Brenda Valencia had the distinct feeling while she was toiling in prison industries that she’d been converted into an economic chit. “So many of these people answering phones? They don’t tell you, but they’re inmates. We took a lot of those 411 calls. They’re taking away a lot of jobs so they can pay inmates 48 cents an hour,” she said. Unicor, a public corporation that operates under a Department of Justice mandate to employ inmates, boasts that its inmate call centers are the “best kept secret in outsourcing.”3 In one ironic use of convict call centers, a contractor for GOP congressional hopeful Jack Metcalf hired Washington State prisoners in 1994 to call and remind voters that he was pro-death penalty. Metcalf won the election.4
Renting inmates to corporations as laborers is a recycled idea that state governments had tried before. After the Civil War the South used convict labor as a legal device to reconstitute backdoor slavery.5 With little or no evidence that they were guilty of crimes, poor African Americans were sentenced to forced labor and rented out to private contractors. Tens of thousands were arbitrarily arrested and leased to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and plantations. Chained together and treated with cruel abandon, the prisoners lacked the rights of farm animals. They were pawns in a system that reeked of brutality, ruthlessness, and corruption. In states where slavery had only recently been made illegal, institutions didn’t blanch at reconstituting its base elements, and finer questions about conflict of interest were barely considered—nor was the concept of liberty for all.
In the early twentieth century, Texas leased its entire prison system to private interests. Around the same time, Florida leased most of its convicts to companies that used them to mine raw materials and kept them in brutal work camps. Tennessee Coal and Iron Company actually rented out the Tennessee State Penitentiary and its inmates for its own purposes. Upon entry, convicts were turned over to the company, which kept most of them to perform grueling work and rented out the remainder to other slave industries.
Ultimately, the rent-a-convict system did not survive the ceaseless attacks from labor unions and civil libertarians. Other opposition came from corporations, which complained that they shouldn’t have to compete against unpaid labor. Perhaps the most significant factor was the cruel death of a white youth named Martin Tabert, who succumbed to the torture and neglect of his Florida captors. Tabert’s terrible fate received national attention, thanks to intense coverage by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.6 The tragedy put the entire rent-a-convict system, and Florida governor Cary Hardee in particular, under siege.
At age twenty-two, Tabert left his parents’ North Dakota ranch to see the world. A few months later, in December 1921, he was arrested in Leon County in Northern Florida for riding a freight train and sentenced to twenty-five dollars or ninety days in prison. Tabert managed to wire home for money, and his parents promptly sent him seventy-five dollars, but the local sheriff, J. R. Jones, had already leased him to the Putnam Lumber Company in Clara. Stamped “unclaimed… party gone,” the letter with the money was returned. Tabert’s parents assumed their son had been released, but in fact he was cutting and clearing lumber in a swamp. He became terribly ill and unable to fulfill his quota. An overseer wielding a “black auntie”—a leather strap four inches wide, five feet long, and often smeared with oil and soaked in sand—flogged him mercilessly, and he died a few days later without receiving medical care. All because he’d hopped on a freight car.
The World, which found a host of credible witnesses to the chain of atrocities perpetrated against Tabert, won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of a system that intertwined financial advantage with criminal court administration. Governor Hardee, who at first defended the leasing system as humane, ultimately signed an order abolishing it. The last state to do away with the post–Civil War convict leases was Alabama in 1927. Yet today, the lessons of Tabert’s awful fate, a fate shared by countless others, many of them African American, have been largely forgotten.
Americans are less than thrilled with the outsourcing of jobs to cheap-labor hotspots in the underdeveloped world. They rarely consider that many go not to India, Guatemala, or rural China, but to American penitentiaries. Honda, for example, was paying prisoners two dollars an hour to perform jobs that used to earn United Auto Workers members ten times that.7
Private use of prison labor, once established so it’s profitable for both the company and the government, is quite clearly an additional incentive to lock people behind bars and keep them there. U.S. law bans the importation of goods produced by convict labor, but these products are not always easy to trace. Convict industries in China have grown adept at muddling the true history of their merchandise. Meanwhile, nothing in U.S. law prevents American convict-manufactured goods from being exported.
Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a bill in January 2011 to require all low-security prisoners to work not forty, but fifty hours a week. This detail demonstrates how quickly convict labor can devolve into a form of slavery. According to Ensign, creating a national prison labor force makes even more sense in a tough economy.8 In some minds, killing union jobs by filling them with convicts is a double victory.
State Representative Kevin Mannix of Oregon urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring the jobs to his state’s prisons. He promised, “There won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor.”9 The Montreal-based Centre for Research on Globalization concluded that thanks to prison labor, “the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets.” It found a company that shut down its maquiladora (an assembly plant in Mexico near the border) “and relocated [its operations] to San Quentin State Prison in California.” It also found a firm that fired 150 Texas factory workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the GEO Group’s Lockhart, Texas, prison, “where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.”10 No dependable source has totaled the costs and savings involved in America’s various prisoner-contracting programs. Although inmates are no longer flogged to death for failing to make work quotas, their cheap labor provides another incentive to grow the prison system beyond reasonable necessity.
PART 4
Failed Excess
13
Deporting for Cash
WHEN PRIVATE PRISONS RENT OUT JAIL SPACE TO THE GOVERNMENT, THEY’RE paid whether the inmates are innocent or guilty. It’s another one of their perks. The process works the same way when jails hold Americans accused of being non-Americans. Administrative or judicial errors translate into profits in this business, and the longer it takes to sort out a mistake, the more profitable it is. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains approximately thirty-three thousand immigrants at any one time.1 Many are held in private, for-profit facilities; but precisely what percentage is unclear.
Researchers found that eighty-two people held for deportation from 2006 to 2008 at two immigration detention centers in Arizona were freed after immigration judges determined that they were American citizens after all. Some had been held for as long as a year.2 In fiscal year 2011 ICE deported a record 396,000 immigrants.3