30¢: THE BUSINESS OF PRISON LABOR
“This is a population of people who want what is NOT good for them. And there is a lot of money that can be made off of people like that.”
by Jeromy Johnson
THE BUSINESS OF PRISON LABOR by Jeromy Johnson
A typical hourly wage for a prisoner in the United States.
meet joe.
55 “I’ve always been an outsider looking in.”
1993
Joe has a master’s degree.
$60k
Joe’s annual worth as the Director of the In-Patient Addictions Unit.
1996
Joe is incarcerated.
$624
Joe’s annual worth working in prison for 30¢ an hour.
2011
Joe has served his debt to society and is released—a felon.
$0.00
Joe’s worth to possible employers as a felon.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
“Despair is surrounded by fragile walls, which all open into vice or crime.� Les Miserables
Chapter One: Locked Up
Table of contents Chapter 1: Locked Up Chapter 2: Freedom’s Shackles Chapter 3: Clinging to Hope
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
23 45 59
Chapter One: Locked Up
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Chapter One: Locked Up
“This is a population of people who want what is not good for them. And there is a lot of money that can be made off of people like that.”
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
03
25 Chapter One: Locked Up
1865 30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
How it all began. The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified December 18th 1865 and brought legal freedom to 3.1 million slaves, has a convenient loophole. It reads: Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. This prisoner loophole was applied most heavily to blacks during the period of Reconstruction through a combination of Black Codes and convict leasing. Black Codes were laws that were applied primarily and selectively to blacks and prison leasing was a practice of leasing prison labor to plantations and busi– nesses. In the 1930s unions successfully lobby congress to abolish prison labor leasing practices to private companies. This ban lasted until the 70s and 80s, right around the time incarceration rates began to skyrocket due to the War on Drugs.
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NO
TO DRUGS
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
YES
TO INCARCERATION 881 753 458 150
220
1970 1980 1990
2000 2010
Incarceration rates per 100,000 people.
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That’s insane! “Mass incarceration has been worse than the actual consequence of the problem itself. More specifically the drug abuse and that sort of thing. I know many, many, many people that when they were teenagers they were put on Ritalen or Adderall and trained from a young age to medicate their problems with drugs. Here’s the thing, these drugs are basically amphetamines which they had to take or they would not be allowed to come to school. So when they get out of school, they get a 25 year prison sentence just for making their own amphetamines? That’s insane! “I am certainly not in favor of letting people do whatever they want. I thought about it hard and long. There is public safety, and that is a real thing and that has to be taken seriously and into account. But I started thinking to myself while I was in prison, how many of these people are a real threat to society? What I came up with is that 60% were truly a threat to society. What I used to determine that—and it’s all subjective—was this, would i be ok with this person living next door to my mother? 40% of them I felt sure, they would be fine. In fact, my mom would probably love them. And I am not comfortable with those numbers, you know?”
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
“When they get out of school they get a twenty-five year prison sentence for making their own amphetamines?�
31 Chapter One: Locked Up
The United States has
05%
of the world’s population. 30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Yet they incarcerate
25%
of the world’s prisoners. 33 Chapter One: Locked Up
Enter corporations. Knowing the mass prison population and the clause in the 13th Amendment, thirty seven states have legalized the contracting of prison labor to private corporations. Take Joe and Indiana for instance. “Now Indiana does it a different way than most states. In order to keep the heat off the prison system for exploiting the inmates they have created a company called Pen Products. It’s a private not-for-profit corporation that is run by the former commissioner of prisons in Indiana. He quit his job as commissioner to start Pen Products. “It started out using prison labor to make the products needed for the prisons, but then they got the bright idea that they could contract out their services to different industries and began building pallets for industries all over and making wire harnesses for Caterpillar. This has definitely been a change in the last fifteen years or so. This partnership protects both the prison system and the corporation because if something goes wrong the corporation can just say, ‘Well, those nasty guys at Pen Products didn’t tell us that was going on,’ and the prison can say, ‘Well, Pen Products didn’t tell us that was going on.’ It creates a layer of deniability on both sides and I think that is by design. And then Pen Products can just be dissolved.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
$2
/ day
“They didn’t want to get into the grey area of minimum wage. They didn’t want to get into the grey area of OSHA Regulations. If they were going to cross those lines, they didn’t want to do so as the Indiana Department of Corrections so they just contract out with Pen Products. In the same way, Caterpillar probably doesn’t want most people to know that their wiring harnesses and diesel engines come out of the Department of Corrections. “They say they are paying min. wage for some of these folks. Pen Products, they can have jobs that pay $7.50 an hour and some of those workers will take those jobs with ten to fifteen years to serve and when they get out they might have $20,000 to take with them when they get out. the problem is, for all the people who work for Pen Products, there might be 10% of them in that category. The other 90% are making $2.00 to $3.00 a day. You know, just real low wages.”
