California prison labor?
With California budget deficit expected to be somewhere between $12 billion or as high as $25 billion for 2010 alone, state legislators have been anxiously looking for ways to reduce state expenses, cutting budgets wherever possible, but already existing programs operated by the state may present an opportunity for cost-savings in the areas of construction, services and maintenance of buildings and amenities.
In 2009, $15 billion was cut from service delivery and $8 billion was cut from the education budget, these were the two single greatest budget cuts made by government to try and tackle the state’s rampant deficit. The driving force behind this deficit has been increases in wages for public sector workers, better benefits, health insurance, travel allowances, etcetera. For example, according to California news reports in 2009, in the Bay Area, 200,000 public sector employees were earning more than $200,000 per year when their benefits were taken into account.
Lowering these salaries has proven extremely unpopular among state employees, leading to strikes in some instances, which costs the state yet more money. However, there are many tasks that can be carried out by prison-labor, without the necessity of state employees, whose labor would cost far more.
There are, of course, significant complexities that arise with the use of prison labor, the notion is intuitively uncomfortable because of its similarities with slavery and the hard labor that prisoners were condemned to in the 19 and early 20th centuries, while the fact that prisoners will earn a meager amount compared to a ‘free’ man, arouses feelings of injustice and wanton inequality in some.
But, when ‘chain gangs’ were put to work building roads, bridges, buildings and other infrastructure in the 20s and 30s, they became the representation of an age through which the United States endured many hardships. This was in the time of the Great Depression, when prisoners were subjected to hard labor with no pay and no work and safety policies. Times were tough though, there was much to be done and no budget with which to do it….and, because they were prisoners, they were considered a little less human.
The country has advanced for those days, in terms of its laws and civil liberties and equality, but an age of hardship and paucity is upon us again. The country is going through the worst recession since those dark days of the Great Depression and, as so many California news reports have shown, the state of California is suffering the most, facing a crippling debt problem.
Some might say then that prison labor is a necessity; indeed the state already uses minimum security prisoners to fight wildfires when the need arises. Around 4100 minimum-security in mates make up a quarter of the state’s forest fire fighting manpower, in return they earn $1 per hour and a reduced sentence, a remuneration that was not afforded prisoners in the old days.
The $1 that they earn is meager in comparison to the $17 that the average fire fighter earns in California, this represents a cost avoidance of $65,600 for each hour that the prisoners do the work that 4,100 state employees would otherwise need to do. If they fight forest fires for 30 days out of the year, working a normal 48 hour week, the state will have saved almost $95 million from its fire fighting operations alone.
California’s municipalities, a source of much of the state deficit, may look to municipalities such as Douglas in Arizona, a little town of 14,000 people that’s making big savings by employing prisoners from a local minimum-security state penitentiary to carry out construction projects, such as building a new courthouse and library, maintaining the city’s parks and other services that would otherwise need to be done by public workers who, in Douglas, would earn at least $7 per hour. The prisoners are paid just 50 cents, which costs the municipality $650 to hire 1300 prisoners for one hour, compared to the $9,100 it would cost to hire 1,300 extra public officials.
The use of prison labor would not replace already employed public workers then, but instead provide the state with the option not to hire as many in future, which will prevent the state budget from growing in the way it has in recent years. As the economy recovers, tax revenues will increase and the budget will balance once more. What the state needs to do after that, is prevent it from dipping into the red again.
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California Special Report
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California prison labor?
California has a famously large budget deficit, budget cuts are being made to a number of state programs and services, but what hasn’t been considered is the cost avoidance potential of the state’s over 40,000 minimum-security prisoner’s, many of whom are already saving the state money by providing labor in return for shorter sentences.
With California budget deficit expected to be somewhere between $12 billion or as high as $25 billion for 2010 alone, state legislators have been anxiously looking for ways to reduce state expenses, cutting budgets wherever possible, but already existing programs operated by the state may present an opportunity for cost-savings in the areas of construction, services and maintenance of buildings and amenities. Read more
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