CHINA EXPORTS PRISON LABOUR
The Guardian has reprinted an interesting article by Brahma Chellaney, first published on the project-syndicate.org website, entitled 'Convicts For Export'. We have known for a long time that the backbone of Chinese state industry are the country's prisons, where inmates are exploited in a whole host of industries: the mining of coal and metal ores; in cement and brick works; vehicle manufacture and repair; agriculture; processing tea; making plastic, clothing and tools, much of which is exported and flings its ways into High Street pound shops. Even Adidas footballs. You name it, the Chinese use prison labour to make it.
Then there is the harvesting of organs from thousands of prisoners executed each year, the exact figure remains a state secret. Now we can add to that the moving of prisoners abroad to provide forced labour on infrastructure projects such as the building of dams and ports that China are carrying out in countries like Sri Lanka, Burma, the Maldives, Ghana and Sudan. Inters tingly, many of these schemes are being run by private Chinese companies whose standard operating practice is to source as much of their workforce from China as possible, and that much of that are prisoners released on 'parole', would indicate that this use of 'slave labour' is official Chinese central government policy. [29/07/10]
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PRISONERS IN GULF OIL CLEAN-UP PART 2
In the past couple of years federal and state prison labour programs in the U.S. have been suffering large-scale lay-offs because of budget restraints and the general down-turn in the market. However, in one particular area of the country prison labour has been booming in recent months, with huge numbers of prisoners being secretly bussed in to work on the BP Gulf oil spill clean-up operation.
In 2008, 11% of the federal prison population was employed in the Federal Prison Industries (FPI) program, which trades under the name UNICOR making everything from clothing and mattresses to office furniture and body armour and electronics components for the U.S. military. That figure of 23,152 prisoners has fallen by 30% to just 16,115 in the past 2 years. Inmates in the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which operates at a more local level, have also suffered lay-offs.
Wages for prisoners have often been an issue of contention. For example, prisoners have no choice as to which job they take and wage levels are as low, if not lower, than their UK equivalents. So, Federal prisoners can expect to get $1.15 an hour at most or, to put it another way, for every $1 in UNICOR turnover, prisoners earn just 4 cents, of which 2 cents goes towards "satisfying their financial obligations" i.e. paying towards their keep.
The smaller over-all numbers of prisoners on the PIECP program have fared even worse. This scheme has recently been the subject of a critical report showing that not only do inmates not receive the pay they are due and both programs have problems with health and safety compliance. Prisoner of course have no say in the negotiations over the wages they will be paid or the level of health and safety enforcement on the job, and any protests about their working conditions normally swiftly leads to loss of privileges and 'earned good time' or a spell in solitary.
The one boom area in prison labour however has been the Gulf clean-up operation. According to The Nation, within days of the Deepwater Horizon explosion "cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words 'Inmate Labor' printed in large red block letters." Locals, many of whom having already been put out of a job because of the spill, started to complain at community meetings. As a result the 'Inmate Labor' uniforms quickly disappeared, replaced by BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots. Another thing that made this particular group of worker stand out was that they were almost exclusively African-American men, something that the NAACP commented on, but hardly surprising given the racist nature of the U.S. criminal justice system.
The Nation article reveals some other eyebrow-raising facts about what is happening in the 'the inmate state':
"Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its 39,000 inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so 20,000 inmates live in parish jails, privately run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour. Obedient inmates, or "trustees," become eligible for work release in the last three years of their sentences. This means they can be a part of a market-rate, daily labor force that works for private companies outside the prison gates. The advantage for trustees is that they get to keep a portion of their earnings, redeemable upon release. The advantage for private companies is that trustees are covered under Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a holdover from Bush's Welfare to Work legislation that rewards private-sector employers for hiring risky "target groups." Businesses earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire. On top of that, they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group workers.""
Other prisoners are being used on an ad hoc unpaid basis, so it quickly becomes clear why BP and a lot of the small clean-up companies that have sprung up overnight are so eager to use prisoners. And it may also explain why BP and almost all of the prison authorities questioned refused to confirm to The Nation the numbers of prisoners involved or talk about issues such as health monitoring for the inmates being used in the clean-up. Many of the prisoners involved have also been moved temporarily into local parishes to get over the stipulation that those employed in the clean-up must be locals (i.e. parish residents). As a result shipping containers converted in to prison dormitories with bunk bed and barred windows, have appeared on waste ground along the coast, further enraging the many locals who are not being taken on for the work.
