Hundreds Of American Companies Pay Employees As Little As 23 Cents An Hour
By Jonathan Wolfe,
When you think of prison labor, what comes to mind? You might envision inmates making license plates and highway signs or cleaning up road debris. For decades, this perception would have been roughly accurate. Using prison labor in the private sector was illegal, so inmates worked on public projects.
But this dynamic changed dramatically in 1979 with the passing of the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE). PIE made it legal for private sector companies to contract prison labor to produce goods.
Ever since then, corporations have turned to prison labor at an ever-increasing rate to make their products. At a time when unemployment remains high and millions of Americans look for work, American corporations are capitalizing on America’s sky-high incarceration rates by using inmates to make their products.
The dynamic is a corporation's dream – inmates make as little as 23 cents an hour, never show up late for work, and don’t demand benefits or time off. These inmates don’t account for some small percent of manufacturing production, either.
more
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/crime/hundreds-american-companies-pay-employees-little-23-cents-hour?=fb
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that benefit from this type of exploitation. The growth of this outrage is being aggressively supported by both Republicans and the corporate Third Way, for one simple reason: Imprisoning human beings is a very profitable industry. But a government's complicity in attaching a profit motive to the imprisonment of human beings is nothing short of evil.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023368969
Government guarantees 90% occupancy rate in private prisons.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2569173
The Obama administration is aggressively growing private prisons
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022568681
Obama's 2013 budget: One area of marked growth, the prison industrial complex
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/1002392306
Obama selects the owner of a private prison consulting firm as the new Director of the United States Marshals Service (USMS)
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/mars-d03.htmlPoor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014158005
Private prison corporations move up on list on federal contractors, receiving BILLIONS
http://www.nationofchange.org/president-obama-s-incarcernation-1335274655
The Caging of America - Why do we lock up so many people
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002226110
Prison Labor Booms As Unemployment Remains High; Companies Reap Benefits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272036.html
Private Prison Corporation's Letters to Shareholders Reveal Industry's Tactics: Profiting from Human Incarceration
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022665091
Financial growth of private prison industry...Profiting from caging humans.
http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/BshteP8i282pcaeH8pdUsA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTUyMA--/
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime
This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall
—By Andy Kroll
| Thu Sep. 19, 2013 9:43 AM PDT MotherJones
We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.
Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)
All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write "three-strike" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.
Thanks to a loophole known as Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, it is perfectly legal to pay disabled workers less than minimum wage, in some instance as little as the prisoners get.
https://nfb.org/fair-wages
