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Keeping Up With the Dow Joneses | Excerpt
Prison
Back on the Chain Gang
Prison labor, we hear from Harry Wu and others, takes place in the Third World. But for some significant noises on the Left, there is otherwise a generous silence about prison labor in the American Gulag. We all know that license plates are made in jail, but there is a tendency to think that this is just a good way for prisoners to whittle away their long days. There is little nation-wide discussion about the prisoners who “do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria’s Secret” 1 ; and more, infirmary beds, razor wire, flags, furniture, drapes, janitorial chemicals, garments, and decals; and then, conduct auto maintenance and bodywork, refinish furniture, do laundry, work in print shops, and then, go out into the world in work crews to offer their general labor for hire. The list of companies that hire prison labor includes American Airlines, Boeing, Compaq, Dell, Eddie Bauer, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, J.C. Penny, McDonalds, Microsoft, Motorola, Nordstrom, Pierre Cardin, Revlon, Sony, Texas Instruments, and Toys ‘R US. The top dogs of the corporate world are well represented behind the walls of Uncle Sam’s pens.
In 1995, by accident, I ran into a pamphlet from the Rhode Island Correctional Industries (RICI). “We provide an opportunity for inmates to practice and improve existing skills and work habits that are valuable in securing employment upon release,” said the pamphlet entitled Fifteen Secrets of Saving. The pamphlet had been sent to state and municipal programs in the state, as well as to non-profit organizations, because all three types of agencies could avail themselves of the cheap labor from RICI. Started over two decades ago, RICI enables the state to forgo training schemes for laid-off (or downsized) workers, because it claims to do the work of retraining for that part of the contingent class now incarcerated, who, if they are released, anyway face a tough time being hired by a private sector that is chary of prison records. In jail, however, RICI offers the non-profits and the state sector “quality workmanship” on furniture, “professional service” on construction, and “highly skilled technicians” for automobile repair. “The quality standards” for garment production, RICI claims, “can match any privately operating sewing shop on the outside.” Because of the low-costs and the high-standards, the Industry urges state agencies, municipalities, and non-profit agencies to “Make Correctional Industries Your FIRST CHOICE.”
One of the services offered by the RICI was a work crew of minimum-security inmates for painting, litter cleanup, grounds maintenance, interior cleaning (including rug shampooing and floor stripping). “We are constantly called upon to handle unusual, labor intensive projects such as cleaning beaches or removing snow,” the pamphlet explained. I called the office and inquired about the service. 2 I need a crew of 10, I said, for a day. The day runs for 6 hours, I was told, and it will cost me $350. I asked how much the inmates earned, but I could not get the cent figure. The inmates certainly do not get minimum wage ($4.25). For 60 man-hours of work, the employer would have to pay $255 at minimum wage (without benefits). That would leave $95 for the supervising correctional officer, the transport of the inmates, and for their lunch. Without lunch and transportation, the correctional officer makes under $16/hour. That is well below the officer’s wage structure, which leads us to assume that the inmates make sub-minimum wages.
Of course there is no need to speculate. On November 1, 1993, the Supreme Court ruled that inmates did not have the right to minimum wage. 3 Three hundred inmates who worked for the prison industries program sued the state of Arizona for work done between 1986 and 1988 under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). They were paid between 40 to 80 cents per hour for their work with Arizona Correctional Industries. Further, Arizona law requires all wages earned by inmates above 50 cents an hour to be used for victim restitution, repayment to the state for room and board, and support payments to children or other dependents. Therefore, the prisoners effectively earn 50 cents per hour. This is so across the United States. After an earlier dismissal of the inmates’ case, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuits after they found an “employer relationship” between the inmates and the state prison. The inmates’ attorney argued that the sub-minimum wage structure produced unfair competition “that is harmful to private sector businesses.” By “private-sector,” the attorney’s surely meant the business enterprises run on small capital funds that must compete with other small concerns, rather than the large global corporations whose economies of scale dwarf the correctional industries, and whose taste for low wages leads them to travel overseas as much as to the local State Farm. The state’s attorney argued that the inmates who work for private businesses (such as those who make reservations for Best Western hotels) are paid at least the minimum wage (which they do not receive, since they can only effectively earn 50 cents/hour); those who work for other prison industries are not entitled to minimum wage. Of course, the state’s attorney did not answer the charge of unfair business, since the correctional industries provided goods and services at a lower cost than the private sector who are obliged to pay minimum wage. The Court agreed with the state that “prisoners working on a program structured by the prison” are not entitled to minimum wage. 4 The inmates, in the words of the Arizona Correctional Industries, work not for economic reasons, but to be better prepared to re-enter society once they leave prison. With the rates of incarceration on the rise, however, it seems as if there are to be more and more forced labor camps, which will attempt to produce cheap goods and services for state and non-profit agencies. Besides given the reticence of society to “take-back” released prisoners, the rates of re-incarceration force us to see the prison population as relatively permanent.
