> Dear Angela, Thanks for the note. The issue of commodity production in the
> prisons in the US since the legislation that effectively put an end to it
> in the 1930s is complex. In the early 1980s--the beginning of the
> incarceration explosion--the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Warren
> Burger, called for the repeal of the depression-era legislation prohibiting
> commodity producing prison labor. The federal government has attempted to
> pioneer it. Unicor--the commodity producing company which is
> quasi-public--has the whole federal prison population as its labor pool.
> But the federal prisoners are less than 20% of the almost 2 million strong
> prison population. Individual state prisons and municipal jails have to
> face quite restrictive local legislation and a prison population with
> different conditions of incarceration, so that they are only beginning to
> be involved in this story. There is a huge literature on the various
> "projects" and "experiments" on this kind of labor although it does not yet
> involve a large bulk of the state prison or municipal jail population, as
> Parenti points out.
> Actually, the most important impact of the incarceration explosion
> on wages and the labor market is on the 3 million people on parole or
> probation. These people are largely dependent on employment in order to
> keep themselves out of prison; consequently, they can barely negotiate
> wages and working conditions without facing the intervention of the state
> in the form of probation or parole officers threatening to put them back
> into prison.
> Free labor is only at its best when it is surrounded by
> slave/unpaid/coerced labor, I'm afraid.
> All the best, George
>
>