When you think about jail
or prison, what comes to mind? Heavy metal bars, a loss of freedom and privacy,
and altogether sort of a scary place, if you’re like me. Prisons and jails are
where people go to be punished for acting in a manner that is popularly and
lawfully decided inappropriate and intolerable by other persons. Or rather,
jail is where a person goes to be corrected.
But have you ever wondered why jails and prisons don’t make and grow their
own supplies? That would be fairly neat, wouldn’t it? And certainly it would
save the taxpayers a little money. After all, currently the funding that pays
for the inmates to live their day to day life, serving out their debts to
society and learning their lessons concerning their crimes comes from the rest
of the taxpaying people in the country. The inmates live out their correctional
period doing not much of anything at all. So why couldn’t they do something
constructive? Something that wouldn’t hurt their corrections, but increase
their productivity and the overall value of the time they spend behind those
plain dank walls? The kind of jail or prison that does this is called a
self-sufficient one; which, as the name implies, means that they support
themselves. The inmates of these facilities make and grow much of their own
food and various other products that they use. Oftentimes the inmates would do
a lot of community service also, something already very common in our jail
systems. Today, Americans spend $60 billion a year, and imprison 2.2 billion
people. The amount that we pay for such expenses exceeds the amount that any
other country in the world pays for them. Our legislators have passed
“get-tough” laws, say the National Prison Commission that has packed the
nation’s jails and prisons with convicts. These convicts, they say, are mostly
poor and uneducated. Because of our inefficient system, there is much strain
financially on the states, and public health breaches are suffered due to
parolees with communicable diseases. During the 1930s, in the Great Depression,
the unions were on the rise. They were beginning to realize more the power of
numbers, and now that they had permission to exist and were overwhelmed with a
variety of success in their missions, they were anxious and eager to fight all
of the issues they found to be somewhat of a broach of equality or unjust. In
those days self-sufficient jails weren’t unheard of, and in fact they were
extremely common. During the 1930s many of the prisons worked their prisoners,
having them plant and grow gardens, do community service, and in those days it
was not uncommon for an inmate to assist in even the job of guard for the other
prisoners! In fact, this way of running the prisons was very efficient and
there were often surpluses of products. These surpluses were sold for more
money to support the prison. And that was where part of the problem came in.
Originally there came to be two establishments opposed to the self-sufficient
prisons. The first were the manufacturers. The manufacturers were angry with
the prisons because they had been so successful with their system, and that
they were producing large enough surpluses to compete with the manufacturers.
People were buying prison-made goods instead of the goods offered by the
manufacturers, and they manufacturers were highly displeased at the
competition. The second enemy the self-sufficient prisons made was the unions.
The unions were angry about the prisons using their inmates for labor, even
labor for themselves. They complained that in working the prisoners without
paying them, the prisons were practicing free and open slavery, the very thing
they had eradicated not too terribly long ago. The unions argued bitterly that
prisons were not just correcting or laying punishments on the prisoners as they
were supposed to be, they were removing their liberties and rights. They were
taking the things that made the prisoners free Americans. The unions and the
manufacturers demanded that something be done about the prisons. And so in
1935, the Ashurst-Sumners Act was created and became law. The Ashurst-Sumners
Act is a United States Act of Congress that makes it unlawful to knowingly
transport in interstate commerce goods made by convict labor unless the
prisoners were paid at least minimum wage; and so died many of the efficient
and brilliantly run self-sufficient prisons. A lot of people today still agree
with those ideas, that to put our inmates to work would be slavery. But ask
yourself, what is the alternative? Today we have many people in jail (2.2
billion) and day by day they sit in their blank, dank, cheerless building and
do next to nothing. There are some activities to do now and then, but not
always, and usually nothing terribly productive. Is this better? I think not.
In Boone County, Kentucky things in the jail systems work a bit differently
than other places. A jailer is an elected position that people take turns at.
But that’s not the only difference in their system; they also run a
self-sufficient jail. The Boone County Jail has a reputation for efficiency,
and they handled about 8,000 prisoners last year. The inmates grow a garden
every year to offset their food costs and they run a neat work program. The
work program allows inmates to do things that are productive to their community
such as cutting county grass, litter pickup, dump site cleanup, and also
providing $700,000 worth of free labor to the county every year. In California,
we have a work program for our prison inmates called CalPIA, or California
Prison Industry Authority. This program basically provides work experience for
prison inmates, using the experience as a way to rehabilitate the prisoners.
They offer jobs, expertise, and experience in several trades such as shoe
manufacturing, bakeries, bindery, crop farming, and more. The program is
required by law to be self-sufficient, and to pay the inmates minimum wage,
both of which it does. They sell many of their products which pay for all of
their costs, and even end with a surplus, which goes to the office presiding
over that one, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
(CDCR). CalPIA is the CDCR’s most successful rehabilitative program. We would
allow our inmates to work like the fellow human beings they are. There are
people who still adamantly believe that to work our prisoners would be slavery,
but what difference is there to a self-sufficient prison from a person getting
charged community service in court? Mainly that they are kept in a facility,
but it is because they are kept in these facilities that they are that much
more willing to do community service. We would not work our inmates like
slaves, arduously, painstakingly, and without choice. While some prisons have
special programs every day, a model of what our slavery concerned citizens
want, many prisons have a lot of time in which the inmates are simply sitting
in their cells doing not much of anything at all. Our inmates are simply moved
around from day to day, as if they were stock for a warehouse, not human beings
simply trying to pay for a wrong they committed. Many of them would jump at the
chance to make their prison a self-sufficient one, a prison that makes its own
necessities and grows its own food. After all, our inmates are allowed to work
on a bit of community service, but they can’t upkeep their own jail? Is that
not community service? Is not the jail a community building? Our country, we as
Americans pay more for our prison and jail system than any of the other
countries in the world. I don’ think that’s something to be proud of. I think
that’s something we should be ashamed of – an extreme waste. In this I do not
imply that it is a waste to rehabilitate our inmates, I mean simply that there
is a better easier way that we are missing completely. Reinstate our rights to
run self-sufficient prisons. Every human being wishes to be helpful, or at
least productive. We have a difficult time sitting around doing nothing at all
because we love to have the feeling that we are an important piece to
something. As humans and especially the Americans we pride ourselves as, our
roots date back to hardworking, progressively delighting people. Everyone wants
to know that if they were doing nothing at all then someone would miss them,
and that person or group of people would need them. We are depriving the people
in prison of these basic human needs. These people are human beings; they
aren’t things that should be kept locked up day and night. If you ask me,
keeping them in that manner is
treating them more like slaves than if we allowed them to work. The inmates, in
contributing to our jails and prisons are not only being productive and busy,
or just helping their communities – we need them to in some ways. Prisoners
aren’t my idea of free slave labor. I do not suggest we create slavery again in
the U.S. What I do suggest is efficient productivity, that we may treat our
inmates like they belong to our human race. If we were to make these
adjustments in our country it would not only affect every community with a jail
or prison, but it would remove the entire cost of jails and prisons from the
United States taxpayers. We would be not just humane to our inmates but we
would be hailed for our efficiency and genius in national costs by other
countries. Look into your jail and prison system today. Do they seem fair?
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