This is a website, apparently, run by prisoners. I do believe prisoners should be put to work to help earn their keep. But working for McD’s, Starbucks, etc. replacing employees just so execs can get richer? And what about the fact this only encourages corporations: like the corporate prison industry, lobby for stricter laws, longer prison terms and less humane conditions?
This is SO wrong.-OEN
Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor.
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”
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Prison work should serve several purposes – none of which is to enrich corporate execs.
Prison work should of course serve the prison community. Work in kitchens, laundries, general maintenance can reduce the expense of running the prison while offering the prisoner meaningful activity.
Prison work can also train a prisoner in a skill that will be useful on the his/her release. Something a little more skilled than flipping burgers. We own a nice set of bedside drawers that were crafted by inmates probably almost 100 years ago. For inmates with limited abilities, less skilled tasks should also be respected as valuable, helpful work.
Of course this begs the attitude that prison should be disciplinary AND rehabilitative, not simply punitive.