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.