HUMAN rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, "no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens." The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world's prison population, but only 5% of the world's people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.
What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?
"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP
According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:
¥ Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years' imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams - 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years' imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.
* The passage in 13 states of the "three strikes" laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.
* Longer sentences.
* The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.
* A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.
* More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.
HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.
During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. "Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex," comments the Left Business Observer.
Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.
Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.
Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won't be any transportation costs; we're offering you competitive prison labor (here)."
PRIVATE PRISONS
The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton's program for cutting the cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.
Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, "the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners." The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for "good behavior," but for any infraction, they get 30 days added - which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost "good behavior time" at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES
Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state's governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.
After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 - ending court supervision and decisions - caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering "rent-a-cell" services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.
STATISTICS
Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country's 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness
By Erwin James posted 15 October 05
UK: The devilish advocate John Hirst taught himself law in jail, and has never lost a case against the prison service. Erwin James meets up again with the former 'lifer' who won inmates the right to vote
It began as an act of "devilment", explains John Hirst, the 55-year-old former prisoner who last week defeated the government in the European Court of Human Rights on the issue of voting rights for convicted prisoners. I'm sharing a sofa with him in the cramped, untidy sitting room of the three-bedroom terraced house in Hull that he rents from a private landlord for £60 a week. He works casually, as a driver. His only company in the house is his dog, a lively labrador cross called Rocky - a "rescue dog" - that is clearly loathe to be out of his new owner's sight even for a moment.
"It was October 2000 and I'd been listening to the news in my cell when it came on that the Human Rights Act had been incorporated into UK law, he recalls. "I thought, 'Right!', and I went down the landing and spoke to a couple of other lifers. They were two grumpy old men who always sat at the same table during association, but I knew they had a little bit of legal knowledge. I said: 'Do you fancy setting up a union?' One said: 'They won't allow that.' I said: 'They can't stop us now, we've got the Human Rights Act.'"
In fact he ended up setting up an association, instead of a union, because, he explains, it sounded "less threatening". And here is the devilment. After searching through his library of law books, built up over the 20 years he had already spent inside, he discovered that anyone could set up an association in direct opposition to any other association that was already in existence. "It was obvious," he says, still tickled by the memory. "Prison officers had the Prison Officers' Association, the POA, so I thought, we'll have the AOP, the Association of Prisoners."
As is the way in prison, word got around fast, and soon the minimum of 10 members necessary to form an association had been recruited. After agreeing on a constitution, the members met in Hirst's cell to plan objectives. Somebody suggested pushing for better food. Somebody else proposed conjugal rights. But Hirst had a better idea. "It was when someone mentioned that we should try and lobby the House of Commons," he says. "I'd read about interest groups lobbying and pressuring politicians to change things, but I knew that, as prisoners, we weren't allowed to vote. It was obvious that politicians only take notice of people who do have the vote - that's why there's never been any real will in parliament to take prison reform seriously. I decided to find out why we weren't allowed to vote."
During his research, he read books on the British constitution and studied the suffragette movement. Eventually, he felt confident enough to mount a legal challenge to the government. It wasn't the first time that he had decided to take legal action to address his grievances in prison.
Hirst was sent to prison for life after being convicted of the manslaughter of his landlady, Bronia Burton, in 1979. She had asked Hirst to bring in some coal. Hirst felt he was being "nagged". He says this caused him to "snap" and attack Burton, hitting her several times on the head with the blunt end of an axe taken from the garden shed. After hearing all the evidence, the court found that he had acted with "diminished responsibility". He eventually received a tariff of 15 years, but served a total of 25 before being released in October last year. He believes his activities as a litigant against the Prison Service and Home Office are the main reason he had to serve the extra years.
Locked in solitary
Hirst proved to be the most prolific prisoner litigant of modern times - and, he says, like Perry Mason and Rumpole of the Bailey, he never lost a case against the Prison Service. He won the right of prisoners on segregation punishment to keep their beds in their cells during the day, and overturned the blanket ban on prisoners communicating with the media. He also, after he was kept locked in solitary for 28 days without a break, successfully sued a prison governor for "malfeasance in public office".
It took Hirst a while to settle into prison life. He quickly gained a reputation as a "difficult" prisoner who would stand up against the authorities if he felt that things were not as they should be. "I've always been someone who questions," he says.
