Factories With Fences

Rows of men sit before their sewing machines, moving their hands quickly and steadily as they stitch stiff swathes of blue denim.

At the end of the production line, Sergio G. Mora, biceps rippling from daily sessions pumping iron, goes through a bin of jeans carefully checking for defects, snipping off loose threads wherever he finds them.

“Some of this stuff goes overseas to Sweden and Japan,” says Mora, who is serving a sentence at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, just outside this old western town, for killing a man in a fight.

This factory, which manufactures blue jeans sold worldwide under the brand Prison Blues, is part of a massive Oregon effort, launched by a 1995 voter initiative, to push for full employment among prison inmates.

“Work can be a part of teaching accountability and a way of rehabilitation,” said Kevin Mannix, an Oregon state legislator and author of Measure 17, which amended the state constitution to require prisoners to spend at least 40 hours a week at work or in on-the-job training.

Oregon’s ambitious effort is being closely watched around the country, where prison officials are desperately searching for ways to deal with the rising cost--already as much as $23,000 a year per prisoner--of keeping an exploding population of convicts behind bars.

The number of inmates in the nation’s state and federal prisons now totals more than 1.1 million, five times the level of just 13 years ago. And with tough new laws calling for even longer sentences for repeat offenders, experts worry that the numbers will rise even more sharply.

Prison work programs, experts say, make it easier to manage inmates, provide convicts with important work skills and produce goods and services that can help offset prison costs.

“In California, you have this warehousing philosophy toward managing inmates,” said Philippe Magloire, head of the education program at the Eastern Oregon penitentiary. “In Oregon, we now have a state mandate to offer work or job training.”

Inmates like the opportunity to work. “I have to work or I’d go nuts,” said Scott Rovig, a bearded 27-year-old who says he’s served 133 months for attempted murder and kidnapping and worked his way up from kitchen duty to a production job at Prison Blues.

Brant Wakeman, the garment division manager at Prison Blues, says that in five years of operation, he has only had to call security guards into his factory once.

As a bonus, Prison Blues is making money, earning $130,000 on its $1.5 million in sales in 1995. The money was used to buy more equipment, expanding the number of jobs in the factory this year by 50% to 100.

Prison Blues has also created other jobs at the prison by contracting the prison’s computer graphics class to do its advertising work and using the prison’s laundry to “stone wash” its jeans.

Elsewhere, Oregon inmates are being put to work fighting forest fires, picking up litter, painting schools and landscaping state parks. Telephone lines are being extended into prison so inmates can staff answering services responding to questions from the public about health insurance and procedures for renewing driver’s licenses.

Prison work programs are nothing new. Most state prisons already do far more than merely manufacture license plates. In Nevada, prisoners assemble stretch limousines, and in Alabama they raise cattle and swine. California’s prisoners make eyeglasses, input data and sort garbage for recycling. Inmates in Washington shrink-wrap copies of Microsoft Office, a widely used software program. IBM is a big user of products such as computer cables made by inmate labor.

But whereas widely touted programs in Florida and reform efforts in California focus on making prison industries profitable, often resulting in shrinking prison employment, Oregon’s effort is unusual in its singular focus on expanding employment.

“It’s a good idea,” said Timothy Flanagan, dean of the Criminal Justice Center in Huntsville, Texas, and a longtime proponent of full employment in prisons. “You have this huge investment in correctional institutions and the marginal cost of keeping inmates constructively engaged is small.”

Flanagan says Oregon’s approach is important because the key aim of employment programs is improving inmate behavior and reducing the social costs of incarceration, rather than bringing in manufacturing profits. Convicts who spend the day working fight less, learn more and are less likely to commit crimes on their release.

“If you can reduce recidivism by even 3%, you would have tremendous cost savings,” Flanagan said.

A recent study of 6,000 inmates by the Federal Bureau of Prisons concluded that inmates in work programs were 24% less likely to end up back behind bars after an eight-to-12-year period than inmates with similar education and backgrounds who were not involved in work programs.

There are plenty of skeptics who argue that the whole trend toward prison work programs detracts from more serious social problems.

“We’re using prisons as a social net” for the jobless, said Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The End of Work.” “The solution is to find jobs for people before they get put in jail.”

Rifkin and others argue that conservative politicians are using inmate labor as an easy way to respond to prison overcrowding resulting from new “tough on crime” laws.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has a World Wide Web site that advertises the state’s inmate work programs, complete with pictures showing prisoners building new prisons. Former Atty. Gen. Ed Meese recently helped launch a Washington-based think tank called the Prison Enterprise Institute that is pushing for tougher prison work requirements.

Whatever the motive, prison officials say efforts like Oregon’s Measure 17 serve a valuable purpose in providing money and political will needed to create jobs for inmates.

The measure, for example, included $11 million in the first year alone to be used to buy equipment for prison industries.

Prison Blues used some of that money to buy machinery to add a line of towels in its factory. The Mill Creek Correctional Institution in Salem, Ore., used its share to expand its freezer capacity so it can offer its butchering services to other state institutions.

Some of the investments have been controversial.

At the Eastern Oregon prison, Robert Reed, 21, sits before a brand-new Sun Microsystems computer. He clicks his mouse on an image of a Japanese lantern, turns it, shrinks it and drops it into a layout for a prison magazine special on the Pacific.

“It’s exhilarating,” says Reed, who was allowed into the one-year computer graphics program as a reward for good behavior. “When I was on the street, being able to use a computer was the farthest thing from my mind.”

Prison officials launched the graphics program as an easy way to meet the state mandate for work or on-the-job training. “This is a quick way to get something up and running,” says Tom Cicchelli, Reed’s graphics instructor. The program’s graduates are finding jobs with print shops that have a strong demand for employees with computer graphics skills.