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Victoria and BP. In 1990 Victoria’s Secret used a subcontractor to hire female inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear. When one bra sells for $52 and the person who made it gets paid less than the bra’s sales tax—for a day’s work!—something is amiss. In 2010, following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP hired Louisiana prison inmates to clean up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men. Coastal residents desperate for work were outraged at BP’s use of cheap prison labor. In The Nation article that exposed BP’s hiring of inmates (published July 2010), Abe Louise Young tells how BP tried to cover up its use of prisoners by changing the inmates’ clothing to give the illusion of civilian workers. Some of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake expanding the prison labor industry, including but not limited to ibm, Boeing, at&t Wireless, Motorola, Microsoft, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, North Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, twa, Nordstrom, Revlon, Macty’s, Pierre Cardin, and Target Stores. As you can see, it touches on every facet of our culture.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
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74% 30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
of States permit the contracting of prison labor to corporations.
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30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Chapter One: Locked Up
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.� Les Miserables
Chapter One: Locked Up
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Chapter Two: Freedom’s Shackles
“The cards are heavily stacked up against our success once we are released a felon.”
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
47 Chapter Two: Freedom’s Shackles
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
A new scarlet letter. Once you are released as a felon—regardless of the sentence you served, the crime you committed or the reform you have experienced—you are thrown into a sub-caste of society. Though it varies from state to state, felons may lose their right to vote, participate in a jury, be hired for a decent job, or qualify for government housing, aid, or student loans. Now with instant computerized background checks, the chances of getting an interview are nearly impossible. Didn’t they already serve their time and pay their debt to society? every prison sentence is a now life sentence. Joe said, “Having been in prison 4 times made my education irrelevant. There is no place where a master’s degree graduate and a former drug and alcohol family therapist can go and say in an interview, ‘Yea I’ve been in prison and I’ve got several felonies’ and expect to get the job. In manufacturing or grunt work, your chances are way less than average in getting a job. But in a professional arena? Almost zip. “Getting a college degree in prison is also worthless. It’s a joke. Even though it’s from the same college, it is worthless. Being in prison absolutely trumps that degree and renders it void.”
49 Chapter Two: Freedom’s Shackles
“It’s wrong, if you paid your debt then your debt is paid. Right?”
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Thanks, now get lost. “I pushed the fuck-up button in 1993 and fell off the edge of the world—I spent the next 17 years trying to find my way back. Once I got out, I decided to stay away from big companies and go to smaller, family-owned companies. You want to be able to sit down with a human being and have your interview be based on what you talk about and who you are. This way they can meet you and not just throw you out the door. “Those companies you work for in prison don’t want to hire you once you’re out regardless what skills you have or what you did for them. That is another reason why corporations like using companies like Pen Products instead of hiring the prisoners themselves.”
