Prison Labor- Sweatshop Behind Bars

[Jcrowley]

Look for that Prison Label
-- Julie Light

The assembly lines at CMT Blues look like those at most any other U.S. garment factory. Workers hunch over industrial sewing machines intently stitching T-shirts. Unlike most garment workers, however, all of these are male. There is an even bigger difference: Armed guards patrol the shop floor.

CMT Blues is housed at the Maximum Security Richard J. Donovan State Correctional Facility outside San Diego. It is part of California's Joint Venture Program that links companies to state prisons. Seventy workers sew T-shirts for Mecca, Seattle Cotton Works, Lee jeans, No Fear,Trinidad Tees, and other U.S. companies. The highly prized jobs ay minimum wage. Less than half goes into the inmates' pockets. The rest is siphoned off to reimburse the state for the cost of incarceration, a victim restitution fund, the inmates' families, and mandatory savings accounts. The California Department of Corrections and CMT Blues owner Pierre Sleiman say they are providing inmates with job skills, work ethic, and income.

But two inmates who worked for CMT Blues say Sleiman and the Department of Corrections are operating a sweatshop behind bars. What's more, the inmates say that prison officials retaliated against them when they blew the whistle on what they claim was corruption at the plant. The prisoners claim they were forced to replace "Made in Honduras" labels with "Made in U.S.A." tags in an effort to defraud consumers. And they say they were not paid minimum wage, paid on time, or paid for their first month of work, as required by law.

<snip>

The CMT Blues case is a window onto the "prison industrial complex." That term refers to the increasingly close relationship between private corporations and what were once exclusively public correctional institutions. It encompasses not only prison labor, but the host of firms profiting from private prisons, prison construction, and services like health care and transportation. In today's America, incarceration has become a booming business.



http://www.prisonwall.org/labor.htm

[Dinger]

1. Excellent Article - K & R!

Thank you:)

[NOLADEM]

2. The New Slavery

Step 1 - Create laws that target blacks unfairly. (crack vs. powder, etc)
Step 2 - Create HUGE fines for indigent defendants
Step 3 - Pass horrid laws allowing pennies an hour for pay
Step 4 - Take bribes to see who gets to use the slaves
Step 5 - Profit


Angola is a Plantation. I recommend anyone interested in seeing an AMAZING documentary on what it is to be a prisoner at 'The Farm' in Angola, watch this.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0139193/

[Jcrowley]

3. Precisely

There are presently 80,000 inmates in the US employed in commercial activity, some earning as little as 21 cents an hour. The US government program Federal Prison Industries (FPI) currently employs 21,000 inmates, an increase of 14 percent in the last two years alone. FPI inmates make a wide variety of products—such as clothing, file cabinets, electronic equipment and military helmets—which are sold to federal agencies and private companies. FPI sales are $600 million annually and rising, with over $37 million in profits.

In addition, during the last 20 years more than 30 states have passed laws permitting the use of convict labor by commercial enterprises. These programs now exist in 36 states.

Prisoners now manufacture everything from blue jeans, to auto parts, to electronics and furniture. Honda has paid inmates $2 an hour for doing the same work an auto worker would get paid $20 to $30 an hour to do. Konica has used prisoners to repair copiers for less than 50 cents an hour. Toys R Us used prisoners to restock shelves, and Microsoft to pack and ship software. Clothing made in California and Oregon prisons competes so successfully with apparel made in Latin America and Asia that it is exported to other countries.

Inmates are also employed in a wide variety of service jobs as well. TWA has used prisoners to handle reservations, while AT&T has used prison labor for telemarketing. In Oregon, prisoners do all the data entry and record keeping in the Secretary of State's corporation division. Other jobs include desktop publishing, digital mapping and computer-aided design work.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml

[madmusic]

4. Nothing new.

Same system, same problem in The Progressive Era. What shut it down then was other businesses complaining about the cheap labor competition. Hell, at least the inmates with have something more than $200 when they get out. How is anyone supposed to get a fresh start with that?

[GliderGuider]

5. Other Lands Have Dreams

I highly recommend "Other Lands Have Dreams" by Kathy Kelly.
http://vitw.org/archives/958

Other Lands Have Dreams is Kathy’s account of her time in Iraq from the first Gulf War of 1991, through the misery of 12 years of economic sanctions, to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that began with Operation Shock and Awe and continues to the present.

Kathy, a founder of Voices in the Wilderness, returned to the U.S. and engaged in nonviolent / civil disobedience at two locations of the U.S. war machine: Project ELF in northern Wisconsin (since closed) and School of the Americas at Fort Benning, GA. Kathy served three months in federal prison for her nonviolent resistance at Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the School of the Americas. Kathy recounts in detail the miseries experienced by U.S. prisoners in a climate where the merciless war on drugs has fostered a “throw away the key mentality.”