Friday, March 13, 2015

Who's getting rich off of imprisonment as a service?


Some of the industries getting crazy rich from mass incarceration:

FOOD SUPPLIERS
Aramark is the biggest food supplier to prisons. It's failures are almost a joke. Reports of maggots it the food, their employees sneaking in contraband, having sex with inmates, and prisons erupting in protest or riot because of the food quality. And then there's the problem of food shortages. For this, they receive huge multi-year contracts for millions of dollars. See more at Eclectablog.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS
It may be best explained like this: Inmate phone calls are monopolized by providers with exclusive contracts. The providers pay the prisons a commission on calls, otherwise known as a "kickback". The provider who gives the biggest kickback is guaranteed all of the business for the entire inmate population, not the provider with best service, product, rates, or anything else. And then the company can charge whatever it wants for low-quality calls. Read more from prisonphonejustice.org.
I can attest to this one personally. I pay a lot to talk to my inmate penpals for a maximum of 15 minutes at a time at an undisclosed rate that I cannot obtain an itemized receipt for. And I can barely hear them.
I always feel like the conversation went like this: "Hi gArBle BlaH bLAh" "What?" "ScHrebLe" "I can't hear you." and then the automated lady:"You have thirty seconds remaining."

HEALTHCARE
Again, like other profiteers inside prisons, healthcare is provided without any competition or options. Medical abuse and neglect are rampant in prisons. One provider, Corizon makes an estimated $1.4 billion off sick prisoners every year. And they have some interesting policies, like not treating patients with Hepatitis C at all. Although Hep C is deadly and rampant in prisons, they just leave it be.



CALL CENTERS
There was once a strong trend for US call centers to move off-shore, and while that may still be financially appealing, at least a few companies have decided to move them into prisons instead. The despicable low pay and the competition with unskilled labor outside are issues of their own, but this seems to be the best slave labor situation inmates are facing. This USA Today article and this  NBC news article give more information about inmates working in call centers.

CLOTHING MANUFACTURING
Some prisoners are employed to make their own clothing, and prisoners have been known to make clothing for Victoria's Secret, JCPenney, K-mart, Fruit of the Loom, Sears, Roebuck & Company, and more. According to this Mother Jones article, a California prison even put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace "Made in Honduras" labels on garments with "Made in the USA." Clothing making is big business in prisons.

TECHNOLOGY
I read that this was a problem in a Salon article, and it's been quite a research project for me. Yes, the government and some telecom agencies and the occasional auto maker use incarcerated slaves, but it doesn't look like private tech companies are into it anymore. I found history of Microsoft using prison contracts, and a few others, but nothing related to tech industry work in the last ten years. This tells me that either this isn't a "thing" anymore, or it is now hushed-up way better than it used to be. I mention it because I don't really know what's going on there, which might be a bad sign?

BAIL BONDS
The bail bonds industry pulls in $2 billion in revenue every year, according to the ACLU. The bail bond model creates opportunity for those with money or willing to go into debt to be released from jail while awaiting trial, giving them a chance to keep their jobs, housing situations, and other responsibilities in order, and time to take initiative to show the courts that they are doing positive activities when trial day comes. Bonds that are set high make big dollars for this industry, and increase likelihood that the jailed suspect will go into debt or into prison because of their failure to pay.

FOOD PROCESSING
Prison labor is used to make lots of foods, these days. An article in Pacific Standard Magazine walks through a prison visit where they have a water-buffalo dairy operation. Sometimes in an effort not to compete with local businesses, prisons get into obscure businesses, like farming talapia fish for Whole Foods. Prison labor often raises more common foods, as well, and it's big business.

From Salon.com:
In 2008, Mother Jones’ Caroline Winter reported that in California alone, prisoners were processing “more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs.”
My main concerns when looking at these things are: it it ethical, and best for everyone? My answer when it comes to prisoners learning to farm and ranch, is "probably not". I believe that if people in prisons were paid fairly, and not wrecking industries outside the prison, this would be a great plan. Of course, the businesses involved wouldn't hire inmates if they had to pay them fairly, I imagine. The workers raising this Whole Foods tilapia earn roughly 60 cents a day.

AGRICULTURE
The United States has relied on Mexican immigrants for approximately 70% of agricultural labor in the past, but now we have imprisoned many of those workers, and fewer Mexicans and other immigrants chose to come risk imprisonment as a result. There is now such a shortage of agricultural labor that states have been passing bills to legalize farmers hiring prison labor, according to TakeApart.com. Having driven out our immigrant labor (instead of allowing them to legally work), we've created another demand for slave labor in the fields. We've chosen, as a group, to condone slavery instead of pay workers so much that apples and other foods cost fair prices. As much as I realize that food is expensive, I feel sure that we could find better answers than that if we tried.

PRISONS
In case you're not familiar with what people mean when they say "The Prison Industrial Complex", I will explain the best I can. Prisons are now businesses. Private business or state or federally owned. They get a certain amount of tax money to provide for each prisoner. The cheaper they can keep that prisoner alive (but not healthy, recovering, growing, or otherwise happy) the more money they get to keep. In fact, if they happen to keep a prisoner for a very long time or release the person with little or no skills to survive outside prison, then that person will continue being an income source for them by staying in or coming back to prison. Besides just cutting costs, prisons can bring in money through minimum occupancy agreements that guaranteed them prisoners or payment to compensate for vacancies, or through selling the labor of prisoners that they have.

MILITARY
Labor done for the US military is contractual through a company called UNICOR. Prisoners make weapons, ammunition, night-vision goggles, body armor, uniforms, radio and communication devices, and lighting systems and components for anti-aircraft guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder. They overhaul military vehicles, make helmets, and more. ALL of this is at slave wages and without proper safety protections in place.
"Prisoners there worked covered in dust, without safety equipment, protective gear, air filtration or masks. The [law]suit explained that the toxic dust caused severe damage to nervous and reproductive systems, lung damage, bone disease, kidney failure, blood clots, cancers, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, memory lapses, skin lesions, and circulatory and respiratory problems. This is one of eight federal prison recycling facilities — employing 1,200 prisoners — run by UNICOR." -from Workers.org
All of these industries would lose big profits if our country stopped imprisoning HUGE amounts of our population. They have strong monetary incentives to enforce this status quo and prevent big change to this country's addiction to imprisonment. These eleven industries and their representatives have not only abundant "need" for prison labor, but abundant resources to influence politics and systems.

But we still outnumber them. And if we all stay aware, keep caring, vote carefully. and purchase from companies we know to be ethical, we can make changes. 

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