LETTER: Prison labor increases unemployment
Published: Friday, October 5, 2012 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 8:39 p.m.
Dear Editor: Concerning Dr. Vergil Williams statements in a letter to the editor on the “evolved solution to non-controversial use of inmate labor”, that is, “to use such labor only to produce services and products for other government agencies.”
He’s being more than a little disingenuous to declare this solution “non-controversial,” indeed anyone that performs manual labor would disagree. Even if a non-prison worker doesn’t lose their job to prison labor like the folks in Hamilton did, the very presence of a similar product being put out by sub-minimum wage labor drives down the value of that worker’s labor.
He might argue that because the prison workers are creating product exclusively for government use, the manufacture and sale of this particular product makes for a closed market that doesn’t affect the value of the product. However, when you consider the workers laid off because of prison labor will join an ever-increasing pool of the unemployed, the growth of which in turn reduces the job security and labor value of workers in the same industry, that argument disintegrates. Why use the U.S. government to speed up what cheap labor from countries like China and India are already doing?
Forcing prisoners to work for cents an hour amounts to exploitation. Dr. Williams says that because the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, we should expect those prisoners to pay for the massive system built to hold them, but isn’t it more reasonable that we reduce our outrageous incarceration rate?
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