>It's a little known fact that prison labour is
>already making a significant contribution to the US economy.
This is a highly suspect fact.
>American prisoners reportedly make
Reported by who?
Here's something from Christian Parenti, who knows a whole lot about what's going on in prisons:
http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/59/75/
Prison Labor
Critics of the Prison Industrial Complex focus much of their attention on prison labor: We hear that incarceration is increasingly driven by profit hungry firms looking for cheap labor. In making this point speakers or writers will reel off a sinner's list of familiar implicated corporate names: Microsoft, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret and TWA. The phenomenon looks to be a mile wide, but in reality it's only an inch deep.
Most of the typically named culprits have engaged prison labor only via subcontractors who, in turn, often have only sporadic contracts with prisons. The moral stain remains: Leasing convicts is leasing convicts. But we need to re-calibrate our understanding of what's going on and look closely at the facts. Nationwide only 2,600 prisoners work for private firms.2 Why is this? Because capitalists don't like the invasive, slow, overbearing environment of prisons. Guards may approve of "making convicts pay" but in practice they regularly interrupt production to strip-search, count, and lock away the convict employees. Nor are many big firms willing to risk the bad press associated with exploiting prisoners. For example, Montgomery Ward's charter pledges that the company will not use child, slave, or convict labor. Finally, why hire convicts at minimum wagecorporations have to pay prisons minimum wage even if the inmate employees only receive pennies per hourwhen there is an overabundance of desperate, often militarily disciplined, workers in the free world. But that's just the private sector, what about the State? After all, most convict laborers are employed by state-owned "prison industries" such as the California Department of Corrections Prison Industries Authority (PIA) or the Federal Government's Unicor, which employs about 20,000 inmates. Impressive numbers, and one would be excused for thinking that someone must be making money hand over fist. However Unicorlike the many parallel ventures owned by the statesis an economic basket case that would shortly collapse if ever forced to compete with the private sector.
Unicor products provided to the Department of Defense, on average, cost 13 percent more than the same goods supplied by private firms. U.S. Navy officials say that, compared to the open market, Unicor's "product is inferior, costs more and takes longer to procure." The federal prison monopoly delivers 42 percent of its orders late, compared to an industry-wide average delinquency rate of only 6 percent. A 1993 government report found that Unicor wire sold to the military failed at nearly twice the rate of the military's next worst supplier. "The stuff was poor quality," said Derek Vander Schaaf, the Pentagon's Deputy Inspector General, adding: "If you can't compete at 50 cents an hour for labor, guys, come on."4 Most state owned prison industry authorities (PIAs) are just as bad: twenty-five percent of them reported net losses in 1994. But even this unflattering number is optimistically distorted, because many PIAs that boast profits in their annual reports fail to disclose the massive subsidies they receive. For example, California's PIA claims to be in the black, but state auditors tell a different story: In 1998 the PIA employed 7,000 of the state's 155,000 prisoners in everything from dairy farming to computer refurbishing, and operated with the usual pampering of guaranteed markets and obscenely low wages. But, like Unicor, the PIA was unable even to meet its costs. Despite posting a "profit" the PIA is on life support, receiving "operating subsidies" and capital outlay funding from the state worth more than $90 million.
The same story can be found in state after state. Why the inefficiency? In part because convicts resent being used as virtual slaves and thus drag their feet, steal supplies, and commit sabotage nonstop. One former federal inmate told me that his "cellie" ended each workday at a Unicor shop with a celebratory calculation of how much equipment and material he had destroyed, thrown or stolen. As the former prisoner put it, "It was all waste, all the time."