats the incarcerated as simply perpetrators, but as survivors of a system designed to control people based on the color of their skin and the need of those with power to withhold it from those without. In this way, we can do more to ensure that we move toward a conclusion in this painful chapter in this nation's history.
Kamau Franklin has been a dedicated community organizer and movement attorney for over 20 years, first in New York City and now based in the South. For 18 years he was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and Malcolm X. He worked on various issues, including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, creating sustainable urban communities and led electoral campaigns. He blogs at grassrootsthinking.com and can be followed on twitter @kamaufranklin