Through the Hawes-Cooper Act (1929) and the Ashurst-Summers Act (1940), the US government made it a felony to transport prison-made goods across state lines. While not a ban on prison labor, these laws restricted and regulated the use of prisoners for corporate profit. Nevertheless, bucking an international trend, President Roosevelt signed an order in 1934 to create the Federal Prison Industries (or Unicor) to operate around Washington, DC as an autonomous agency. In 1947, when the world’s powers put together the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, they allowed states to erect barriers to “free trade” in certain exceptional circumstances (article XX) – to protect public morals, human, animal, or plant life, health, national treasures, exhaustible natural resources and finally, (in section “e”), “relating to the products of prison labor.” The general disgust at the use of convicts for profits came from the broad social democratic dynamic that overthrew Nazi racism, colonial barbarism, and the general disregard for human dignity that would now find its institutional champion at the UN and in the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Article 10.3 of the Declaration’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (finally agreed upon in 1966 and ratified in 1976) states, “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.” If the post-war penal philosophy said that bibliotherapy would heal prisoners, the 1970s inaugurated a belief that work was the salve needed to straighten out and reform criminals. Criminology provided a scientific basis for the emerging system of penal slavery: work, not for remuneration, but for therapy. In 1979, the US Congress passed the Federal Prison Industries Enhancement (PIE) Act that allowed private firms to enter “joint ventures” with the state prisons, as well as opening the door to prison labor in general. 5
Big corporations entered the prison labor trade, but not to an enormous extent. Sociologist Parenti and American Studies professor Cynthia Young are both clear that the prison labor situation should not be exaggerated. Parenti shows that less than five percent of inmates work in the prison industries, that the rate of increase of prison workers is not near the rate of increase in inmates, and therefore, “prison labor is a sideshow.” Young, drawing from Parenti’s work, argues, “The reasons for the increasing use of prison labor are, in fact, primarily ideological – not economic.” 6 While this is so in terms of the prison system in general, it does not obviate the fact that for the businesses that enter the prisons, “prison labor is like a pot of gold.” 7
Prison labor profits private firms that enter the pens to take advantage of cheap labor, but the state-run enterprises, even with cheap wages, cannot seem to stay afloat without state subsidies. California’s Prison Industry Authority, for example, pays its workforce under a dollar with no benefits, pays the Department of Corrections almost nothing for warehouse space, pays no taxes, does not have to advertise because its customers are other state agencies that are mandated to buy its products, sets its own prices, and yet it has lost money for at least a third of its existence. 8 The prison-made goods do, however, enable the state, municipal and non-profit sectors to gain access to goods for relatively low costs with labor that is disciplined by guards who are paid for by the state. The PIA does not make money because it absorbs all kinds of costs that are not passed on to the customer – so the solvency of the PIA is not at issue, but the generally low cost of goods that enable the state to pass by small business for prison business. Furthermore, as Cynthia Young puts it, “Rather than generate huge windfalls for states or the federal government, prison labor has the potential to enrich private corporations, benefiting states only in so far as corporations remain in-state. The relatively low startup costs and paltry wages paid by corporations make prison labor a cost-effective alternative to relocating their factories to Mexico, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific Rim.” 9
At least two social classes stand to lose from prison labor. The inmates are part of a captive workforce with no rights, only duties to capital, and they cannot bargain for higher wages or for most of the basic contractual arrangements. There are, of course, some prisoners’ unions, such as the Missouri Prisoners Labor Union, legally chartered by the state of Missouri on August 3, 1998 and now with a membership of over five hundred prisoners. On July 1, 2000, the MPLU initiated an international boycott of the products made by Colgate Palmolive because the company did not back MPLU’s demand that the state of Missouri establish a minimum wage for all Missouri workers, abolish forced labor, and condemn executions. In a letter to Colgate, which hires Missouri prisoners, the MPLU noted,
Apart from a few instances such as this, the prison workers are by and large unable to make demands and this situation shows us that the correctional industries are the highest stage of capitalist extraction within a formally democratic framework.
