The Public Policy / Working for the Man
Frum, David
House rules. On April 17, it also made Working for the Man the full Phelan report public. by David Frum Support for Wright among his Democratic colleagues had already been dwindling over...
...And while a life lived wholly admirably and above reproach offers a defense that Jim Wright certainly did not have at his disposal, there is still the lingering question of whether, in the fetid air of scandal season in Washington, innocence is really good enough...
...others followed New York in permitting only state agencies to purchase prison-made goods...
...And it's also possible, as one high-ranking California corrections official fears, that the work most conducive to individual rehabilitation (he cites gardening) is the least remunerative for the state...
...II The opportunities for discipline and introspection uniquely offered by labor, especially hard labor, is still lost on many of us...
...Some have done quite well: North Carolina earned $5.4 million on sales of $51.2 million in 1994, and Texas has made money from prison industries in every year since it began its modem labor program in 1963...
...Any fair reading of the history of Jim Wright and the current charges against Newt Gingrich supports but a single conclusion: the sum total of everything that has been alleged against Gingrich over many years, predating his ascendancy to the speakership, even if it is all true, is nothing next to Wright's misconduct...
...instead, the university was required to pay $92 per chair to the prison industries authority—and to wait nearly a year...
...In 1929 Congress gave states the authority to stop purchasers buying goods made by prisoners in other states...
...This idea provoked some skeptical harumphing from prison administrators, for in fact prison labor has not recently proved a great success...
...And Texas's achievement of putting 8 percent of the 48 The American Spectator August 1995 state's 94,000 prisoners to work—while impressive compared to California's 5 percent and the even lower percentages elsewhere—still means work is a marginal activity within the correction system...
...In the first years of the twentieth century, many states banned prison labor outright...
...Ever since, state government has been the sole market for the products of prison labor...
...As it turned out, those jobs were eventually lost anyhow to lower-paid foreigners...
...There is simply no evidence of a Wright-like pattern of behavior in which public office was exploited, day-in and day-out, for private gain...
...Here, people are ruined for political reasons...
...Motivate them with money and perks like better food, and they may go some way toward reimbursing the taxpayer the $800 million paid for their incarceration...
...Barely a week before, the Orange County Register had printed a searing denunciation of the largest employer of convict labor in America: the California Prison Industry Authority...
...And while a $3 million profit was turned in 1993-94, that $3 million forced even bigger hidden costs onto the taxpayer, disguised in the ridiculously high prices paid by the state agencies that must buy from the prison-industry monopoly...
...by David Frum Support for Wright among his Democratic colleagues had already been dwindling over the derailment of the con gressional pay raise, which they under stood would take effect without a vote...
...0 I t's amazing: some 1.5 million able-bodied people are now enjoying free housing, free meals, television, libraries, educational services, and gymnasiums, all without working and all at the expense of the American taxpayer...
...tries cost the state more money than they brought in—despite their being a monopoly with average wages of 56 cents an hour, factory space that's practically free, and no taxes or benefits to pay...
...Aided by a monopoly on state purchasing, Prison Industries, as the California authority is known, is a big business, with total sales of some $135 million in 1993-94...
...The California prison system is the largest in the nation...
...Even at 50 cents an hour, prison labor may prove no bargain compared to eager hands equipped with the latest productivity-enhancing tools...
...Gingrich, moreover, finally settled on a royalty-only arrangement in which he bears the entire risk for the success or failure of the project, and reaps a financial reward in exact proportion to the book's commercial value...
...And if putting prisoners—not just a tiny minority, but virtually all prisoners—to work makes economic sense federally, think what it could do for the states, where prison costs more than $10.5 billion annually, and hundreds of millions more for county and municipal jails...
...Prison Industries," the Register concludes, "has a history of providing shoddy, overpriced products...
...It went down ignominiously—and so, eventually, did Wright...
...In a May address to the National Rifle Association, presidential contender Phil Gramm denounced the absurdity of this government-run hospitality business, and proposed that the federal government should attempt to defray half the cost of the federal prison system by putting prisoners to work...
...The only possible exception is the book deal...