But the investment in computers has drawn some opposition from parents who think schools should have a higher priority. Advocates, however, say the investment could pay lavish returns if it can prevent crime.

“If we train 10 or 12 people it may cost $50,000 to $60,000,” said Sharon Dyer, dean of instruction at Blue Mountain Community College, which provides instruction for the Oregon prison. “But if just a few of them are employed and don’t end up back in prison in the first year, you’ve saved $100,000.”

Making convicts work used to be standard practice in the early 1900s, when many of the nation’s prisons were self-supporting. The San Quentin and Folsom state prisons in California were both built using prison labor. Prisoners were often used to pick crops.

In 1935, as a result of union pressure in a period of widespread unemployment, the Haves-Cooper and Ashurst-Sumner acts were passed, outlawing prison labor and making it a felony to move prison goods across state borders.

The national mood began to change in the 1970s, when Chief Justice Warren Burger pushed for prisons to become “factories with fences.” A series of new laws, beginning with the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979, loosened regulations to allow state and federal prisons to put people to work, provided they paid prevailing wages, consulted unions and didn’t displace workers outside prison. (Room, board and, in many cases, restitution are deducted from inmates’ pay.)

Now, nearly two decades later, prison officials haven’t been able to add new work programs fast enough to keep up with the growing prison population.

The federal Unicor program, which builds furniture, textiles, cables and other products for federal agencies, hires 16,000 inmates at $1.35 an hour (half of which goes for restitution to victims). But only 18% of federal inmates are working today, down from 26% in 1984.

Also disappointing have been the federal Prison Industry Enhancement programs in which prison enterprises are allowed to sell across state lines if they agree to pay prevailing wages. The program, which encourages prisons to establish joint ventures with private industry, employs only about 1,000 inmates--even though it has been in place for nearly a decade.

One major problem is space. Many prisons don’t have the kind of space within their grounds to operate factories on the scale of Prison Blues. And as the number of convicts put to work increases, work programs will have to begin to tap the 30% or so of the prison population that prison officials estimates is unsuitable for regular work because of mental health or discipline problems.

Nuisance and other lawsuits also hamper prisons. The Eastern Oregon prison had to close its journeyman carpenter program after a female inmate at another prison sued because she didn’t have access to a similar program.

The constraints of operating inside a prison also make it difficult to turn a profit. Because prisoners must return to their dormitory-style rooms each noon for a time-consuming head count, inmates at Prison Blues work only 6 1/2-hour days, although their supervisors are paid for full eight-hour days.

The program must pay market wages in order to be allowed to sell its wares out of state, giving it little advantage over private companies.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to expanding prison programs is the fear that prison work will take away jobs on the outside.

Prison Blues’ new line of towels, for example, is taking away business from the Salem-based Rockwest Training Co., which employs 89 mentally retarded workers.

“I don’t think that when we voted to put them [convicts] to work, we meant to put mentally retarded out of work,” said Dennis Kelley, who runs the nonprofit Rockwest program.

Christine Ashburn, president of Bunks Plus, says another inmate program underbid her for a $30,000 contract to build cots for the Oregon Parks and Recreations Department.

This kind of opposition has killed inmate work programs in other states. Honda Motors subcontracted parts assembly work to a company that used prison labor briefly in 1992, until union complaints brought an end to the practice. A union boycott of a Toys R Us store in Aurora, Ill., stopped the store from continuing to use convicts to stock its shelves.

Not in Oregon. The state’s low unemployment numbers have muted opposition to the prison work programs. More important, as a constitutional mandate, Measure 17 isn’t easy to overturn. Said Ashburn: “When it’s in the constitution, there is not much anybody can do.”

Backers of Measure 17 say the lower overall cost to taxpayers more than makes up for the loss of private sector jobs. For example, by buying cheaper inmate-made cots, the Oregon parks department has more money to spend on other needs, says Mannix, the state legislator.

Proponents also argue that the training programs offer prisoners important skills. Teams of prisoners are being trained in carpentry, masonry, irrigation systems, plumbing and electrical repair even as they help maintain prison facilities at almost no cost.

Keith Dockery was 19 when he was imprisoned five years ago for robbing a woman on the street. Before entering prison, he worked in a fast-food restaurant, earning $3.85 a hour. Now, at the Eastern Oregon prison, he has become an experienced painter and figures he can make as much as $12 an hour when he gets out.

Security remains an overriding concern, but enterprising prison officials have found ways to overcome those obstacles.

The Eastern Oregon penitentiary’s laundry facility won a bid to launder the giant plastic sacks used by a nearby flour mill to pack cake mixes, but the prison feared inmates would hide in the bags to escape.

The prison turned to Sam Balking, a former consulting engineer for Bechtel, the giant San Francisco-based engineering firm. Balking is serving a three-year sentence for a crime he would only describe as having to do with drinking and prostitution.

Balking designed and built a machine that automatically rolls the bags tightly around a long steel pole and tapes them down. When the rolls are pulled off and stacked, there is a hole through each one that guards can see through to make sure no inmate is hiding.

Ultimately, one of the biggest obstacles to expanding inmate work programs is a prison bureaucracy averse to taking risks and making waves, says Tom Albrecht, head of the Prison Industries Enhancements program at the U.S. Department of Justice. The program is designed to encourage joint ventures between private industry and public prisons.

But as the obvious benefits of prison labor in managing prison populations and rehabilitating convicts becomes evident, many prison officials are becoming enthusiastic backers.

“How can they become a productive member of society if they don’t have something to hope for?” asked Brad Heath, manager of security at the Eastern Oregon prison. “Otherwise they will return to what they know best.”