Prison Labor as the Past -- and Future -- of American
"Free-Market" Capitalism

Far from protecting liberty, capitalism has a huge
interest in making us all serfs. And America's prisons are
a core part of the plan.

By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
April 25, 2012  |  TomDispatch.com   

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found
across broad stretches of the American economy and around
the world.  Penitentiaries have become a niche market for
such work.  The privatization of prisons in recent years
has meant the creation of a small army of workers too
coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for
whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up
a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the
unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S.
incarceration rate.  The Corrections Corporation of
America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a
third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell
inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500
corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in
prisons or prisoners to work on the outside.  All told,
nearly a million prisoners are now making office
furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body
armor, taking hotel reservations, working in
slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and
clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents
and $4.73 per day. 

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control,
stripped of political rights, and subject to martial
discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance -- unless,
that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when
convict labor was commonplace nationwide.  Indeed, a
sentence of "confinement at hard labor" was then the
essence of the American penal system.  More than that, it
was one vital way the United States became a modern
industrial capitalist economy -- at a moment, eerily like
our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were
in crisis

A Yankee Invention

What some historians call "the long Depression" of the
nineteenth century, which lasted from the mid-1870s
through the mid-1890s, was marked by frequent panics and
slumps, mass bankruptcies, deflation, and self-destructive
competition among businesses designed to depress costs,
especially labor costs.  So, too, we are living through a
twenty-first century age of panics and austerity with
similar pressures to shrink the social wage. 

Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way
for business to address these dilemmas.  Penal servitude
now strikes us as a barbaric throwback to some long-lost
moment that preceded the industrial revolution, but in
that we're wrong.  From its first appearance in this
country, it has been associated with modern capitalist
industry and large-scale agriculture. 

And that is only the first of many misconceptions about
this peculiar institution.  Infamous for the brutality
with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly
linked in popular memory (and popular culture) with images
of the black chain gang in the American South, it is
usually assumed to be a Southern invention.  So apparently
atavistic, it seems to fit naturally with the retrograde
nature of Southern life and labor, its economic and
cultural underdevelopment, its racial caste system, and
its desperate attachment to the "lost cause." 

As it happens, penal servitude -- the leasing out of
prisoners to private enterprise, either within prison
walls or in outside workshops, factories, and fields --
was originally known as a "Yankee invention." First used
at Auburn prison in New York State in the 1820s, the
system spread widely and quickly throughout the North, the
Midwest, and later the West.  It developed alongside
state-run prison workshops that produced goods for the
public sector and sometimes the open market. 

for the rest of this article, go to
http://www.alternet.org/economy/155157/prison_labor_as_the_past_--_and_future_--_of_american_%22free-market”_capitalism_?page=entire
 

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