...0 f course, it's possible that the cause-and-effect runs the other way round: that the prisoners most eager to mend their ways are the ones who sign up for work...
...the state holds nearly twice as many prisoners as the federal government, and at more than twice the expense...
...Abolish congressional and state restrictions, Thomas argues, and prisons will once again bustle with productive labor—and the rehabilitation labor brings:their neighbors, sins for which they are individually responsible, prisons could actually prove beneficial for a change...
...All the same, the experiment is worth a try, and the federal system is probably the best place to start...
...People are not ruined for sport in Washington, though those doing the ruining seem to enjoy themselves...
...Thomas points out that, in the late nineteenth century, more than 70 percent of state prisoners worked—usually by a lease system, in which the state hired them out to private employers...
...Not according to one of the country's emerging authorities on crime and punishment, Andrew Peyton Thomas...
...A private contractor could have provided the chairs within six weeks at a price of $54 each...
...And when questioned, Gramm's staff admitted that they had undertaken no research at all into the practicality of the senator's commitment...
...Six weeks after the Phelan report was made public, he announced his resig nation during an emotional speech on the packed House floor...
...Instead of ceding certain jobs to prisoners to aid in their reformation . . . Americans sought crime control on the cheap...
...That was careless of Gramm...
...It seems, then, that Vince Foster was wrong...
...But no one has proffered a shred of evidence that this is the case, and there is much to suggest the contrary...
...But North Carolina's $5.4 million profit does not make much of a dent in the $360 million the state spends each year on its prisons...
...The experience of the one state work program to keep track of its alumni corroborates Thomas: 18 percent of Florida's working convicts return to prison, compared to 50 percent of the non-working majority...
...If America's prisoners are given work and discipline and required to confront their transgressions as sins against The American Spectator August 1995 49...
...N one of the other forty-one states that use prison labor has compiled a record as bad as California's...
...Among many examples found by the Register: California State Polytechnic University in Pomona wanted 213 chairs to outfit a new computer lab...
...Unfortunately, in five of the past twelve years, California's prison indusDavid Frum is the author of Dead Right (New Republic/BasicBooks...
...Worse, it may be true that as the proportion of prisoners enrolled in work programs rises, the value of prison labor's output maytumble...
...Prison labor, once viewed as indispensable for restoring a healthy relationship between the criminal and society, was made literally a federal offense...
...The book was auctioned, for example, and other publishers bid in the millions for it...
...The original conception of the penitentiary was thus turned on its head," Thomas laments...
...Two pieces of New Deal legislation, in 1936 and 1940, effectively suppressed the sale of prison-made goods to private purchasers altogether...
...It was union-sponsored legislation, not economics, that brought prison labor to an end...
...Thomas, a young assistant attorney general in Arizona, is the author of Crime and the Sacking of America (Brassey's, 1994), the most fascinating and original book on crime and punishment since James Q. Wilson's 1975 classic, Thinking About Crime...
...Thomas observes that work contributes powerfully to rehabilitation: only 6.6 percent of the federal prisoners who worked were re-attested or violated parole within a year of release, while 20 percent of other federal prisoners found themselves in trouble with the law again...
...Do these sorry results prove the prison administrators right and Senator Gramm wrong...
...All they had to do to qualify for this deal: kill, rob, or rape somebody...
...As an added irritant, California was also employing hundreds of non-convict shop foremen, superintendents, and salesmen—and paying them wages well above those earned by comparable employees in the private sector...
...The people in the federal prisons usually landed there because they committed a crime that required a little more intelligence than the squalid robberies and wife killings that fill the state prisons: crimes like drug smuggling, counterfeiting, and kidnapping...
...But Wright, pressured by overwhelmingly hostile public opinion as his ethics prob lems worsened, had brought the matter to a floor vote in February...
...Gingrich did seem to strike it rich with that deal, and if in fact it had been part of a secret arrangement with Rupert Murdoch—whereby Gingrich would use the speaker's office to benefit the owner of HarperCollins—then it would have been a grave matter indeed...
...If the 5 percent of California's prisoners who choose to work now need eight times as long as a private manufacturer to build a chair and charge twice as much, what kind of job can we expect from the other 95 percent...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