Of course, it is also highly unlikely that there will be any follow-up checks on the prisoners involved, many of whom have been working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in "protective chin-to-boot coveralls (made out of high-density polyethylene and manufactured by Dupont), taped to steel-toed boots covered in yellow plastic" and with no respirators, "shoveling oil-soaked sand into black trash bags". "They work twenty minutes on, forty minutes off, as per Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety rules" in the "blazing sun and the oppressive heat that builds up inside their impermeable suits". According to The Nation, "[t]hese are long hours for performing what may arguably be the most toxic job in America. Although the dangers of mixed oil and dispersant exposure are largely unknown, the chemicals in crude oil can damage every system in the body, as well as cell structures and DNA. [26/07/10]
[see also: PRISONERS IN GULF OIL CLEAN-UP]
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KEN CLARKE: "I'LL MAKE THEN WORK"
Ken Clarke has revealed in an interview in the Sun that he plans to make "a good percentage of prisoners...do something more sensible in prison. Make them work, give them training - a template to make better people of them. The aim is to give these guys the idea that work is a normal part of life. If they wish to get out of going in and out of prison, they'd better get used to working. It will hopefully form part of our rehabilitation revolution to be published in the autumn."
This appears to be a version of the proposals put forward by celebrity ex-prisoner Jonathan Aitkin in the 'Locked Up Potential' report for the Centre for Social Justice. There the idea was to double the number of Contract Service workshop places during what was then the next (i.e. this) parliament if the Tories got in. Iain Duncan Smith however got the pensions brief and justice fell to Clarke.
According to the Sun, that would mean that "Prisoners would get the minimum wage for their work - but it would be paid to them over a period of time AFTER their release. Up to half of their earnings would go towards helping victims."
Clarke also explained: "We hope businesses will come in and invest. There is a certain amount you can do with supplying the Prison Service itself, with food and other things you can make. But it has to be lead by private industry. I'm not going to be paying them all the minimum wage out of my budget. If you don't work, you would face privilege reduction. Someone who is prepared to work an eight-hour day might attract other privileges."
Unfortunately, the Prison Service largely supplies itself anyway, with everything from prisoners' y-fronts and meals to prison furniture and cell bars, so what he means by this is a bit of a mystery. Also, prisoners who currently refuse to work face reduced or even no privileges anyway - definitely no IEP pay and almost certainly additional punishments to boot. Work is definitely not voluntary as the Sun appears to think.
We all know that the Sun invariably never knows what it is talking about when it comes to prisons and prisoners, but now it seems that Ken Clarke is a little short on facts. And quiet how he means to afford to build and equip new prison workshops when the prisons' budget is being heavily cut, let alone find space for them in an already overcrowded prison system where prisoners are sleeping in converted cupboards, is anyone's guess. [16/07/10]
[Coming soon: The Rehabilitation Revolution: Myth or a Convenient Excuse. An article on the Conservatives' change of heart on the 'Prison Works' issue.
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PRISONERS IN GULF OIL CLEAN-UP
US prisoners are being used in a desperate attempt to find people to fill the workforce need to help with the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico coast following the BP oil disaster. For example, 200 are working for SG & S Oil Recovery Product LLC, a new business started by Jay Graddick after the leak first occurred. Hoping to cash-in on the environmental disaster, he placed an ad in the local Press-Register newspaper looking for oil relief workers at $8 to $10 per hour, but "didn't get a single phone call for somebody looking for a job."
So, as he has been using work-release inmates for the past two years on the construction sites he runs as part of another business venture, he got in touch with his Department of Corrections contacts and has la ready had 150 prisoners trained in Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response, also known as HAZWOPER, last month. Another 60-odd prisoners are employed in a rented warehouse in Alabama making about 12,000 linear feet of oil containment boom per day. They are "working around the clock, 24-hours a day, two shifts. It's a good thing for the local economy. And we just hope we get enough orders to make it worth our while," according to Graddick. Others prisoners are also working for the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries alongside the out-of-work fishermen and shrimpers who have had their livelihoods removed by the oil spill and find this the only jobs around.
