On Dec 15, 2006, at 12:59 AM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>> 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 should have said that I first came up with the "you can't beat free labor" formulation after talking with Christian when I was first getting to know him - it was probably around 1999. I said I was skeptical of the line about how prison privatization and the use of inmate labor were driving the incarceration boom - that it was all about profit and not social control, an extremely vulgar Marxist interpretation popular with some anti-prison activists. Christian agreed, recounted all the evidence he'd found of the failure of prison labor to make a buck (as I recall he said it's often subsidized in fact). So I said, you can't beat free labor, right?, and he agreed. It was an early bonding moment.
Doug