Those who do not see themselves as losers in this set-up are the small business owners, those whose shops exist on the whim of banks and of one account or the other, and whose margins are thin enough that a few cents here and there on wages make an enormous difference on the contracts they can offer. These people, the small business people and their class, pay a lion’s share of US taxes. These taxes subsidize the expanding penal work force who now produce the same sorts of goods that small businesses produce. The prison goods are cheaper, even if they are of inferior quality, and they have a captive market in the state, municipalities and non-profit organizations. These middling classes hurl their invective at criminals, but they have not yet organized against their economic competitors, the UNICORs and others who undersell them with their jail breaks.
Prison labor may not be the most efficient form of labor, but it is certainly not contradictory to the dynamic of capitalism. It might even be its most efficient and, yet, underutilized form. From 1972 to 1992, the number of prison inmates working in correctional industries has increased by three hundred percent, from 169,000 to 523,000. The prison-industrial complex now hires more people than any Fortune 500 company with the exception of General Motors. 11 This does not mean that the prisons are fated to become the main industries in the US, but that they are certainly a significant part of the economy, even if they seem to be only a “sideshow.”
Detention
If the prison construction and management business went into a brief slump in 2000 and 2001, the events of 9/11 have made the prison CEOs jubilant. “The federal business is the best business for us,” Cornell Companies’ Steve Logan told his prison CEO colleagues, and the fallout from 9/11 is “increasing the level of business.” 12 In 1986, the CCA was formed to handle immigrant detainees, as they awaited deportation proceedings, and the other main private prison profiteers, Wachenhut, also began its career with immigration detention centers. They branched out to other correctional sites, but with a decline in demand there, and after 9/11, with a boom in immigrant detention centers, the private prison firms have returned to the basics. As the Village Voice’s Alisa Solomon notes, “The only incarcerated populations sustaining reliable growth now are INS detainees and federal prisoners, many of them noncitizens.” The Federal Bureau of Prisons, in September 2001, issued directives to contractors to build prisons to meet its “criminal alien requirements (CAR),” a new category that harbingers a future for the prison industry.
Setting aside the unknown number (perhaps several thousand) of those picked up by the FBI since 9/11 and shielded from public view, the number of those who pass through the INS detention centers each year comes to about one hundred and fifty thousand, with about twenty thousand in residence at one time. According to a 2002 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of alien detainees who serve a prison sentence has increased by ninefold between 1985 and 2000, that this increase is more than twice the rate of increase of the entire federal prison population.13 Of those who serve an INS-related prison sentence, more than half had Mexican citizenship, seven percent had US citizenship (but had violated INS regulations—such as sale of papers to a non-citizen, etc.), three percent had Chinese citizenship and the rest are evenly spread among the planet’s population. Before the state’s drive to register, incarcerate and deport Muslims, it went after migrants with HIV/AIDS. These survivors in the system could not even challenge their situation because they were not arrested. Awaiting deportation as “administrative detainees,” these migrants could not challenge the system’s lack of medical care. How can they claim “cruel and unusual punishment” when they are only being held, not punished?14 The parallel with the post-9/11 detainees is very strong. The Village Voice’s Alisa Solomon has brought the stories of many of those who seek asylum, but live for intolerable amounts of time in jail: people like Uganda’s Emmy Kutesa and Yudaya Nanyonga, Nigeria’s Osabeda Egoibe, Ghana’s Adelaide Abankwah, Congo’s Lilian Loukakou, Togo’s Fauziya Kassindja, Barbados’ Kenneth Durant, Ethiopia’s Lulseged Dhine, and so many others. 15 Thanks to the efforts of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) in New York City, we have the stories of Ahmed Raza, a migrant worker from Pakistan and now a 9/11 detainee in Passaic County Jail, of Mohammed Akram, a convenience store owner also at Passaic as a 9/11 detainee, and so many others. 16 These people provide the human face to the underground expansion of state power, and of prison profiteering. As Egoibe told Solomon, “A person cannot be in confinement like this and feel that he is safe. But I did come to America because I thought it was a place I could find safety.”
