President Obama's College Plan for Inmates

President Obama recently demonstrated his appreciation of America’s incarceration crisis by visiting a prison, the first U.S. president to do so, and by announcing he will try to provide funding for college courses to some prison inmates. This will add to the ongoing criticism of attempts to circumvent Congress with executive orders. Congress and most state legislatures perennially disallow amenities, benefits and privileges to America’s least popular class. The public insists that prison life be no better than the life of the poorest law-abiding citizens. This is the all-powerful principle of less eligibility.  It will strongly reassert itself against Obama’s plans when a chorus of law-abiding people complain that they have to take out loans for what the president plans to give prison inmates.

Our president’s concern for the incarcerated is fully justified. Incarceration is in many respects a failed social experiment of the last 200 years. We see this most clearly in recidivism rates, rising social and economic costs, and misleading unemployment statistics that do not count prisoners as unemployed.  The high school level GED coursework allowed to prisoners is one of the few unreservedly good things that prisons can do. But the college-level plan is an elitist solution to a working class problem. Less than half of prisoners are college-level material. Many prisoners are high school dropouts; a good number are functionally illiterate. Most prisoners do not have enough time left on their sentences to complete four years of college.

But the biggest problem with Obama’s plan is that it utilizes the disastrously failed and nearly bankrupt big government welfare approach, when return to laissez-faire free enterprise would help prisoners, the American economy, revitalized prison industries and fully strapped state and federal budgets. Incarcerating about 2.2 million largely able-bodied Americans who are not allowed to work much, except to run the prison or jail itself or in money-losing state-owned prison industries, harms American productivity and busts budgets. Prisoners picking up trash by the side of the road is an inefficient way to make the public smile. 

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives to the state the right to work prisoners involuntarily. The public owns the value of their labor. In the 19th century, a number of prison systems were self-supporting with manufacturing profits. The legislative and regulatory environment that inhibits prison industries and labor goes back over 100 years to the wooden barrel manufacturers and their employees who could not compete against wooden barrels made in prison by unpaid or poorly paid inmates. Depression-era laws prohibited or restricted the interstate shipment of prison-made goods; many states banned their sale. Prison reformers and advocates always insisted that prisoners should work for their own benefit as well as the benefit of society, but today only a small fraction work productively. The current incarceration regime is big welfare government writ large: total control over the lives of 2.2 million Americans and the duty to provide all of their food, clothing, shelter and healthcare. Incarcerated Americans do not have to be the largest group of full-ride welfare recipients in the world, but they are. One inmate at Riker’s Island Jail in New York City costs taxpayers over $160,000 per year.

Private prisons now simply replicate the warehousing function of state prisons; they do no privatize prison labor or industries or provide many jobs. We still need to cut the number of incarcerated Americans in half, a goal of mine that the ACLU has now adopted. We can reduce our prison and jail populations with a host of community punishments, some of them traditional and painful. It helps to study what our Founders and best presidents favored.    

Instead of throwing money at the problem, money we have to borrow, our prison systems ought to allow prisoners to earn their own money and education, which unquestionably is the best preparation for a new life outside prison. To do this, the federal government could wipe out nearly all employment-related legislation and regulation as it relates to prisoners, including wage and hour laws, preempt state laws, provide immunity to private employers, and allow private employers to hire, fire and negotiate contracts with prisoners and prison systems. Manufacturers could operate private manufacturing concerns on prison premises or on separate secure campuses. Organized labor would oppose these changes, at first, but unions will be better off if we limit these prison industries to manufacturing goods now made exclusively overseas. We could compete with overseas manufacturers. Most prisoners would leap at the chance to work a manufacturing job, build a nest egg for their release, learn to show up for work every day, and work in a private enterprise environment far surpassing what they have now.  Incarcerated Americans need to re-experience the powerful employment-at-will discipline we have largely surrendered for a host of legal restrictions. Prisoners would conform to the employer’s rules or quickly return to the general prison population. 

This is how to create American manufacturing jobs, reduce actual unemployment and rehabilitate. Everybody can win except foreign manufacturers.