Pay now, pay later: states impose prison peonage - Life In Prison - includes related article on prison factories - Cover Story

Progressive, The, July, 1996 by Christian Parenti

Prison activists and critics of medical co-payments point to the long-term irrationality of such policies. At first it seems to be a rational cost-cutting policy," says Jenni Gainsborough of the ACLU's National Prison Project. "But eventually prison administrators will be faced with widespread health crises. Even deadly contagious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis often start out as a rash or a cough. If something like tuberculosis is not treated promptly--especially in a prison--epidemics are inevitable."

In purely financial terms, attempts to make prisons self-sufficient will, and do, fail. Prisoners are drawn from the poorest sections of the population and even if they are gouged for every penny in prison and hounded for all of their postrelease lives by the debts of incarceration, they will never cough up enough money to pay for the overpriced, high-tech island of concrete in which they are kept. The main effect of squeezing funds from prisoners is to justify the gargantuan costs of America's gulag, which grows larger every day.

RELATED ARTICLE: Inside the Prison Factory

The ultimate in prison self-sufficiency is the prison as factory. This was the stated aim of Chief Justice Warren Burger, who in the 1970s urged Congress to turn prisons into "factories with fences." As part of the 1979 Justice Improvement Act, Congress established the Justice Department's Prison Industries Enhancement (PIE) program. Under PIE it again became legal for private corporations to employ prison labor. This practice had been outlawed by New Deal legislation--the Hawes-Cooper Act and the Ashurst-Sumnor Act. The latter of these laws made transportation of prison-manufactured products across state lines a felony.

At first just a small-scale collection of pilot programs, PIE now licenses more than fifty "projects." Many states, most notably California, operate private prison-labor programs outside of PIE legislation and set their own rules for how firms can use prison labor.

California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington lead the nation in leasing prison labor to private firms, as states are moving toward a partnership with private industry.

Nevada provides a glimpse of what may lie ahead on the road to self-sufficient prisons. Nevada prisoners already do the following:

* Build Bentley Nevada circuit boards for nuclear power plants (thirteen to fifteen inmates employed).

* Make waterbeds for Vinyl Products (sixty-five inmates emploed).

* Restore cars fo Imperial Palace (thirty to forty inmates employed).

* Hand-assemble Shelby Cobra road cars (fifteen inmates employed).

* And, in a perfect reflection of the dual economy in the United States, another thirty inmates build stretch limousines for Emerald Coach.

Other Nevada operations include making mattresses and fitting out ambulances for state government use.

On average, Nevada collects $800,000 to $1 million a year in room and board. Howard Skolnik, assistant director of the Nevada Department of Prisons, says: "The only thing stopping our expansion is that we've used all available space."