What accounts for this explosion, prior to 9/11? Marika Latras and John Scalia, of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, note, “A major portion of this growth was attributable to changes in federal sentencing law that increased the likelihood of a convicted immigration felony offender receiving a prison sentence—from 57 percent in 1985 to 91 percent in 2000—in lieu of some lesser sanction. The growth was also the result of increased sentences and time actually served, which increased from about 4 months in 1985 to 21 months in 2000.”17 The numbers arrested after 9/11 may grow, but they are a small fraction of those who are held by the INS for deportation, for crimes they committed, or else until their asylum applications are processed. In 1999, long before the PATRIOT Act, the INS anticipated that it would need jail cells for almost thirty thousand detainees. Richard Wackenhut, head of Wackenhut Corp, reported, “We are very optimistic about our continued growth in view of our current backlog of 8,260 correctional facility beds under development. Federal and other agencies are expected to issue additional requests for proposals on additional prison privatization projects for over 20,000 additional beds in the coming year.”18 The US government has now appointed a Detention Trustee (the first appointee to this post is Craig Unger, a former Bureau of Prisons procurement officer), and he has a budget of $615 million to contract for beds for the expansion.
To hold these “criminal aliens,” the INS operates nine Service Processing Centers (SPCs) in Puerto Rico, New York, California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida. The newest INS SPC is located in Buffalo, NY, where there are not only three hundred INS beds, but also one hundred and fifty for use by the US Marshals Service (FBI). In addition, the INS contracts for seven other facilities, in Colorado, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, New York, and California, in addition to use of Bureau of Prisons sites in Louisiana and Arizona. To run these sites, the INS spends over $600 million per year. Stunningly, the Federal Bureau of Prisons guaranteed CCA a ninety-five percent occupancy rate for its prisons – that is, the government will pay CCA for ninety-five percent of its bed capacity regardless of how many inmates held in the jail. This is akin to the power purchasing agreements that Enron insisted upon in its pioneering shakedown of the world.19
Conditions in these INS detention centers are atrocious. The tale of the detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey is sufficient as an illustration of the broad structural violence experienced by INS detainees, asylum seekers, and others caught in the INS dragnet. Esmor Correctional Services Corporation began its correctional career in “half-way houses” for the homeless in New York City, but in 1989, as the city cut-back on social welfare, Esmor “turned to the next emerging housing program: prisons.” 20 In 1993, Esmor won a $54 million contract to run the immigrant detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Their bid was $20 million more than their closest competitor, so that the upshot of their bid was that they failed to provide the inmates with anything like human occupancy when the jail opened on August 3, 1994. About six months after the holding area was up and running, the INS ordered a review and investigation of the facility, whose seventy-two page report showed that “detainees were subjected to harassment, verbal abuse, and other degrading actions perpetuated by Esmor guards.” Such treatment “was part of a systematic methodology designed to control the general detainee population and to intimidate and discipline obstreperous detainees thorugh use of corporal punishment.” The violence formed part of “an atmosphere of penny pinching in the jail [as] poorly paid, ill-trained guards physically and verbally abused detainees, shackling them with leg irons, roughing them up and waking them without reason in the night.” 21
On the night of June 18, 1995, after the INS reviewed the jail, but before they published the interim report, some INS detainees at the Esmor facility, took control of the jail. The Esmor guards fled and the local police sent in a SWAT team that viciously retook the jail. 22 The police brought the “ring-leaders,” about twenty men, to Union County Jail, in Elizabeth, and, who were, according to Human Rights Watch, “beaten, held naked, made to crawl on their hands and knees through a gauntlet of jail officers, and forced to chant, ‘America is Number One.’ One Indian detainee claimed that between beatings, correctional officers used pliers to pinch the skin on his genitals and squeeze his tongue.” 23 Esmor’s share price fell from $20 to $7 in the aftermath of the riot. The INS shut down the facility, but in 1997 reopened it under the management of CCA.
