Doing Business Behind Bars

By Bennett H. Beach

Many prisoners serve time productively and profitably too

Dan Morgan is a convicted kidnaper with little hope of leaving the maximum security prison at Stillwater, Minn., until the mid-'90s. During the early years of his sentence, he whiled away the days shuffling papers in an office and worrying about the financial plight of his disabled wife. Nowadays Morgan (not his real name) serves his time much more productively. Thanks to a 40-hour-a-week job as a computer programmer with a company set up inside prison walls, he has been able to buy a $50,000 house for his wife, and he sends home enough money to cover mortgage payments, taxes, electricity and telephone service.

Morgan is one of thousands of prisoners across the country who are engaged in useful and sometimes even profitable work. The range of jobs is wide, from assembling solar energy panels and setting type to milking cows and, in Colorado, building a new $6 million prison near Canon City. Convicts in Thomaston, Me., cannot keep up with demand for their sturdy hardwood furniture. A production line at Minnesota's Lino Lakes penitentiary repairs Toro Trimmer-Weeders, outperforming the company's own employees. Not all these employed prisoners are male; select inmates at the Colorado Women's Correctional Facility, for example, spend their days operating computers.

There is nothing new about prisoners doing some honest work. As long ago as the early 19th century, industry was seen as the inmate's ticket to moral redemption, and wardens were judged by their bottom lines. By 1828 Sing Sing claimed to be economically self-sufficient by virtue of stonecutting, blacksmithing and other activities. Private companies, however, sought to limit the competition from so much cheap labor. During the Depression, Congress came to the companies' aid by severely curtailing the right to sell prison-made goods across state lines. Work programs began to shut down. Many of those legal barriers remain, but prison industries are making a comeback for both sociological and financial reasons.

"The work has a therapeutic effect," says Ed Fox, head of Colorado's prison industry program. At the simplest level, it reduces boredom, and hence its byproduct, violence. Adds Rodney Page, wood products manager at Thomaston:

"The inmates are busy and have something to be proud of. They can help provide for their families and themselves. That's a lot."

Many of today's programs are also designed to provide the rehabilitation that, in theory, is the purpose of the prison regimen. Convicts who may be accustomed to unemployment can learn to get up and go to work in the morning; some acquire skills that they can use after release to get steady jobs. All twelve of the ex-cons who worked for the computer company at Stillwater have parlayed their skills into similar jobs on the outside. In hopes of achieving comparable results, Massachusetts has closed down its flag-sewing operation in favor of a microfilm shop. Some experts caution that this approach can backfire. Jack Schaller, president of the American Institute of Criminal Justice in Philadelphia, maintains that ex-cons often do not want to pursue activities that remind them of their days behind bars. If a prisoner worked in the print shop, says Schaller, "the last thing he's going to do when he gets out on the street is have anything to do with printing."

Not all prison work is as lucrative as Dan Morgan's in Stillwater. Colorado pays its inmates up to $3.04 an hour, but a few states like Texas pay nothing, and the national average is a modest 20-c- to 30-c- an hour. Whatever their outlay, the states aim for a good return. It costs about $10,000 to house the average prisoner for a year, and with inmate population expanding and taxpayers' tolerance shrinking, legislators are loath to spend any more than they absolutely must to keep their penal systems going. Thus it is a boon when a state's prison industries can show an increase in sales like that in Massachusetts: from $200,000 in 1972 to $3.4 million last year. States can benefit in yet another way, by obtaining goods and services from their prisons and thereby reducing purchasing costs.

The future success of such projects depends in part on Washington. A major impetus has come from Free Venture, a program financed in seven states by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Now LEAA may fall victim to congressional budget cutting. Meantime Congress has at least directed LEAA to select seven test projects whose prison industries would be allowed to market their products beyond state lines. Sponsors hope this experiment will further the trend of private companies' subcontracting work to prison shops.

Many prisoners hope so too. Colorado convicts are so pleased to have an alternative to sitting in their cells that they put in 50-hour weeks repairing school buses. At Stillwater earlier this year, one inmate obtained parole but refused to leave; first he wanted to finish overhauling an engine. --By Bennett H. Beach

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