Would you possibly believe your jobs are NOT being sent overseas?

Legend in your own mind! asked:


If I said your jobs are NOT being sent overseas and the US now underbids the lowest of the low of the Asian sweatshops you might say I’m crazy, but the reality is that your jobs are being outsourced not to foreign nations, but to the PIC, Prison Industrial Complex. Federal Prison Industries, FPI now sells inmate produced goods globally and to you in stores all over the land then simply labels them as “Made In China” and other foreign markets. Isn’t that sweet?
The job you might expect to be paid a living wage is sent to slaves in our prisons and 3/4ths of these slaves would never qualify for prison in Europe, but do in the US.
How could a system that built thousands of new prisons possibly pay for them when tax payers could barely afford the ones we had in the 70’s and 80s? Slave labor.
I don’t know how many remembered the big “outcry” to keep inmates in prison longer and longer and to stop releasing “violent inmates” back in the 80’s and 90’s, but that wasn’t because crime rates went up and it wasn’t because judges went soft on crime at all. Juries never decided to let the bad guys go scott-free because of some imagined sympathy. Instead we were sold the proverbial pig with lipstick on a grand scale. Oh sure, there was the occasional inmate who was released only to reoffend, but the numbers never told the truth because those were and still are the exception rather than the rule. Prosecutors didn’t suddenly become better lawyers and defense layers didn’t suddenly become blathering idiots. Judges had sentencing common sense yanked away and every crime now has a prescribed number of days, months or years on the books and many of them are so unreasonable you couldn’t possibly believe them even if you read them.
The truth is the public was sold a bill of sale and told we lived in constant fear of crime while our jobs were being outsourced to slave labor in American prisons. Ironically crime rates never really went up the entire time and FBI statistics prove that.
At least 37 states have legalized the contracting out of prison labor to private corporations that set up operations inside state prisons. (The number is much higher now) The list of these prisons’ business clients reads like a Who’s Who of Corporate America: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T Wireless, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target stores, and on and on and on and…on.
In 1994 state prisoners produced over $900 million worth of goods and services. (God only can guess that number now) With the vast increase in corporate use of prison labor, this may very well be fifty or even a thousand times that now, but is surely in the hundreds of billions now. This does not include the value of services performed by prisoners just to maintain the prison. If the state had to pay outside labor even the legal minimum wage for this work, it would cost far more than the states pay prisoners. Many pay nothing for this prison maintenance work.

There are at least seven distinct ways profits are wrenched out of this vast U.S. prison population:
(1) Goods and services produced inside prisons by prison labor and sold by federal, state and local prisons/jails either to other government agencies, or on the open market or as exports abroad;
(2) The contracting out of prison labor (both inside and outside prisons) to private corporations at slave labor wages;
(3) The creation of vast new private prison corporations that profit both from housing inmates from state prisons as well as from using these inmates as forced prison labor;
(4) The construction of new prisons, using both prison and non-prison labor;
(5) Interest paid to banks and Wall Street investment houses on loans for the construction and upkeep of new prisons, both public and private;
(6) The venders of supplies to prison industries;
(7) The pay telephone racket set up inside prison walls by private phone companies for collect calls by prisoners to the outside world.
All these profiteers combined comprise what is now commonly defined as the Prison-Industrial Complex, one of the biggest growth industries in the U.S. This multi-billion dollar industry has its own trade shows, conventions, web sites, mail order catalogues, direct marketing campaigns, architectural firms, construction firms, Wall Street investment houses, plumbing supply companies, food service companies, and outfits selling “prison-specific” products: bullet-resistant security cameras, padded cells in “vast color selections,” belts and shackles (”special for juveniles”), body orifice security scanners, razor wire, etc., etc. This industry even has its own Yellow Pages, with a list of over 1,000 venders. All this is largely based on the non-violent offenders (two-thirds of the two million) who, by even European capitalist standards, should not be in prison at all. Here many inmates origina

Deidre