Little has changed. In July 1998, guards at the Jackson County Correctional Facility in Florida used electric batons to shock detainees, torturing them into submission. When the matter was brought before the INS, the INS assistant deputy for detention and deportation at the Miami office told the media, “We cannot dictate to the county or the state of Florida what standards they should have in their facilities. They’re another government agency. We have to rely on their integrity.” 24 The US signed the 1994 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, whose second article notes, “no exceptional circumstance whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” What happened in the Jackson Correctional facility, what happens at the Guantánamo Bay Camp X-Ray or elsewhere is a violation of that Convention and yet, the bureaucracy is able to make the case for inter-agency trust!
Notes
1 Goldberg and Evans, “The Prison Industrial Complex.”
2 Telephone conversation with Larry Walsh of the RICI, December 16, 1994.
3 The information on Arizona comes from Corrections Digest, November 17, 1993. I am grateful to Jenni Gainsborough of the National Prison Project (American Civil Liberties Union) for her help with information. The late Kathy DeLeon, who served 9 months in federal prison, told me that she did not make more than pennies for her work. She died in custody, not long thereafter.
4 The case, decided on November 1, 1993, is Hale vs. Arizona, 93-353.
5 Parenti, Lockdown America, pp. 230-231.
6 Parenti, Lockdown America, p. 232 and Cynthia Young, “Punishing Labor: Why Labor Should Oppose the Prison Industrial Complex,” New Labor Forum, no. 7, Fall/Winter 2000, p. 41.
7 Goldberg and Evans, “Prison Industrial Complex.”
8 Lucia Hwang, “Working for Nothing: The Failure of Prison Industry Programs,” Third Force, vol. 4, no. 3, July/August 1996 and Parenti, Lockdown America, pp. 230-235.
9 Young, “Punishing Labor,” p. 47.
10 For more details on the campaign and on MPLU, contact Michael Lee, Communications Officer of the MPLU, at 2435 E. North St. PMB 255, Greenville, SC 29615 or by email, convict78@hotmail.com.