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Let’s talk. A focus group gathered in 2011 to discuss this topic. Here is an excerpt. Reina: There are companies that only hire felons ‘cause the working conditions are shit; they hire them ‘cause they can’t work anywhere else. For instance, a brake place in Sacramento. My brother, being a felon, was pointed to these places when he was on probation. It was worse for him to work there than it was to go back out onto the streets and do whatever it was he was doing. John: And there are few chances for advancement. Say you do get hired, you’ll stay at the entry level position. Reina: There are only a small number of places that will hire them, even with truck driving. And if you are hired, like my brother drives trucks, the working conditions in those truck companies that hire felons is still like shit. Jeromy: How long does the branding of “felon” stay with them? Reina: FOREVER! You never expunge your record once you’re a felon.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Adele: It’s just a sad cycle. Where’s the motivation to do better? Reina: My brother has no desire to go back. He spent 1/2 his life in prison. He wants to move on. John: Companies are now getting to the point where they are not even hiring people with misdemeanors. Eric: Right. I had a co-worker who was laid off because they did background checks, historical, like your whole life, and they went back 15 years for him and he got busted one time when someone thought he stole something out of a car. He wasn’t even arrested or anything, but it was on his record and the company said, You’re out! and let him go.
53 Chapter Two: Freedom’s Shackles
Where’s the motivation to do better?
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
55 Chapter Two: Freedom’s Shackles
“Liberation is not deliverance. A convict may leave prison behind but not his sentence.” Les Miserables
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Chapter Two: Freedom’s Shackles
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
Chapter Three: Clinging to Hope
“I have to stay hopeful. I cannot for any reason get to the point where I feel like I wasted all those years in prison!”
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
61 Chapter Three: Clinging to Hope
Finding hope. “This last time in prison I had given up. I had decided that I didn’t care about getting my shit together, I didn’t care about having a life, I didn’t care about any other human being, that I was just going to be a burden on society and they could kiss my ass. I had decided that. “Then one day people came through with grocery sacks full of goodies donated from local stores. And this one older woman stopped by my cell and gave me a bag and eye-locked me. And I stared into her eyes and she starred into mine and she walked on. But then she came back. And she looked into my cell and pointed at me and says, ‘He (God) knows you’re here.’ And I tell you, I had the most unbelievable experience right then. So many things just fell away. “After that, when I could, I started helping people while I was in drug and alcohol therapy, and some of them responded and I started feeling useful again.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
“The problem is that we don’t want to get our hands dirty with the individuals and that is what it is going to take. “Here is part of the answer: broken people tend to get together and help each other. And with so many people being incarcerated it creates this subculture. If we can just stay out long enough, we can help each other to get back up and stay on our feet.”
How can I help as a designer?
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Redesign existing book. Redesign an existing book to better visually communicate the issues and tell the story, One book might be The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
65 Chapter Three: Clinging to Hope
Co-create documentary. Collaborate with a documentary filmmakers to help bring this issue to light. My role would be to help create the graphical style and the physical marketing materials for the movie.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
67 Chapter Three: Clinging to Hope
Tell a prisoner’s story. Conduct an in-depth interview with a prisoner and, together, use graphic design to help tell their story. Perhaps even interview multiple people, one per chapter. Their story could be communicated both through a book and a website.
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
69 Chapter Three: Clinging to Hope
30¢: The Business of Prison Labor
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” Les Miserables
Chapter Three: Clinging to Hope
Designed and written by: Jeromy Johnson Š 2011 in partial fulfillment of a Master of Fine Arts degree in graphic design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California. Typefaces: Neutraface Slab created by House Industries and Avenir lt std created by Adrian Frutiger. Software: Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. Printing: 4-color printing by Blurb on 60# (90gsm) uncoated white paper. Binding: Perfect bound with cover wrap by Blurb.
A special thank you to Joe who graciously, honestly and openly shared his story with me. I will let his be the last words of the book‌
“I am going to find meaning in that experience. I am going somehow use that experience to benefit other people.