Two ugly truths: Slave-labor camps.
Corporations are getting rich using federal prisoners as captive labor pools.
Unless she’s dying or recovering from surgery, a patient at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell must work. The hospital out on the banks of
Just across the street from the hospital complex is a camp for minimum-security women prisoners who are not ill. They get most of the hot, hard jobs — cleaning boilers, welding, mowing. The pay is a lousy 12 cents an hour with no raises. That’s why a job that many on the outside would take only as a last resort is the most coveted in the compound: Ernestine the telephone operator.
So when you call directory assistance using, say, Excel Telecommunications, chances are good your inquiry might be answered by a federal prisoner. At Carswell, a fifth of the prison workforce — most from the camp but a few from the hospital as well — get to sit in cubicles in an air-conditioned building, start at almost double the pay of the regular prison jobs, and, if they behave and don’t make mistakes, get regular raises until they reach the maximum pay of — hold onto your hat — $1.45 an hour. Of course, they have to work seven and a half years to reach that maximum. And since this center hasn’t been open long enough for anyone to make the maximum, the highest pay at Carswell is $1.15 an hour.
With toothpaste at $5.95 in the prison commissary, inmates who take those calls for Excel have to work between five and 25 hours to earn enough for one tube. But by comparison, they’re lucky: Women who work at other prison jobs have to sweat out 49 hours for the luxury of brushing their teeth.
The math on the other end is even simpler, if grander in scale: Excel, a $2.5 billion global company, comes out the clear winner. If the 19-year-old Irving-based long-distance carrier had to pay no more than minimum wage to non-prison
But the Carswell prisoners are far from the only ones participating in this exercise in government-assisted capitalism.
How many people know that when they dial 411, the operator at the other end of the call is often a federal prisoner? Or that when they call to reserve a camping space at a national park, the person taking their personal information may be sitting in a cubicle in a maximum-security prison? Or that the body armor for the soldiers fighting in
In what critics call slave labor and advocates call job training, more than 100 factories and service centers in federal prisons across the United States employ inmates in jobs such as those above and hundreds more, making everything from underwear to military gear to intricate electrical components, all under the umbrella of a near-billion-dollar corporation known as the Federal Prison Industries, Inc., trade name Unicor.
This little-known and wholly owned arm of the BOP has come under fire in recent years from environmentalists, prison reform groups, and congressional investigative committees for, among other things, exposing inmate workers to dangerous levels of lead and other toxins in its computer recycling centers. The company has also been investigated for profiting from sales of tens of thousands of excess Defense Department computers that were supposed to be given free to low-income schools around the country and, what may be worse, failing to remove sensitive data from the computers it resold. Unions and even the U. S. Chamber of Commerce are up in arms over its use of dirt-cheap prison labor to take jobs from the private sector.
The prison workers are just as unhappy. Unicor and the companies it contracts with “are making a killing off of us here,” one of the Carswell workers wrote recently to Fort Worth Weekly. “And then we leave prison and have nothing to fall back on. Just think how beneficial it would be if they paid at least minimum wage, paid into Social Security ... so that we would have something when we leave, old and broken down.”
There’s another Carswell prisoner who may be in a better position than most to help shine a spotlight into this dark corner of the federal prison system. “This prison is making huge profits off of nothing more than slave labor and then marking up prices by as much as 50 percent in the commissary, making even more profit off of all us,” Karen Lucchesi Lewis said.
Lewis has been a lot of things in her 42 years. She has known fame as the daughter of legendary Texas Rangers baseball manager Frank Lucchesi. She has owned and managed a multi-million-dollar spa and wellness center. She has been an honored volunteer fund-raiser for charities in her hometown of Colleyville. And, as a sufferer from lupus, she has been a proponent of naturalized medicine. What she never dreamed of becoming was an advocate for women in prison — especially one advocating from inside the walls. But that is exactly what she is these days, turning a shattering life change into a “mission from God,” as she calls it.
For the last three years Lewis has been doing time at Carswell, after getting caught up in a money-laundering sting aimed at the man who at that time handled legal matters for her business and who got off with a light sentence after testifying against her. In court, her criminal lawyer presented a defense so weak that even the sentencing judge commented on it. Still, Federal Judge John McBryde sent her to prison for 78 months.
While her new attorney, her family, and supporters such as North Side businessman Mike Costanza are working to get her conviction overturned, Lewis is on another quest. She wants to expose the injustices that she said she has witnessed since she entered the Carswell compound in 2004 — everything from “terrible medical neglect to women being used as slave labor for the prison to make millions in profits.”
Regardless of whether one believes in her innocence, Lewis is a high-profile inmate who is unafraid to speak out about a culture of abuse at Carswell that has been reported by the Weekly in an ongoing series since 1999. Now, to the prison’s litany of well-documented medical horror stories, rape, and sexual misconduct cases, are added allegations that the inmates are being exploited by a government industry that few citizens have ever heard of — even though it has been around since 1934. Someone’s making millions off the labor of the women at Carswell and thousands like them across the country — but it sure isn’t the inmates.
During the depths of the Great Depression,
Prison industry advocates say the “factories with fences” train inmates for jobs on the outside. They say the work reduces recidivism and boredom and gives inmates a source of income to help pay their court fines, support families, or spend at the commissary. Critics, on the other hand, describe them as Dickensian places where laborers have no workplace protection, are routinely exposed to cancer-causing toxins, and are exempt from federal labor laws, which means they can be forced to accept wages lower than those in
For the last several years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor unions, and prison reform groups such as FedCure have all pushed for legislation that would outlaw Unicor’s preferential treatment and require the corporation to pay minimum wage. Members of Congress from states whose manufacturing businesses have lost millions in government contracts to Unicor have taken up the cause, but to date the corporation has been able to fend off all such efforts.