11 GM, meanwhile, is in a crisis of its own. On June 5, 1998, workers at GM’s Flint Metal Center went on strike; six days later their comrades from the Delphi East components plant in Flint, Michigan, joined them. By mid-June, nine thousand two hundred United Auto Workers (UAW) members were on strike against GM. They had idled twenty-three assembly plants and ninety-four parts plants, with just over one hundred thousand additional workers off work. GM operations in the US, Mexico, Canada and Singapore had been halted. Further, in North America, eighty-eight percent of GM’s production is on hold. GM controls thirty-one percent of the world’s automobile share. UAW went on strike with two demands on the table: (1) That GM reneged on a 1995 promise to upgrade the Flint plants with a capital infusion of $500 million. The company put in $120 million and then used the rest to bargain with UAW. GM wanted UAW to decrease its control over certain aspects of the production process (safety rules, etc). Instead of putting capital into an older plant, GM wanted to shift its production site to Mexico (where it would build a new mechanized factory and use the cheaper, non-union, Mexican labor). (2) That GM use contract labor for its low-tech work, a process that cost UAW 2500 jobs. With no common language on these issues, the talks went nowhere. There was a time a few decades ago when GM controlled close to half the world’s automobile market. By the late 1990s, its share went down to thirty-one percent, but this did not hurt GM’s capacity to earn enormous profits. In 1995, the company posted an annual profit of $6.9 billion (four times more than the GNP of Nicaragua). In the third quarter of 1997, GM’s profits totaled $1.1 billion (with $423 million or forty percent earned from North American operations). This profit was earned by at least three means: (1) a reduction of man-hours required to assemble cars by sixty-two percent (from 39 hours to 24 hours) and a general increase in the speed of the plants; (2) a decrease in the workforce of one hundred and fifty thousand US workers from 1979 to 1990 (compensated by lower wage workers in Mexican maquiladoras or sweat-shop factories); (3) a use of profits for dividends to share-holders and as salaries to management rather than for reinvestment in the deteriorating physical plant of US factories. For the workers the situation was bleak. Since the late 1970s, UAW lost over five hundred and fifty thousand members. “Those workers who were laid off,” says Sean McAlinden of the University of Michigan, “disappeared into nothingness -- they got nothing.” This strike represented the frustrations of the workers against the globalization of capital. UAW President Stephen Yokich congratulated GM for its 1995 record profit, but complained that management did not give proper credit to the union for its role in enhancing the bottom line. In an excellent example of collaboration between workers and management, UAW asked for just a little bit more of the pie rather than challenge the unequal basis of labor and capital. UAW lost the action.
12 Alisa Solomon, “Detainees Equal Dollars. The Rise of Immigrant Incarcerations drive a prison boom,” Village Voice, August 14-20, 2002. Solomon’s many writings on immigrant detention, long before 9/11, provide a road-map for the lay reader. I have relied upon it extensively for this section.
13 Keep in mind that by mid-2002, the rate of inmates increased by only a percent, but this number does not count those who are held in detention, etc. Fox Butterfield, “1% Increase in US Inmates is Lowest Rate in Three Decades,” New York Times, July 31, 2002.
14 Alisa Solomon, “Locked Up in Limbo,” POZ, September 1999, pp. 82-86.
15 Alisa Solomon, “Yearning to Breathe Free,” Village Voice, August 8, 1995; “Wachenhut Detention Ordeal,” Village Voice, September 1-7, 1999;“A Dream Detained,” Village Voice, March 24-30, 1999; “Sweet Release,” Village Voice, June 8, 1999.
16 Tram Nguyen, “Detained or Disappeared?” ColorLines, vol. 5, issue 2, Summer 2002.
17 Marika Litras and John Scalia, “Immigration Offenders in the Federal Criminal Justice System, 2000,” Washington, DC: BJS, 2002 (NCJ-191745).
18 Alisa Solomon, “Wackenhut Detention Ordeal.”
19 The details are in my Fat Cats and Running Dogs.
20 John Sullivan and Matthew Purdy, “In Corrections Business, Shrewdness Pays: A Prison Empire,” New York Times, July 23, 1995.
21 US Immigration and Naturalization Service, The Elizabeth, New Jersey, Contract Detention Facility Operated by Esmor, Inc.: Interim Report, July 20, 1995.
22 David Gonzales, “Jail Uprising Leaves Many Sad and Bitter,” New York Times, June 25, 1995.
23 Human Rights Watch, Locked Away. Immigration Detainees in Jails in the United States, New York: HRW, September 1998. HRW’s evidence came from interviews and from three news reports: Christine Gardner, “Defense Argues for US Guards in Trial Over Illegal Immigrants,” Reuters, 3 March 1998, “Detained Immigrant Recalls Rough Treatment at Union County Jail,” Associated Press, February 2, 1998; Ronald Smothers, “Immigrants Tell of Mistreatment by New Jersey Jail Guards,” New York Times, February 6, 1998.
24 Teresa Mears, “Detainees Held by INS say Jails Rife with Abuse,” Boston Globe, August 2, 1998 and Human Rights Watch, Locked Away.
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