The South Carolina Post & Courier has had a couple of articles this week about a working prison farm. I have to admit to being unfamiliar with this concept. How many prisoner farmers do we have in America? Are many prisoners across the country growing their own food?

Journalist Yvonne Wenger reports on the addition of a $7 million dairy to the Wateree River Correctional Institution. Purportedly the dairy is intended to save money for the prison.

Wateree River Correctional Institution is the largest prison farm in the state. Inmates milk the cows and tend to their needs, run a sawmill and gristmill and grow soy, corn and sweet potatoes, among other crops.

Ozmint said the crops produced at the farms, which feed inmates across the state, help the Corrections Department keep the cost of feeding inmates low. South Carolina spends $1.51 a day on food per inmate, the lowest among all state prison systems.

Another article in the series describes the prison farms this way:

Two inmates, dressed identically in tan prison-issued uniforms, sit atop a machine Monday in the farm’s gristmill. They use the machine to grind up the corn kernels while another pair of inmates package the grits in heavy brown paper bags. They produce a bag of grits valued at $35 for just $4.70. The grits will be shipped across South Carolina to feed the state’s 24,000 inmates.

Jon Ozmint, director of the state Department of Corrections, said the prison’s three farms are key to keeping the cost of feeding state inmates at $1.51 a day each, the lowest in the country. The farms produce all the milk, eggs and grits the prisons use, saving the Corrections Department almost $600,000 a year.

The article continues:

The Wateree farm, once segregated, has been in operation since the late 1800s. South Carolina inmates also produce license tags and their own bedding.

Ozmint said inmates in state prisons don’t get paid for their work, but South Carolina’s prison industries provide the inmates with a form of rehabilitation through job training and they can get “good-time credit” to shorten their sentence. [EMPHASIS MINE]

Duane, a St. Matthews man serving an 11-year sentence for a fatal car crash he caused while driving drunk, said he’d rather work in the heat than sit on his duff waiting for the last four years of sentence to run out. Inmates can have little interaction with the media, and they are not authorized to share their last names.

He is a handyman, at one time owning his own contracting business, who is working on the construction of the new dairy. Duane said he is grateful for the opportunity to keep his skills sharp while in prison.

“I enjoy doing this,” he said Monday, as the temperature in Rembert climbed toward 100 degrees.

I have blogged before about my conflicted feelings regarding prison labor. On the one hand, I want to take prisoners like Duane and others at their word that they “enjoy” working because it provides a diversion from their incarceration and in some cases provides some meager but needed funds. On the other hand, I continue to see prison labor as exploitative and as fundamentally unjust. Additionally it serves to further depress the wages of marginalized groups of individuals on the outside. How should anti-prison activists address the issue of prison labor? Obviously if we could abolish prisons then the issue would not exist, however since abolition is not imminent what do we advocate for in the meantime?

I will not be blogging as regularly as I have been for the next week. I am attending a couple of conferences and will not have access to a computer during that time. I will have tons more to write about after these conferences since both focus on prisons and “corrections.” Stay tuned! In the meantime, here are today’s PIC Fact(s) of the Day.

* In 2008, $68,747,203,000 was spent on corrections in the USA alone.

* The average annual operating cost per state inmate in 2008 was $22,650, or $62.05 per day.

* Housing the approximately 500,000 people in jail awaiting trial who cannot afford bail costs $9 billion a year.

The MetroWest Daily News wrote an editorial titled Inmates Aren't Slaves.

The tradition of prison inmates working menial jobs for meager pay dates back decades, long enough for “making license plates” to become a euphemism for going to jail.

Although prisoners are paid just pennies an hour for their work, it’s at least something, allowing them some money to purchase items from the prison canteen and helping lessen the burden on their family members who often financially support their locked-up loved ones. For some, working while incarcerated allows them to build up some small savings, giving them at least a chance to successfully re-enter society when they are released, which, after all, is part of the mission of any correctional system.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson would have the state remove that advantage from departing inmates and impose a greater burden on family members of remaining prisoners. Hodgson and state Rep. Elizabeth Poirier, R-North Attleboro, unveiled a bill Tuesday that would prohibit paying inmates for their work. Instead, prisoners would only receive time off their sentence – up to seven days a month – as payment for their work. Eliminating inmate pay would save the state between $2.5 million and $3 million a year, Hodgson claimed.

You know what would be better than paying inmates 2 cents an hour for their work? It would be NOT TO LOCK millions of people up in the first place!!

The editorial continues:

Indeed, the state would not be paying out that money in labor costs. But Hodgson conveniently neglects to mention what the commonwealth would lose if it stopped paying prisoners. Inmates at MCI-Cedar Junction, the state’s maximum-security prison, make every license plate affixed to every vehicle in Massachusetts. Without the cheap inmate work force, the state would have to contract with a private firm or hire new employees who would need to be paid livable wages, costing millions.

And license plates are just the beginning. Massachusetts Correctional Industries, or MassCor, is a major corporation, branching out into several industries. The Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, for example, houses a large print shop, providing discounted print jobs for state agencies, municipalities and private entities. Next door, at Massachusetts Treatment Center, inmates work in silk screen and sign shops, producing bumper stickers, business cards, street signs, city seals for police cars, etc. Inmates at MCI Framingham have been sewing American flags for more than a century. Other correctional facilities produce everything from trash barrels to beds, mattresses, eyeglasses and office furniture. MassCor even has a catalog to market its products, which generate a profit of more than $5 million a year. That doesn’t even count the savings to state agencies and municipalities, which would have to pay significantly more to purchase such products in the private sector.

While some inmates may continue to work solely to earn time off their sentence, that’s unlikely to be an incentive for many, especially those with long sentences who would barely notice the reduction. Without salaries, there would be no work force.

