The debate over expanding the industrial employment of inmates is best understood in the context of seriously flawed criminal justice and correction systems, which do little to rehabilitate offenders, imprison too many non-violent offenders, employ too many poorly trained and low-paid corrections staffs, and pay very little attention to empirical evidence about the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration. These systems have a number of features that cause them to be self-perpetuating: the creation of people with a vested interest in building prisons and incarcerating people for minor offenses; the absence of effective political counter forces to the “get tough” on crime syndrome; the fact that most inmates are African American and Hispanics who have multiple disadvantages which give them fewer alternatives to crime and limited ability to gain effective representation; the fact that prisons are training grounds for criminals; the ineffective reintegration of releasees into society; and the strong intergenerational aspects of involvement with the criminal justice system.Without changes in the system, rising prison populations—there are approximately two million federal, state, and local inmates, about 500,000 of whom are released each year—could have serious negative effects on low wage labor markets, which already are being decimated by strong technological, economic, and social forces.