There are clues in Hirst's early years that give some indication of the attitude he exhibited in prison. He was born in Hull in 1950. A year later, his mother gave birth to his brother, and soon afterwards his father left home. A year after that, unable to cope with the children, his mother handed him and his brother into the care of a Dr Barnardo's home in South Yorkshire. By the time he was seven, he and his brother were in their fourth foster parent placement and Hirst had a history of bed wetting and soiling. "We were all over the place," he says.
His bad behaviour caused the foster parents to send him back to the institution, but he would return intermittently for holidays. When he was 10, a primary school teacher described him as "vulnerable, easily hurt, good sense of humour, never bored or fed up, willing, with a nice social manner, very loving to animals". Yet by the time he was 13, his foster mother reported her concerns about Hirst's temperament. "John gets furious easily," she said, adding that she was "afraid of what he might do". Incidences of "pilfering" and general bad behaviour continued to be reported.
He left secondary school at 15, with no qualifications, and got a job as page boy in a city hotel. Two months later he was dismissed for "extreme impudence", after arguing about the sugar allocation for the porters. Afterwards, he embarked on a life of casual work and petty crime. "Building sites, burglary and car theft," he says. A series of prison terms, ranging from six months to five years, followed until he was 30, when he was sentenced to life. "The wetting and soiling never stopped until I went to prison," he says.
As a lifer, he was moved around the system regularly, and frequently spent periods in prison segregation units. In 1989, he attacked a prison officer. He says that on that day the officer had "offered out" (challenged to a fight) a number of prisoners. Hirst was working as a food- serving orderly, and one of the "perks" was extra milk for his cornflakes. The officer stopped the extra milk and, when Hirst argued, he says the officer offered him out. The ensuing violence left the officer in an intensive care unit for some days. Hirst was segregated immediately and later transferred to a special high security unit in Hull prison.
The unit was experimental, designed to hold at most a dozen prisoners marked down as being among the most difficult and dangerous in the system. Ironically, the unit provided prisoners with better treatment and conditions than would have been available to them otherwise.
Hirst began to read more. Stephen Shaw, now prisons ombudsman but then director of the Prison Reform Trust, visited the unit and gave Hirst a copy of a book published by the trust, Prison Rules: A Working Guide. Armed with the correct information, he successfully sued the prison governor for compensation regarding a quantity of his property that had disappeared during his earlier transfer. "The first law book I read was on administrative law," he says. "I opened it up on a chapter on power and the abuse of power. I thought: 'This is what prison is all about.' Suddenly, my brain seemed to kick into gear. I wanted more books. I had them sent in, or teachers would bring them for me. My brain was insatiable for knowledge of the law." So does he see himself as anti-authority. "Not at all," he says. "I'm just anti the abuse of authority."
As we talk, I am reminded of the time that I knew John Hirst when we were fellow prisoners on the same wing in a closed prison in 1994. I didn't know him well, but I knew of his formidable reputation for legal knowledge. Everybody on the wing knew where his cell was. He had a sign on his cell door: Prison Law Centre. Underneath, another sign proclaimed: Free Legal Advice. Every morning before breakfast he had a queue outside his cell waiting patiently to take advantage of his legal skills and his straining shelves of law books.
Legal eagle
Hirst did not discriminate. Even prison officers were known to open his door occasionally during "bang up" to ask for advice on problems affecting them inside or outside the prison, and the self-taught legal eagle was always happy to assist - although not all prison officials were impressed. A psychologist reported that he "showed no remorse for the people he had litigated against".
His first success in the property case marked the beginning of a preoccupation with the law and prison conditions that has left modern law books littered with dozens of references to his cases: Hirst v (numerous prison governors), Hirst v Secretary of State for the Home Department; and, in relation to last week's ECHR judgment, Hirst v UK.
When I get up to leave, the dog bounds into action, yelping and excited for some exercise. "Shut up, Rocky," Hirst says gently, stroking and hugging the animal. "Silly dog." I ask him about his plans for the future. "I'm going to keep on fighting," he says. Any regrets? "No," he says, and then thinks for a second and adds: "Well, just one. If I could go back to the night of the offence and change it, I would."
