Many have heard about California’s overcrowded prisons. In fact, conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, so ruled the US Supreme Court in 2011. That led to an order to expand California’s parole programs. But the state resisted the order, using two arguments: First, that they won’t have enough minimum security inmates left to perform inmate jobs. Second, that cheap prison labor is essential to the state’s budget.
The arguments center on a state program that uses inmates to fight wildfires. California is one of several states that employ prison labor to fight wildfires, and it has the largest firefighter program. According to Buzzfeed, prison inmates are paid less than $2 per day, and California will save $1 billion by using prison labor rather than hiring firefighters. Only certain classes of nonviolent inmates charged with lower level offenses are eligible for the inmate firefighter program. They must then meet physical and other criteria.
In exchange, inmates get the opportunity for early release, by earning twice as many credits toward early release as non-firefighting inmates otherwise earn, known as 2-for-1 credits. In February, the federal court overseeing California’s prison litigation ordered the state to expand this 2-for-1 program to some other rehabilitation programs so that other inmates who exhibit good behavior and perform certain work successfully would also be eligible for even earlier release.
Think Progress reported that California’s actions to slow-roll the court’s orders raises questions about whether using prison labor at the expense of private labor, creates incentives to keep inmates in prison, particularly when the courts have already said that many of them don’t need to be there. This doesn’t pass the smell test. Is the purpose of imprisonment to punish and/or rehabilitate, or is it to make money for the state? Is it ethical to do both? Is it ethical to keep prisoners incarcerated longer than the courts require because we can make money on their backs?
To make California’s argument even more repulsive, they apparently need more prisoners to make more money. Yet they can’t be bothered to build facilities sufficient to take care of those already in the system.
Does anyone seriously think it is cheaper to pay an imprisoned firefighter than to pay a private firefighter? That makes economic sense only when the state looks just at the $2 per day that the inmate is paid, compared to the cost of a full-time (union member) firefighter. They should be comparing it to keeping the inmate in prison for the minimum sentence of his/her term, since many of these prisoners would paroled under the Court’s order. California says that the annual cost of keeping someone in a state prison is $49,000. BTW, the typical pay for a beginning California temp firefighter for the wildfire season is $15,240. And, if the money were moved from pot A to pot B, those inmate seasonal firefighters could be hired upon release. That would create more competition for those seasonal firefighting jobs.
Prison labor has been with us since the beginning. It built our farm-to-market roads in the early days of the automobile. It stamped our license plates. Today, it picks up some of our litter and fights some of our fires and harvests some of our crops. Prison labor, whether in firefighter garb, orange jumpsuits, or chains, will remain.
It is our ethics as a people that seems to be going away for a long stay in a concrete room.
