Laurie Hazen has bad taste in men. “They’re my downfall,” the 41-year-old jokes in her Massachusetts accent. “I have to really stay single.” An ex-boyfriend first introduced her to prescription drugs, she says, a habit she maintained through the course of another relationship, with another addict, and through two stints in prison, most recently in 2012 for writing fake prescriptions.
When she arrived at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Framingham, Hazen left behind a job as a records manager for a fiber-optics company. Her $14-an-hour salary had covered food, utilities, and rent on the modest apartment she shared with her boyfriend and her teenage son. She would have been putting some money away, too, if her paycheck hadn’t also been covering the couple’s drug habit. As it was, like many inmates, she went to prison with no savings and, because her boyfriend was locked up too, had no one on the outside to send her money. Her son went to live with his dad.
After two weeks in prison, Hazen could apply for a job. Because her sentence was less than a year, she wasn’t eligible for the prison’s highest-paying job at $20 per week—stitching American flags for the state police—and she had to choose between washing dishes in the kitchen and cleaning bathrooms. Because portions in prison are notoriously small, Hazen took the kitchen job so she could eat a little extra before and after her shifts. She earned $2 a day collecting inmates’ dirty trays and loading them into the dishwasher during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The cramped room where she worked had no windows and routinely filled with steam from the 200-degree dishwasher. There was one tiny fan. “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that. I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.”
About half of the 1.6 million Americans serving time in prison have full-time jobs like Hazen did. They aren’t counted in standard labor surveys, but prisoners make up a sizable workforce: with 870,000 working inmates, roughly the same number of workers as in the states of Vermont and Rhode Island combined. Despite decades’ worth of talk about reform—of giving prisoners the skills and resources they need to build a life after prison—the vast majority of these workers, almost 700,000, still do “institutional maintenance” work like Hazen’s. They mop cellblock floors, prepare and serve food in the dining hall, mow the lawns, file papers in the warden’s office, and launder millions of tons of uniforms and bed linens. Compensation varies from state to state and facility to facility, but the median wage in state and federal prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively. (...)
Despite the conditions and the pay, most inmates want to work. A job gives them a safe place to be for hours each day, provides a break from the monotony of prison life, and—in most states—puts a few dollars and cents in their commissary account. “I was happy to work,” Hazen says. “It made me feel like I wasn’t so much in prison. It gave me a minute by myself to get away from the craziness, time to think and reflect and figure out what I wanted to do with my life.” What the job didn’t provide was a wage sufficient to support her son and accumulate some savings for post-prison life, or job training that would help her pursue the goals she established in that dish room: to study psychology and one day open a domestic-violence shelter. After six months of work, Hazen left prison the way most people do: with a criminal record, no meaningful job experience beyond what she went in with, and not even enough savings to buy a suit for a job interview ($43).
Study after study has found what common sense would suggest: Prisoners who gain professional skills while locked up, and those who earn a decent wage for their work, are far less likely to end up back behind bars. But if prisons in America, with the world’s highest incarceration rate, had to pay minimum wage—let alone the prevailing wage—they couldn’t keep operating. If inmates like Hazen weren’t washing dishes in Massachusetts prisons, the state’s corrections department would spend an average of $9.22 to hire someone else to do it (the mean hourly wage for a dishwasher, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). That’s 30 to 45 times what inmates make for performing the same service. As a result, prisons—and taxpayers—use prisoners to save hundreds of millions of dollars each year on labor costs, according to the GAO.
“If our criminal-justice system had to pay a fair wage for labor that inmates provide, it would collapse,” says Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, an independent magazine that promotes inmates’ rights. “We could not afford to run our justice system without exploiting inmates.”
If paying inmates pennies looks like savings to corrections officials, it translates to additional costs for everyone else. Consider, for starters, that more than 1.2 million prisoners have a minor child—2.7 million kids in all. About half of these parents were, like Laurie Hazen, their families’ primary breadwinners before they went to prison. Not surprisingly, their families often turn to social safety-net programs to compensate for the missing income. Families with an incarcerated parent are 50 percent more likely to use Medicaid and twice as likely to use food stamps.
For most, the situation doesn’t improve upon release. Even as state and federal governments pour hundreds of millions of dollars into re-entry initiatives with the aim of easing the transition home and slowing the “revolving door” between prison and the community, they’re undermining successful re-entry by burying inmates in fees and fines while paying them next to nothing for their work. It costs money to be locked up in America—more and more of it all the time: court costs and fees when you’re tried, booking fees when you’re processed in jail and then prison, and supervision fees while you’re out on parole. Restitution costs, child-support arrears, and, in some states, “room and board costs” pile up during long prison terms. A state-sponsored study of the impact of legal fees in Washington found that the average inmate owes $2,540 per conviction in fees and fines.
by Beth Schwartzapfel, American Prospect | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/The News Tribune, Peter Haley
When she arrived at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Framingham, Hazen left behind a job as a records manager for a fiber-optics company. Her $14-an-hour salary had covered food, utilities, and rent on the modest apartment she shared with her boyfriend and her teenage son. She would have been putting some money away, too, if her paycheck hadn’t also been covering the couple’s drug habit. As it was, like many inmates, she went to prison with no savings and, because her boyfriend was locked up too, had no one on the outside to send her money. Her son went to live with his dad.
After two weeks in prison, Hazen could apply for a job. Because her sentence was less than a year, she wasn’t eligible for the prison’s highest-paying job at $20 per week—stitching American flags for the state police—and she had to choose between washing dishes in the kitchen and cleaning bathrooms. Because portions in prison are notoriously small, Hazen took the kitchen job so she could eat a little extra before and after her shifts. She earned $2 a day collecting inmates’ dirty trays and loading them into the dishwasher during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The cramped room where she worked had no windows and routinely filled with steam from the 200-degree dishwasher. There was one tiny fan. “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that. I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.”About half of the 1.6 million Americans serving time in prison have full-time jobs like Hazen did. They aren’t counted in standard labor surveys, but prisoners make up a sizable workforce: with 870,000 working inmates, roughly the same number of workers as in the states of Vermont and Rhode Island combined. Despite decades’ worth of talk about reform—of giving prisoners the skills and resources they need to build a life after prison—the vast majority of these workers, almost 700,000, still do “institutional maintenance” work like Hazen’s. They mop cellblock floors, prepare and serve food in the dining hall, mow the lawns, file papers in the warden’s office, and launder millions of tons of uniforms and bed linens. Compensation varies from state to state and facility to facility, but the median wage in state and federal prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively. (...)
Despite the conditions and the pay, most inmates want to work. A job gives them a safe place to be for hours each day, provides a break from the monotony of prison life, and—in most states—puts a few dollars and cents in their commissary account. “I was happy to work,” Hazen says. “It made me feel like I wasn’t so much in prison. It gave me a minute by myself to get away from the craziness, time to think and reflect and figure out what I wanted to do with my life.” What the job didn’t provide was a wage sufficient to support her son and accumulate some savings for post-prison life, or job training that would help her pursue the goals she established in that dish room: to study psychology and one day open a domestic-violence shelter. After six months of work, Hazen left prison the way most people do: with a criminal record, no meaningful job experience beyond what she went in with, and not even enough savings to buy a suit for a job interview ($43).
Study after study has found what common sense would suggest: Prisoners who gain professional skills while locked up, and those who earn a decent wage for their work, are far less likely to end up back behind bars. But if prisons in America, with the world’s highest incarceration rate, had to pay minimum wage—let alone the prevailing wage—they couldn’t keep operating. If inmates like Hazen weren’t washing dishes in Massachusetts prisons, the state’s corrections department would spend an average of $9.22 to hire someone else to do it (the mean hourly wage for a dishwasher, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). That’s 30 to 45 times what inmates make for performing the same service. As a result, prisons—and taxpayers—use prisoners to save hundreds of millions of dollars each year on labor costs, according to the GAO.
“If our criminal-justice system had to pay a fair wage for labor that inmates provide, it would collapse,” says Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, an independent magazine that promotes inmates’ rights. “We could not afford to run our justice system without exploiting inmates.”
If paying inmates pennies looks like savings to corrections officials, it translates to additional costs for everyone else. Consider, for starters, that more than 1.2 million prisoners have a minor child—2.7 million kids in all. About half of these parents were, like Laurie Hazen, their families’ primary breadwinners before they went to prison. Not surprisingly, their families often turn to social safety-net programs to compensate for the missing income. Families with an incarcerated parent are 50 percent more likely to use Medicaid and twice as likely to use food stamps.
For most, the situation doesn’t improve upon release. Even as state and federal governments pour hundreds of millions of dollars into re-entry initiatives with the aim of easing the transition home and slowing the “revolving door” between prison and the community, they’re undermining successful re-entry by burying inmates in fees and fines while paying them next to nothing for their work. It costs money to be locked up in America—more and more of it all the time: court costs and fees when you’re tried, booking fees when you’re processed in jail and then prison, and supervision fees while you’re out on parole. Restitution costs, child-support arrears, and, in some states, “room and board costs” pile up during long prison terms. A state-sponsored study of the impact of legal fees in Washington found that the average inmate owes $2,540 per conviction in fees and fines.
by Beth Schwartzapfel, American Prospect | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/The News Tribune, Peter Haley
