Inside the secret industry of inmate-staffed call centers (50 cents an hour)

[The Straight Story]

Inside the secret industry of inmate-staffed call centers


Inmates at Greene Correctional Institution in Coxsackie, N.Y., staff a state Department of Motor Vehicles call center.

When you call a company or government agency for help, there's a good chance the person on the other end of the line is a prison inmate.

The federal government calls it "the best-kept secret in outsourcing" — providing inmates to staff call centers and other services in both the private and public sectors.

The U.S. government, through a 75-year-old program called Federal Prison Industries, makes about $750 million a year providing prison labor, federal records show. The great majority of those contracts are with other federal agencies for services as diverse as laundry, construction, data conversion and manufacture of emergency equipment.

But the program also markets itself to businesses under a different name, Unicor, providing commercial market and product-related services. Unicor made about $10 million from "other agencies and customers" in the first six months of fiscal year 2011 (the most recent period for which official figures are available), according to an msnbc.com analysis of its sales records.

...

For inmates, the appeal isn't the pay, which can be as low as 50 cents an hour.

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/12/10140493-inside-the-secret-industry-of-inmate-staffed-call-centers?ocid=twitter

[a simple pattern]

1. I'm always tempted to ask them

if they are under duress

[valerief]

2. And THIS is why America imprisons so many people. For the slave labor. nt

[Saving Hawaii]

7. My local representative was saying we need to imprison more.

Courtesy of overcrowding issues the state has little choice but to release a lot of inmates and transfer a lot more to county jails. Naturally they're focusing on doing so with low-level offenders. This is a little problematic for one of the state's inmate labor programs. The state has about 5000 inmate firefighters who help put out forest fires during the summer and do a lot of other useful work in the winter. It's actually a great rehabilitation program. They get a lot of job skills (shoot, a handful actually manage to land jobs as forest firefighters), get grateful mention in local newspapers and respect from the local communities, and get treated like humans rather than cattle. The thing is, the camps they house these inmate firefighters in are very low security. No-fence low security, just trees. So they need low-level offenders who aren't flight risks for this sort of work. Anyways, they're trying to figure out how to avoid losing a good number (majority?) of these crews when the state prisons shrink over the next year or two.

A local representative was complaining that we shouldn't release the inmates from the state prisons because we won't have them around to help put out fires in the summer. I sympathize a bit... the local firefighting resources have suffered cut after cut. They've dropped the number of paid firefighters on engines from 4 to 3. The federal air tanker fleet has shrunk dramatically in the past year (one of the main contractors got dropped and went bankrupt due to their horrendously inadequate safety program). The last thing we need is to lose thousands more firefighters during the summertime, especially as this state has been having the worst fire seasons in history again and again and again over the past decade and a half.

But I can't help but feel sick in the stomach at what's being suggested here. It's not that these inmates need to pay their debt to society so they need to stay. It's not that these inmates are a risk to the public so they need to stay. It's that we need cheap, slave labor so they need to stay. That's sickening.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/24/local/la-me-firefighting-20111225

[baldguy]

3. Captive labor.

Sounds like indentured servitude.

[malaise]

4. neo-slavery

Here we go again

[Major Nikon]

5. I'm not sure what's so secret about it

Unicor has been around forever. Inmates aren't required to work for Unicor, although the alternative they face may be worse for all I know. Inmates should be heavily encouraged, if not required to do something productive with their time for a lot of different reasons. I don't have a problem with the pay issue. Why should inmates be paid more than what a pack of smokes or a candy bar costs? All their needs are being met and they don't have anything else to spend it on. It might be good to keep some money in escrow for them for the day they get out, so they aren't dumped on the street penniless.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. The rap against the low pay is that it takes work from ordinary people

Why pay you even minimum wage when they can get a prisoner to do the job for 50¢ an hour?

[Major Nikon]

8. I'm not sure that's a good argument

There are many very good reasons to employ prisoners in productive work. So unless you have them turning big rocks into little rocks which is stupid and pointless, they are going to be competing with other workers for that production.

[Stinky The Clown]

10. I wasn't making it. I was merely stating that it is a common argument against prison industries.

My own feeling is if the work they do saves the state/citizens money, its probably a good thing. I'm thinking about making furniture for use in state hospitals, running the state printing plant, even making license plates. All good use of their time.

Putting them to work. for private industry's enrichment? Not so good.

[Major Nikon]

11. Unicor used to make mostly furniture for federal agencies exclusively

I'm not sure why they decided to market to the general public. My guess is our lock and key society generates much more supply than our federal agencies can demand.

[BlueToTheBone]

9. I can see a couple of things that could go terribly wrong

with this plan...One, they're convicts, in prison, and they're being given access to people's identity information? And the other has been mentioned...slave labor.

[Quantess]

12. WHAT! That's so wrong in so many ways.

I knew about prison labor. The surprise for me is the nature of the work. So inappropriate for inmates.