What is this? Under the guise of caring about prisoners’ human dignity and their professional development, this editorial board is actually making the case that it isn’t a good idea to stop paying prisoners for their work because it would adversely impact corporations and by extension the state of Massachusetts. This seems to be a more benign pro-exploitation of prisoner labor argument. The editorial board completely buys in to the prison industrial complex.

In response to this editorial, someone named Pat Ferris wrote a letter to the editor. This letter was incredibly depressing to read but I know that millions of Americans would agree with the sentiments expressed:

When early warning signs appear in young people by way of juvenile delinquency, the offender must be required to perform community service and be educated regarding the behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place. On that presumption it should be considered community service to work at some task during incarceration. Community service and working within the prison system should be a requirement if one becomes incarcerated. After all we are housing and feeding them, and if a person is not willing to work for food or shelter, they should go hungry and without a bed! [EMPHASIS MINE]

Slavery? On the contrary, more like “community service” and rehabilitation. I believe, and reason will bear this out, that this viewpoint which calls it slavery is a sign of the “viral” liberal mentality that has carried us so deeply into economic and social distress. The law was broken, a debt must be paid to society, and society must require certain criteria be fulfilled as part of an inmates rehabilitation.

We are a society of people who believe in the rule of law and that a citizen must pay a price for breaking the law. Incarceration alone does not rehabilitate, hard work and education are prerequisites that do.

God help us all…

The Justice Policy Institute has a new report that starkly illustrates how our major cities (in this case Washington D.C.) are redirecting resources from support services towards the prison industrial complex.

In Washington D.C., since 2008, spending on the Metropolitan Police Department and the Office of the Attorney General increased more than 2 percent and 11 percent respectively, while funding for schools, mental health services and housing has dropped. Research shows that investing in front-end services and programs that keep people out of the justice system is more effective at improving public safety and promoting community well-being than law enforcement and incarceration.

Other key report findings include:

* Despite an increasing need for affordable and supportive housing for residents during tough economic times, the budget for the District’s Department of Housing was cut more than 30 percent in the last two years, with the Housing Production Trust Fund losing $42 million in 2008 to $18 million in 2010, a cut of more than 50 percent.

* D.C. has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country; estimates of the homeless population range from 12,000 to 17,800 over the course of a year. Forty-seven percent of homeless people in D.C. are “chronically homeless.”

* Even though D.C. Public Schools continue to struggle with achieving its goal of providing quality education to every child, spending on education in the District has fallen 17 percent ($170 million) since 2008. Research shows that states that invest more in education have lower crime rates than states that spend less. Wards with the lowest median income and highest percentage of people of color have the lowest math and reading proficiencies and the most people without high school degrees.

* Despite a clear need for mental health services, especially for low-income populations and at-risk children and teens, the city continues to cut funding in this area. The D.C. Department of Mental Health’s budget was cut 17 percent from 2008 to 2010. Over 5,000 D.C. children in need of mental health treatment do not receive it.

* The Department of Parks and Recreation provides vital youth programming and maintains safe spaces for children to play. Yet funding for the Department of Parks and Recreation fell almost 20 percent from 2008 to 2010. These programs are especially valuable to children and teens whose families cannot afford private camps, classes, or after school programs.

This is a terrific concrete example of the warped priorities that many of our big cities and the country overall have. We need a movement to press political leaders to redirect needed resources to the social safety net rather than to the PIC.

Hat tip to blogger This is My Time at Daily Kos for sharing this link to a 30 minute documentary produced by a TV station in California about the high cost of incarceration. The documentary is surprisingly informative for something that has been produced by the mainstream media. Take a moment to watch it.

The Center on American Progress issued a new report about homelessness among gay and transgender youth.  The statistics are staggering.  However one particular piece of information jumped out at me related to the PIC:

$53,665: The estimated cost to maintain a youth in the criminal justice system for one year, while it only costs $5,887 to permanently move a homeless youth off the streets and prevent them from reentering the criminal justice system.

Again, will sanity and common sense start to prevail in America?

I’ll give you three chances to guess how much it costs to incarcerate ONE youth in Illinois…  What were your guesses?  Well it costs $78,000 to keep a young person in jail for a year in Illinois.  If you gasped, you are not alone.  This is particularly stupid because we KNOW that incarceration does NOT work.  It just serves to make youth into better criminals.

On the other hand, three to six months of multisystem therapy costs only between $6,800 and $10,000 per youth.  Tuition at the University of Illinois would cost under $10,000.  For all of the “conservatives” who would like to decrease the budget deficits at the state and local levels, they should be loudly advocating for decarceration and a focus on community-based alternatives.  That would be the appropriate ”conservative response.”  Yet no one has ever accused the right of being consistent in their arguments.

States spent about $5.7 billion in 2007 to imprison 64,558 youth committed to residential facilities.  The per diem costs of locking up on young person in a juvenile facility ranges from $24 in Wyoming to $726 in Connecticut, but the American Correctional Association estimates that, on average, it costs states $240.99 per day — around $88,000 a year — for every youth in a juvenile facility.  If you are interested in more such facts, the Justice Policy Institute published a good report last year called the costs of confinement.  The report makes the point that states needlessly spend billions of dollars a year incarcerating nonviolent youth.  These young people could to be safely supported in the community instead.

Just this month, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a report that is a MUST READ for anyone who is interested in issues associated with mass incarceration. The report called “The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration” suggests that:

“a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year and return the U.S. to about the same incarceration rate we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards)…As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.”

Most importantly the report says that “a review of the extensive research on incarceration and crime suggests that these savings could be achieved without any appreciable deterioration in public safety.”

The report can be found here and it is well worth reading in its entirety.

The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration Report