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Did you know that even though DoD contracts contain a clause that prohibits manufactures from employing prison labor (such as China) that Federal law requires the DoD to procure certain clothing and textile (C&T) items such as helmets and uniforms from Federal Prison Industries (FPI). According to the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA), approximately 19% of all Army Combat Uniforms (ACU) are produced by Federal prisoners.
Should Federal Prison Industries continue as a mandatory source for Army Combat Helmets (ACH) and Army Combat Uniforms (ACU)? Why should 6,505 federal convicts be fully employed in regional areas of 10% or more unemployment?
This is the question put directly to both Senate and Congressional staffers during a recent AAFA visit to Capitol Hill. In almost all cases, staffers were amazed to learn that much of our military gear is made by federal prisoners. In fact, according to the FPI Annual Report from 2009, prisoners achieved $262.7M in sales in the Clothing and Textiles category earning $36M in profits ($60M in 2008). The question on everyone’s mind is that given prisoners are only paid pennies per hour, who is reaping the benefits of these $36M in earnings? The question from the tax payer’s mind is simple – wouldn’t it be better for the $262.7M in sales to be pushed into the free enterprise market and potentially re-employ the 6,505 tax paying, sewing and manufacturing people who may be unemployed today?
The other question is a matter of quality assurance in the personal protective products made by UNICOR. From the FPI website “UNICOR also produces body armor that meets National Institute of Justice (NIJ) standards, as well as a wide range of ballistic products for military applicants.” Unfortunately these products do not meet NIJ standards given the recent recall of 44,000 Army Combat Helmets. The Army and the prime contact holder Armor Source both confirmed that UNICOR, also called Federal Prison Industries, manufactured all 44,000 of the recalled helmets.
The stated purpose of the FPI program, again from the FPI web site is “. . . not about business, but instead, about inmate release preparation…. helping offenders acquire the skills necessary to successfully make that transition from prison to law-abiding, contributing members of society. The production of items and provision of services are merely by-products of those efforts.” I wonder how the clothing and textile $96M profit over the last two years really helped prisoners acquire job skills.
The Industrial Base and overall employment of textile, apparel, and furnishings workers is expected to decline rapidly through 2018 from 212,400 jobs in the year 2008 to 140,900 jobs by the year 2018; a loss of 71,500 jobs. Specific rehabilitation by the FPI program in the C&T industry is for sewing machine operators which is expected to decline rapidly by 34 percent (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos233.htm#outlook). Question – why is the government taking potential jobs from workers who could be employed today, to train and rehabilitate prisoners in a declining job field with little hope for a job when released from prison?
Wouldn’t the government be better served by focusing on the areas of high future job growth? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the top ten following occupations requiring only on-the-job training or work experience, than all other occupations with similar requirements will grow the fastest, through 2018. Home Health Aides growth 50 percent; Home Care Aides 46 percent; Physical Therapist Aides 36 percent; Dental Assistants 36 percent; Medical Assistants 34 percent; Self-Enrichment Teachers 32 percent; Government Compliance Officers 31 percent; Occupational Therapist Aides 31 percent; Pharmacy Technician 31 percent; and Medical Secretaries 27 percent.
Now – granted, some of these occupations may not be a good fit because they require background and security assessments to deal with personal data. This doesn’t change the fact that these are the greatest growth potential job fields and therefore have the greatest rehabilitation and reemployment potential for prisoners over through 2018. The Department of Justice, which oversees the FPI program, must get creative in determining how to really best support rehabilitation of prisoners and not just push inmates into labor intensive jobs like clothing and textiles because FPI can make significant profits.
There is a current amendment offered by Representative Walter B. Jones (NC) included in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (HR 5136) which attempts to get at the question of unfairly controlling market share. The amendment requires FPI to follow the existing rules. It is neither REP Jones nor the AAFA’s intent to cancel the rehabilitation efforts of FPI but to roll back FPI’s market share as required by law in product areas where they exceed 5%. The 5% cap is already included in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008 (Public Law 110-18). The point now is to control FPI’s appetite for growth in clothing and textiles beyond the 5% limitation – for example pulling back 10 – 12% of ACU production and pushing that production back into the private industrial base to increase job growth.
I believe this is a step in the right direction by Congress and bringing the aggressive nature of FPI to the attention of the Secretary of Defense. It seems that holding FPI to the already defined 5% cap is right. However, the larger questions remain as to why doesn’t the Congress push the 6,505 prisoner jobs into private industry to provide more employment opportunity? Further, why does the Federal government prohibit contractors from using prison labor when the US government mandates that percentages of all Federal contracts be set aside for US prison labor? And last, what is the message that we are sending to both our troops and to our allies when the soldier, sailors, marines, and airman who deploy to defend our values of freedom and democracy are wearing uniforms made by US federal prisoners?

