American prisoners receive free medical attention, housing, meals, utilities, use of exercise equipment, and laundry services. The cost of these services amount in the billions of dollars a year and government budgets are straining to accommodate these fiscal requirements. “There’s special urgency in prisons these days,” “As state budgets get constricted, the public is looking for ways to offset the cost of imprisonment” (Brown). This economic concern requires work programs to aid in the relief of financial burdens incurred from convicted criminals. Once found guilty of a crime the prisoner needs to take responsibility for the costs incurred. Prison labor has evolved from the day of hard labor, breaking rocks, and making license plates to manufacturing, data processing, electronics, farming, construction, and even customer relations. Prisoners in America need to work, not to be confused with slavery, for economical, recidivism, and responsibility concerns. Work programs are crucial if taxpayers are tired of paying the cost for prison's financial liability, prisoner's family support, and release support programs.
The idea of prison work programs in America is not a new idea. In 1682, Pennsylvania attempted to utilize hard labor in state prisons but the practice did not come into fruition until 1773. Under the direction of the American Correctional Association, along with watchdog groups, today's prisons operate under high standards. "No single phase of life within prison walls is more important to the public or to the inmate than efficient industrial operations and the intelligent utilization of the labor of prisoners," stated a Federal Bureau of Prisons report in 1949. “This statement is still true today, nearly 50 years later”...
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... cost for prison's financial liability, prisoner's family support, and release support programs.
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Unable to get official permission to interview and write about correctional officers, Ted Conover, author of the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, “got in" by applying for a correctional officer position. After training, he and his fellow rookies, known as "newjacks," were randomly assigned to Sing Sing, one of the country's most famous -- and infamous -- prisons. Sing Sing, a maximum-security male prison, was built in 1828 by prisoners themselves, kept at their task by frequent use of the whip. Today, the chaos, the backbiting, the rundown building and equipment, the disrespect and the relentless stress that Conover experienced in his year at Sing Sing show, quite well, how the increase of prisons in the U.S. brutalizes more than just the prisoners. Some of the individuals in Conover's entering "class" of corrections trainees had always wanted to work in law enforcement. Others were ex-military, looking for a civilian job that they thought would reward structure and discipline. But most came looking for a steady job with good benefits. To get it, they were desperate enough to commute hours each way, or even to live apart from their families during the work week. Their job consists of long days locking and unlocking cells, moving prisoners to and from various locations while the prisoners beg, hassle and abuse them. Sometimes, the prisoners' requests are simple, but against the rules: an extra shower, some contraband cigarettes. Other times, they are appropriate, but unbelievably complicated: it can take months to get information about property lost in the transfer from one prison to another. Meanwhile, the orders officers give are ignored. Discipline -- even among the officers themselves -- is non-existent. And with the money and benefits of this "good" job come nightmares and family stress, daily uncertainty about one's job and duties, and pent-up frustration that, every so often, explodes in violence -- instigated by staff as well as by prisoners.
When envisioning a prison, one often conceptualizes a grisly scene of hardened rapists and murderers wandering aimlessly down the darkened halls of Alcatraz, as opposed to a pleasant facility catering to the needs of troubled souls. Prisons have long been a source of punishment for inmates in America and the debate continues as to whether or not an overhaul of the US prison system should occur. Such an overhaul would readjust the focuses of prison to rehabilitation and incarceration of inmates instead of the current focuses of punishment and incarceration. Altering the goal of the entire state and federal prison system for the purpose of rehabilitation is an unrealistic objective, however. Rehabilitation should not be the main purpose of prison because there are outlying factors that negatively affect the success of rehabilitation programs and such programs would be too costly for prisons currently struggling to accommodate additional inmate needs.
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Wacquant argues “Confinement is the other technique through which the nagging problem of persistent marginally rooted in unemployment, subemployment, and the precarious work is made to shrink on —if not disappear from — the public scene” (60). By forcing people to work unreliable jobs, America is also forcing people into prison. He also states “The vast majority of the occupants of county jails do come from the ranks of the “working poor,” that fraction of the working class that does not manage to escape poverty although they work, but who are largely ineligible for social protections because they work at poverty-level jobs” (70). This endless circle of unjust treatment of the poor has dire consequences. People released from prison are kept of heavy surveillance and are unable to grab hold of a job because employers will not hire ex-convicts. They also lose all ability to receive any further pubic assistance. In response, their children are led down the same path of little to no education, which leads to unstable working conditions, which leads to
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Prison siting as a form of economic development resulted from the convergence of two unrelated trends in America: the economic downturn in rural America and the increase in U.S. prison populations. Over the last several decades, economic distress was brought on to non-metro regions as family farms were consolidated and manufacturing industries found cheaper labor elsewhere; Almost all sources of well-paying employment drained out of rural America. The consequence, as Huling identifies, was that the poverty rate of working rural families actually increased in the 1980s (4). With demoralized populations and stagnant economies, non-metro America looked to all but vanish by the end of the century.
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
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However, the corporations that focus their business in the prison system could not look overseas for cheap labor. Furthermore, to make it more complicated for corporations in the United States it is hard to find cheap labor because of the several regulations that protect employees, including the minimum wage law, which sets a different amount of money to be paid depending on the state as the minimum remuneration that an individual must perceive for their work. Nevertheless, corporations have found the way to benefit from the prison system and are taking advantage of it. In his journal, U$ Prisons Means Money, Hartman Andrew describes, “the criminal justice system is now supplying the United States with cheap labor” where prisoners get paid half of the minimum wage, and the other half goes for the system itself where many laborer laws do not apply to the prisoners, including health care, pay leave act, and OSHA. In other words, prisoners are not allowing to complain at all about the working conditions (American Humanist
The. McMurty, John. A. "Caging the Poor: The Case Against the Prison System." The Case For Penal Abolition? Ed. W. Gordon West and Ruth Morris.