November 3, 2011

Now I get it. At first I couldn't figure out why the government would want to build more prisons and arrest more people to fill them. It's all about jobs.

It's not about reducing crime. Crime is at its lowest level in decades. And Texas is discovering that imprisoning people doesn't reduce crime. Republicans in that hang-'em-high state are shutting down prisons and successfully rehabilitating law-breakers outside prison walls. Texans hope that Canadian Conservatives will learn from their experience. "You will spend billions and billions and billions on locking people up," says Judge John Creuzot of the Dallas County Court. "And there will come a point in time where the public says, 'Enough!' And you'll wind up letting them out."

Republican Jerry Madden, head of the Texas House Committee on Corrections, warns: ""It's a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build 'em, I guarantee you they will come. They'll be filled, OK? Because people will send them there." Also, Texas is repealing the very legislation that the Harper Conservatives are enacting: mandatory minimum sentencing.

Treating prisoners outside of jail is effective and saves tax dollars but it hurts the bottom line of the prison industrial complex. Building and running prisons is big business. The U.S. corrections industry employs more people than people than General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart combined.

And prisoners are employed at slave wages. Tennessee inmates sew jeans for Kmart and JCPenney according to Sara Flounders of GlobalResearch.ca. IBM, Texas Instruments and Dell get circuit boards made by Texas prisoners. They are paid as little as 23 cents an hour. Work is dangerous and unsafe. Big corporations like Motorola, Compaq, Honeywell, Microsoft, Boeing, Revlon, Chevron, TWA, Victoria's Secret and Eddie Bauer employ prisoners.



 

These corporations claim that they are actually doing the prisoners a favour by giving them job training for when they are released. That claim might be credible if jobs were waiting at those factories upon release. But most manufacturing jobs have been sent overseas to workers who are paid not much more than prisoners. And if corporations want to do some good, why not hire workers at living wages before they are driven into lives of poverty and crime?

Of course, most prisoners are not exactly model employees. Many are alcoholics, or mentally ill, or addicted to drugs. To improve the quality of prison employees, the U.S. is arresting more marijuana users. Unlike most hard drug users, pot heads are relatively functional. So, it's not surprising that one-third of all arrests are for marijuana possession and that number is growing.

Texas's experience notwithstanding, the U.S. imprisons more citizens per capita than any other industrialized country. Canada has a lot of catching up to do. We only incarcerate about one-sixth of the U.S. but the Harper government is well on the way to correct that problem. Their "tough on crime" plan is build more prisons and arrest more people at great expense to taxpayers. Harper also plans to arrest more marijuana users to improve the quality of the prison workforce.

More has to be done to make get the prison industry up and running in Canada. Harper needs to reduce fair union wages by privatizing prisons and prison services such as food service and laundry.

The prison industry could serve the military industrial complex as well by employing prisoners to make parts for Canada's submarine fleet. Since the subs will never get out of dry docks, there is no risk if parts are inferior. Or prisoners could operate call centres that promote products made from Canadian asbestos, which Harper claims are safe.

David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca