"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

-Article Thirteen of the Constitution of 1787

By Kim S. Nash
COMPUTERWORLD

Hugo Weigand's fingers fly across the keyboard at 19,000 strokes per hour. He almost never misses a day at his data-entry job. He is a model employee, recently promoted to document batcher. Weigand is also a convicted murderer. He is serving 25 years to life in the Wasatch County prison complex here. He is one of hundreds of convicts in the U.S. who do data entry or telemarketing or who make travel reservations or even digital maps for companies and government agencies. Low wages and high-quality work make prison labor an attractive, if controversial, outsourcing option for some companies, including Procter & Gamble Co., and Trans World Airlines (TWA).

But unusual management problems come in the bargain. Aside from obvious security concerns, companies must adjust to the peculiarities of a behind-bars workforce, from prison lockdowns to workers who leave because they get paroled. No one has reliable statistics, but prison officials in several states said computer work is growing faster than traditional prison jobs, such as sewing and making license plates. The federal corrections system and at least 36 states have prison industry programs, and most programs entail some kind of computer or telemarketing work.

You can't beat the prices. For example, the 23 cents to a few dollars per hour that inmates are paid for data entry is nothing compared with the $8 to $12 per hour that workers in the free world get for the same job. But the low wages also bring criticism. Labor unions claim that prison labor steals jobs from law-abiding workers, and civil liberties groups say the programs are exploitative. Other observers said using prisoners to handle often sensitive data without consumers' knowledge is unethical, and the practice may backfire.

A typical example of today's prison labor is Wasatch prison, just south of Salt Lake City, Utah. There, 40 male and 40 female prisoners key in data for the Utah Bureau of Medicaid. Every day at 6 a.m., a state-owned van brings crates of medical claim forms to a loading dock just inside a metal fence that is reinforced with four layers of razor wire. The cargo is combed for contraband by armed guards. Work stopped for more than an hour last month as officials searched inmates for illegal tobacco, said Richard Clasby, director of Utah Correctional Industries, which oversees the prison's 26 businesses. "I won't lie to you and say it's easy doing business here. There's a lot to overcome," Clasby said.

Across the country, inmate work programs are interrupted every few hours to allow for prisoner head counts, for example. Corporate managers often can't directly supervise their prison workers - they have to go through wardens and guards - unless they get trained as corrections officers. That means learning things such as how to handle a cellblock riot. And workers can be paroled anytime or, like one Kentucky convict, yanked off the job for fighting over a plastic spoon. But there are benefits to inmate labor, advocates said, including high productivity from prisoners who are motivated to get and keep those special jobs. "The alternative is to make 10 cents an hour raking rocks. That gets touch in the dead of summer," said John Spearman, assistant director of the Arizona Department of Corrections in Phoenix.

Businessman Dan Bohan is slowly learning how the system works. Late last year, he cut a deal with Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, SC, to turn a weight room into an airline reservations center. A technician from Sabre Group, Inc. installed a bank of PCs and connected them to Sabre's reservation system in Dallas. Custom screens were built to black out sensitive data of repeat customers. There are no printers on the network, nor are workers allowed pens or paper. To further guard against security problems, prisoners aren't allowed to take credit card numbers or personal information, said Bohan, who co-owns Travel Wholesalers International in Fairfax, VA. When a transaction reaches that stage, callers are transferred to a regular Travel Wholesalers employee.

Bohan maintained that he wants to give convicts job skills so they can avoid a life of crime after leaving jail. (Then he should give them jobs after they get out of jail. WFI Editor). It doesn't hurt, he said, that once the kinks are worked out, he expects to save roughly 50% or more in wages compared with what traditional reservation agents are paid. He said he hopes to have 50 inmates working for him by early next year. But after 14 weeks of paid training for the first batch of 12 female prisoners, three soon left - paroled. Good for them, but bad for Bohan. "It's not the smoothest start in the world," he said. (The idea that society is better off by having inmates work for $5.00 a day is a joke. Meanwhile, the state pays $30,000 per year to incarcerate the inmate; so in effect, the state is subsidizing the businessman who exploits prison labor. WFI Editor)

Prison officials won't guarantee any minimum employment commitments for the convicts, but Bohan may have solved that problem. "The five new people we're hiring are all lifers," he said. In all convict work programs, prisoners are monitored closely by armed corrections officers. Advocates claim that makes the prison labor pool more secure than most. But trouble does happen. Metromail Corp., a database marketing company in Lombard, IL, is being sued by an Ohio woman over an incident with an inmate. A prisoner who processed consumer surveys for Metromail wrote the woman a sexual letter that included personal details from her survey. Metromail has since stopped using prison labor.

Yet the degree of data abuse in prison programs is exaggerated, advocates say. Client companies may know more about individual prison workers than they do about most corporate employees, they say, alluding to the detailed files and close eye kept on inmates. And unlike in the free world, inmate workers who break rules can be punished immediately, and not only by being fired. They also can be denied recreation privileges or put in solitary confinement, said Morgan Reynolds, an economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank in Dallas, TX. "In a way," Reynolds said, "these problems are easier to handle in prison."

Most companies don't tell their customers that convicts may handle their data. That's a mistake, said Megan Barry, a member of the Ethics Officers Association, a group for corporate ethicists run by Bentley College in Waltham, MA. Consumers have a right to know exactly whom they give information to, Barry said. "The impression companies give is that you're not giving it to someone who is a rapist or murderer." Prison labor may keep costs down, which is a benefit to customers. But "a knowledgeable consumer may choose to pay more for a service they know they can trust," she said.

SOURCE: Reprinted from Computerworld magazine, 11 May, 1998 issue. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

(WFI EDITOR: Will parents in the future have to tell their kids that when they grow up, they can plan on going to jail in order to get a job? How will employers be able to contain their glee at the prospect of externalizing all the housing and associated costs of their employees, so that they can actually get away with paying them $5.00 per day? And if the arrangement proves profitable to the state, will there not be a motivation to make it easier and easier to arrest and convict American citizens, to keep the labor supply plentiful? While it might seem appropriate to put convicts to work - especially individuals who might benefit from the structure and discipline that a real job offers - what is the incentive for employers to hire convicts who have served their time, and gone by the rules, and who desperately need a job upon being released from prison? The exploitation of prison labor amounts to the virtual re-birth of slavery, and every person who is concerned with the ideal that America embodies the aspiration of mankind to be free, should be deeply disturbed by the trends towards industry embracing convict labor. During the Holocaust, prisoners of Nazi Germany who went to the prison camps were greeted by the slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei," which in English reads, "Work Makes Free." In reality, the only way those prisoners left the camps was as smoke going up the chimney. If it happened once, it could happen again…)