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Many Companies Employ Prisoners
By Dan Sewell AP Business Writer Saturday, August 29, 1998; 2:09 p.m. EDT
MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) -- Like many Americans these days who have in-demand work skills, Lee Gibbs didn't have to go looking for a job -- employers sought him out.
He was easy to find.
When he completed a seven-year drug sentence at a state prison in Lockhart, Texas, Gibbs walked out with more than the traditional $50 and a bus ticket. He had $8,000 in his bank account, expertise in working with electronic component boards and a new job starting at more than $30,000 a year.
``They were calling me, offering me jobs even before I got out,'' said Gibbs, freed two months ago. ``With the money I had saved, I was able to get a vehicle, buy clothes for work, pay the first and last month's rent on an apartment; put down a telephone deposit.''
Gibbs, 30, became marketable through a prison work program run by a Marietta-based company, U.S. Technologies, with subsidiaries that use prison inmates for outsourcing contracts with private companies.
With more Americans than ever behind bars and businesses shopping for workers from a tight labor pool, there is renewed debate over the pros and cons of having cons contributing to free-market enterprises.
For most of this century, prison work programs have been sharply restricted by concerns about unfair competition and use of inmates as ``slave labor'' -- and questions about whether criminals deserve to receive training, pay and job experience.
However, the programs ``can be such a force for good,'' Attorney General Janet Reno said last May. The programs have many benefits: wages can go to victims' restitution funds, they reduce prison recidivism and serve as ``another engine'' for the national economy.
At the Liberty Correctional Institution in Bristol, Fla., Michael Provence will soon be eligible for parole after serving 25 years for murder in ``a drug deal that went bad.'' After spending years doing menial tasks such as making mess-hall tables, he now does computer-assisted drafting and mapping.
Facing the outside world isn't as worrisome as it would have been ``if I had been isolated from technology the last 25 years,'' said Provence, who expects to have little problem finding work.
``For a lot of these people, this is the first job they've held,'' said Ken Smith, chief executive officer of U.S. Technologies. ``They learn work habits -- they have to get up, shower and shave and show up for work on time, they have to show initiative, they have to meet goals, they have to stay out of trouble.
``It creates self-respect and gives them a work ethic, and then when they get out and the drug lord says, `Glad to see you, I've got a job for you,' they say no,'' Smith said.
In Florida, PRIDE Enterprises is a nonprofit company that started in 1985 training and employing prison inmates to perform useful jobs with a goal of reducing prison recidivism. It employs 4,000 inmates in 51 operations. Their jobs range from making eyeglasses to data entry.
Pam Davis, its president, says studies show that less than 13 percent of the organization's inmate workers landed back in prison, compared to a national rate of about 60 percent.
With more people in prison longer because of tougher sentencing laws, inmate work programs could be an important component of the economy.
``Part of our resources are the million or so people in prison,'' Davis said. ``We've got to use them in creative ways; consider this as a viable labor source rather than sending jobs offshore.''
Such programs are popular with prison officials who see them as a way to reduce idleness that leads to problems.
``That's 200 inmates that are not just slogging around on the compound,'' Russell Smith, assistant superintendent at Liberty Correctional, said of the PRIDE operation there.
But only a fraction of the nation's estimated 1.5 million prisoners work in such programs, and efforts to expand them often run into opposition.
``It's hard for me to accept that the government would put the welfare and benefit of convicted felons above the interests of its taxpayers,'' said Tim Graves, a Marietta man who said his 100-employee company was forced out of business after 18 years when the government-run Federal Prison Industries took over contracts to produce missile shipping containers.
Companies such as PRIDE and U.S. Technologies are trying to find ways businesses can use inmates without threatening American jobs.
At one PRIDE project at Bristol, prisoners are digitally mapping records of a European utility company that contracted with St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Geonex to perform the time-consuming work. Ken Mellem, Geonex's head, said the contractor had suggested the work be done overseas.
While inmate labor may cost more than offshore work, Mellem said, it offers advantages because the workers are within a few hours' drive of his company.
Smith, with expertise in turning around troubled companies, took over U.S. Technologies last year with a vision of using inmates to fill the rising demand for outsourcing work. His fast-growing company now is involved in running or setting up operations in prisons in Texas, California, Utah and Florida.
He finds that prison workers tend to be highly motivated and responsible, as well as low-cost.
But, Smith recounted, there are drawbacks that don't come up in the normal business world. Sitting in an office last year during a visit to the Lockhart prison, he suddenly noticed ``deathly quiet.'' He looked up to see he was the only one left in the building.
There had been a prison escape, and his entire workforce had been returned to their cells for a temporary lockdown.
C Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Index of Welfare-Workfare-State Archives
Last Modified: October 1998