Corporations Lobby For Private Debtors Prisons

Posted on July 25, 2010
Filed Under Critical Issues | Leave a Comment

After the 2010 election corporations will launch an all out push for congress to institute some form of debtors incarnation where Americans are imprisoned and forced to work at slave wages to pay off their corporate creditors. This will finish the globalist agenda of reducing America’s working class to slave laborers on par with China.

In our modern era of debt servitude, a PR Push has been designed to reintroduce a serious discussion of debtors’ prisons as a sound solution. What goes beyond alarming is that the full-fledged return of debtors’ prisons might be seen as both appropriately terrifying, as well as a profitable investment opportunity and politically sound decision to be made by state governments struggling with their own looming bankruptcies, and a Federal government struggling politically with the concept of a jobless recovery that is not materializing.

A de facto debtors’ prison has already been largely accepted in the case of “deadbeat” parents when a failure to pay child support puts them in civil contempt of court. It is this civil contempt charge that is now beginning to take on an expanded definition to include those who owe for much smaller infractions. When a court order to pay a debt is issued and ignored, it then qualifies as a civil contempt of court. At that point, the judge becomes a literal dictator with the ability to imprison a person indefinitely for the violation. The Constitution explicitly prohibits incarceration for failure to pay debts, but it is the violation of a court order that gives judges free rein to impose draconian punishments. In this way, an end-run around the Constitution can become frighteningly commonplace.

America already has a record-high ratio of people in prison, with no signs of the trend reversing as private corporations like Wackenhut Corporation, referred to as a “Free Market in Human Misery,” have long been enlisted to turn government directives into shareholder profit. One might even deign to call it blatant fascism in its purest form, as government legislation leads offenders directly into private company coffers. The prison-industrial complex has already capitalized on government actions like The War on Drugs. A prime example is how The California Correctional Peace Officers Association helped fuel the prison-building boom as a cozy relationship was established on Capitol Hill through influence peddling.

Profiting from the suffering of the poor while bailouts and bonuses await the over-leveraged banksters, car companies, and state governments, sets up a prison-industrial complex with a class warfare component that is the domestic mirror of the military-industrial complex sent abroad. This domestic prison system seems to be the only industry left to build upon, and it is here that things become truly frightening. For the federally-owned prison system complex, Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR), more incarceration means a growing supply of cheap labor and a skewing of unemployment numbers, as these inmates are often doing jobs they couldn’t even find if they were job hunting on the outside. But it is the private prison system, with its web fully woven throughout the U.S. government, that stands to profit the most from the return of debtors’ admission.

The largest private prison conglomerate in the U.S. is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which controls more than 47% of all private prison and jail beds nationwide and is able to produce a 13-15% return annually on new real estate investments. Wackenhut (now subsumed into G4S, the largest security company in the world) was of course started by an FBI agent, George Wackenhut, who is famous for developing millions of dossiers on America’s “potential subversives” in the sixties, and was exposed as being an integral player within the shadow CIA.

These major security conglomerates are at the top of a growing pyramid of for-profit, international detention center operators that has Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs simply fawning over the solid, long-term investment potential. Similar to war, when there is a profit to be made off of incarceration, only more incarceration can be expected to follow. The U.S. government certainly seems to be working hard to ensure that the numbers of poor continue to increase, as they are well aware that that programs designed to help the downtrodden are an abject failure every time. Furthermore, the massive government debts that must be repaid directly into the hands of the Federal Reserve-led banking cabal must lead us to an inescapable conclusion: More money is to be made from slavery in the United States, than from freedom.

Read Full Article Here: Activist Post: Our Future In Chains: The For-Profit Debtors’ Prison System.

We are seeing this slave labor being used right now as BP pays pennies on the dollar for inmate labor to clean up the oil disaster in the gulf even though there are millions of Americans out of work.

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

Known to some as “the inmate state,” Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its 39,000 inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so 20,000 inmates live in parish jails, privately run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour.

Read Full Article Here: BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle | The Nation.

The banking industry can no longer count on Americans to get into debt at an early age and spend the next 60 years maintaining corporate profits. For-profit debtors prisons utilizing American slave labor is the next big economic bubble.