|
While Jack Warner was a Pennsylvania state senator, he
fought tooth and nail to prevent the closing of the moldering
monstrosity of Western State Penitentiary
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He didn't care that it was a
dangerous, dilapidated money-pit unfit for human habitation.
What he cared about was getting votes for himself from the guards
and staff who could keep their high-paying do-nothing jobs.
When Jack Wagner became the State's Auditor General he matured a tad. The guy's not dumb. He's just a pragmatic politician who's principles ebb and flow with his personal political situation. As Auditor General, Mr. Wagner's improved ethics allowed him to actually criticize the Department of Imprisonment. Well, actually not the whole enormous department, only the antiquated and inefficient bureau of slave labor. Correctional Industries, as Pennsylvania's official slave labor bureau is called, employs hundreds of civilian bosses, slave masters and so-called instructors. It also employs about 1,600 prisoners. It's not fair or accurate to call the prisoners slaves. They get paid at least 19 cents an hour - nineteen cents! In all other respects, they are slaves. They cannot quit or refuse to work. They have no benefits such as vacations, overtime pay or sick leave. They have no dignity. That's not what excited Mr. Wagner's ire. What does he care about prisoners or their welfare? Correctional Industries supposedly makes things used by the state and in the many prisons. It still produces license plates, bed linen, boxes, mattresses, prison clothes and a few other things. At one time it operated prison farms, dairies, cannaries and other useful businesses. Before the Republicans did such enormous social harm with their greedy policies of fear and exploitation, Correctional Industries, (usually simply called "CI") served an important role in the rehabilitation of prisoners. To some small extent, it trained them for lawful employment once they were released. Not anymore. Prisoners are no longer allowed to have decent employment when they are released from prison. Law and policies insure that ex-prisoners can very seldom find work except at the very bottom of the economy, "McDonalds' jobs." People can't survive on such meager incomes. The Republican system of vengeance assures that ex-prisoners must return to crime and so, create a perpetual underclass to keep the prisons bulging and thousands of guards employed. An offender can never actually finish paying her/his debt to society. What really alarmed the Auditor General, was that CI had a secret slush fund of $32,000,000.00! Mr. Wagner badly wanted that money - for the taxpayers he said. What he ment was he wanted the money spent to benefit the prison staff. That's not all that the Auditor General discovered. He found that the things made by CI were so grossly overpriced that they could only be sold back to the prisons. We've been saying the same thing for years. For example, prisoners who want to buy sweat pants must buy the ones made by CI. They're the worst sort of junk. What's worse, they cost $12 a pair, almost twice what the good sweat pants made by Hanes cost. In the same way, bed linen made by CI slave labor costs more than twice what better articles costs that are made by private industry. Mr. Wagner's belated epiphany was that, like the rest of the Department of Imprisonment, CI was VERY badly managed - dah! The audit revealed the obvious fact that the real purpose of CI was not to employ or train prisoners. It was to give many high paid jobs to the civilian bosses. Correctional Industries did nothing to actually train prisoners for employment in the free economy. After all, there's not much call in the free economy for license plate makers. Mr. Wagner naively thought that it was a bad practice to let lifers work in CI. His reasoning was that since lifers would never be released, they didn't need training. He failed to realize that, in reality, there is no training and that upon release, ex-offenders aren't allowed to get real employment. Our publisher wrote to the Auditor General. She again suggested what we've lobbied for in the past: let prisoners work in private industry at reasonable wages. Tolerate a certain amount of prisoner misconduct and risk in the program. Give the employers a small advantage in the bidding process to sell goods and services to government. Close CI and take that bounty of do-nothing jobs away from the Department of Imprisonment.We can only hope that someone has sense enough to realisticly help prisoners and the society. How are we benefited by a permanent underclass, by slavery, for that matter?
"A little inaccuracy sometimes You are welcome to use or republish
any of our material.
|