Now, obviously no one in their right minds would want to work 12-hour shifts, or probably be able to for too long, even if the money was good. However, the media unfortunately are not letting on to how much the prisoners are being paid but, given the choice, the 12-hour factory shifts seem the preferable option. This is due to the appalling health effects encountered by workers cleaning up spills. According to environmental campaigners, oil clean-up workers have been threatened with the sack if they turn up for work wearing respirators because it makes for bad PR - people think that the foul smelling mixture of crude oil and dispersants that is causing "severe headaches, nausea, respiratory problems, burning eyes and sore throats" in those exposed to it, including the general public when the wind is in the wrong direction, might come to the unhelpful conclusion that it is in fact a health hazard!
According to the Guardian: "Five offshore rigs have been shut down since the spill after workers fell ill. Seven workers on a boat trying to scrub the oil from Breton Sound were taken to hospital [last week], complaining of burning eyes, headaches, nausea, dizziness and chest pains." The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) even claimed that they had been suffering from heatstroke. The EPA have even been issuing the workers they have recruited with protective gear that does not include respirators, violating Federal safety regulations for workers exposed to dangerous chemicals.
The Gulf spill the worst US oil-related environmental event since the Exxon Valdez in 1989, and whilst that spill had a devastating effect on wildlife and the environment, it had much less of an effect on human health. This was mainly due to the sparse Alaskan population but also the fact that Exxon's clean-up was done 'on the cheap', relying on Nature to do the company's job for it rather than having to move a large workforce to the remote Prince William Sound coastline. BP however do not have that luxury, and the Gulf oil clean-up workers, prisoners and unemployed fishermen alike, will be under threat of both the short-term effects and the potential long-term health effects, such as neurological disorders and cancer. As will the estimated 14 million people living along the US Gulf coastal strip. [15/05/10]
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PLAN FOR INDIAN PRISON CALL CENTRES
It has long been a gripe of many people that you spend ages on the phone waiting to get through to speak to somebody on the end of a phone to sort out some problem with a utility/pay a bill/book an air flight or similar, only to end up speaking to someone in India. Many of the less tolerant of society end up slamming down the phone or start talking louder to (as they think) try and make themselves understood, often becoming abusive.
Such are the perils (if they can really be so considered) of outsourcing. In the States it has long been the case that if you want to book say a TWA flight or a holiday through Omega World Travel Agency, you end up talking to someone in a federal prison call centre. Now an Indian firm, Radiant Info Systems, has decided to combine both concepts an set up so-called business process outsourcing (BPO) centres in Indian prisons.
Radiant already operates IT and BPO services for Indian and Western clients, including Marks and Spencer and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Now it has negotiated a contract with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to set up a BPO centre in Cherlapally Central Jail employing 200 prisoners. The prisoners will initially deal with the processing of insurance claim forms and bank account applications for Indian clients. For this they will earn 100 rupees (£1.50) a day, rather than the 15 rupees (22p) they would normally get for manual work such as furniture making.
Radiant hope that they will be able to expand into other prison when they secure more clients in the UK and United States and, of course, the prisoners once their sentences are over will have the right skills and experience to get jobs in non-prison call centres, providing companies are willing to employ them given what societal prejudices are worldwide. [15/05/10]
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MINISTRY OF JUSTICE PERFORMS POORLY IN FOI ACT STAKES
The latest Freedom Of Information Act statistics have been released and they show that the Ministry of Justice is currently the fifth worst performing Department of State (behind the MoD, Scottish and Home Offices and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) in the numbers of responses it managed on time (70% of requests responded to within the 20-day limit) and fourth with the rate of 'in time' responses i.e. meeting deadline or with permitted extension (72% behind the MoD and the Scottish and Home Offices).
The MoJ also came in third lowest in the percentage of 'resolvable requests granted in full' list (behind the Cabinet Office and the FCO) but second highest (behind the Cabinet Office) in the league of 'resolvable requests withheld in full'. The MoJ (44.8%) was also second most prolific (behind the Cabinet Office with 54.3%) on numbers of FIOA requests rejected, with 59.6% rejected as being 'too expensive' to answer and 38.9% as exempt/exempted (against 51.8% & 42.4% for the Cabinet Office). The MoJ also had the highest number of appeals submitted to the Information Commissioner's Office against its decisions, 26% of which were overturned either in part or fully (as against 37.5% for the Cabinet Office). [11/05/10]
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