>
>So, I'm curious if there's any research to back this up Doug -- the
>stuff about prison labor.
This is from a 1999 interview with Christian Parenti. A much fuller version of this argument is in his book "Lockdown America"
I'm not arguing that prisons are a profit center. I'm not arguing the same thing as Manning Marable, that prison is hyper-profitable and that's why it's being pushed forward. actually, I don't think that's the case, I don't think that most prisons are profitable.There are 72,000 prisoners working. It's a lower percentage of the overall prison population than was working in 1980. the vast majority of prisoners work for state-owned prison industries. the vast majority of those state-owned prison industries do not create a surplus for the state or for the prison system. in other words they have to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars.the main point of prison labor is not extracting wealth; it's about making prison look efficient. There are only 2500 prisoners that work for private corporations. And it's not for lack of effort. there's been enormous effort to try and draw capital into prison, but the thing is private corporations don't want to exploit prison labor for a number of reasons.one, which we on the left should keep in mind there is still a moral stigma attached to using convict labor. two, there's so much cheap labor everywhere in the world, including the United States, and much of it militarily disciplined, why would you ever need prison labor? Third, prison is not just for prisoners, but for everyone else there a bureaucratic nightmare. So you can't operate a sweatshop with total flexibility inside prison because you're going to have prison guards strip-searching your workers, shutting down your operations, doing economically irrational stuff like not letting people walk across a yard when it's foggy.All of these things are keeping private capital out of prison labor. What happens too much on the left is that people look for corporate smoking guns, as opposed to looking at the class system in general.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/pareinterwar.html