By 2006 Unicor had come a long way from that initial $4 million. Last year, according to its annual report, the corporation held assets of $730 million in 108 factories and service centers at 79 prisons across the country. Its gross sales were $718 million with profits of $71.2 million. Those profits were produced by more than 21,000 inmate laborers who made, on average, $1,700 for a year’s work. The profits aren’t, as one might suspect, plowed back into the prison system to, say, improve healthcare services at Carswell or reduce the inflated prices for basic personal hygiene supplies at prison commissaries. Instead, it is plowed back into Unicor.
One its harshest critics is U. S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who has been trying since at least 2000 to get legislation passed that would reform Unicor and force it to compete with private companies. He said that the requirement that federal agencies must buy from Unicor allows it to perpetuate itself without regard to whether that is the best option for agencies and for prisoners themselves.
One congressional aide, who asked for anonymity, said that Hoekstra has found no evidence that those who run the corporation are enriching themselves. But, he said, it’s a “giant Ponzi scheme,” that requires more and more millions to feed its ever-expanding enterprises.
In recent years, Unicor has added to its list of factory-made products what it calls “services”: computer recycling centers, industrial laundry services, printing shops, and call centers — all for sale to private, for-profit companies in spite of the law’s prohibiting language. BOP Director Harry Lappin, who is also head of Unicor, maneuvered around that little obstacle in the law, apparently successfully, when he testified before a congressional committee last year that the corporation’s new offerings are “a service, not a product” and that therefore the law does not apply. Unicor now advertises its call centers on its web page and in its catalogs as “domestic outsourcing at offshore prices.”
Three major national communications networks use the “domestic outsourcing” call center at Carswell for their directory assistance services, according to FPI program director Todd Baldau. Baldau refused to name the clients, citing “proprietary information.” However, two inmates who currently work at the center, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the companies are Excel Telecom, Cricket Communications, and Metro 411. Calls and e-mails to the three companies were not returned. Baldau would not say what the companies pay Unicor for inmate labor for their call centers, but the corporation’s 2006 annual report listed sales of $27.8 million from its 18 service centers, including Carswell, with profits of $2.5 million.
The policy that all prisoners in federal lockups must work, including the less critically ill patients in prison hospitals, is designed to keep prisoners occupied as much as anything, bureau spokesman Mike Truman said in an interview for an earlier story. “Life can get very boring in prison,” he said, and reducing boredom reduces the potential for trouble among inmates.
Working for Unicor “is a privilege for good inmates with a smidgen of education,” said a former Carswell prison employee who asked not to be named. “They are monitored heavily, are lectured frequently, and really do their jobs in fear of losing them if they mess up. ... The work is easy, conditions are better [than any other jobs there], and the work is useful on their resumés once they get out. ... That’s why jobs with Unicor are coveted.” The call center at Carswell has been open for more than five years. Women sit in a small, guarded, air-conditioned building near the center of the compound, taking directory assistance calls in eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day.
Sweatier non-Unicor jobs basically cover maintenance work at the prison camp and hospital, including groundskeeping, floor-scrubbing, plumbing, welding, carpentry, and cleaning the boilers that provide hot water and heat for the compound. “They even work on the elevators,” said former inmate Dana Corum. “And that’s a full-time job because those dang elevators were always out.”
Prison officials also refused to discuss details of Unicor pay scales. But one of the inmates who provided the names of the Unicor client companies wrote to the Weekly that the pay starts at 23 cents an hour with incremental raises that top out at $1.15 an hour. She said that after 18 months on the job, the women get an additional 10 cents an hour for “longevity” and another 5 cents an hour for each 18 months after that up to 80 months. At that point, they will have “maxed out” at around $1.45 an hour. “There are a few ‘premium pay’ positions that rate an extra 25 cents an hour ... for being extra important to the operations — or the most liked,” she wrote. It takes “political ... shit to get these spots.”
The Spokane Area Journal of Business reported last year that regular call center jobs in this country start their workers at more than $11 an hour, plus benefits. Call center personnel in
And since the prison laborers receive no benefits: and no Social Security, the private companies that contract with the prisons save on those substantial costs as well. Average cost to an employer for health insurance for a family of four in 2007 is around $9,000 a year according to Towers Perrin, a global business financial management firm. And then there’s that 9.1 percent matching contribution to Social Security and Medicare for each employee.
Unlike Indian workers, American inmates don’t have to pay for all their living costs from those salaries — but Indian workers, on the other hand, don’t have to pay almost $2 for soap. Inmates are required to buy all personal items, and often meet some dietary needs, from the prison’s commissary.
Most can’t afford just the basic things that are necessary for their health and hygiene, said Lewis, who is one of the few who has a family able to put money into her prison account, to a maximum of $300 a month. A commissary price sheet lists a bar of bath soap at $1.65, deodorant at $2.80, and a box of regular tampons at $5.30. For diabetics, who must buy their own non-sugar products, a 50-count box of Equal packets costs $3.80. Many of the women at Carswell come from poor families. Some have been abandoned by their families, and only a few have loved ones who can send them money for such basic needs.
Corum, a diabetic, spent five years at Carswell, off and on. She was sent to
Even though the women work under strict guidelines, which forbid them to ask callers for personal information or tell them their calls have been routed to a prison, the jobs can be enjoyable and provide some relief from the rigidity of prison life, Corum said. “They had some fun, but the pay is still lousy,” she said, “and the whole thing is a racket that’s making money for the prison and unfairly competing with legitimate businesses.”
You can reach Betty Brink at
Piles of incinerated corpses were indicting images at Nuremberg, used to prove that the German-run concentration camps during World War II were intended for purposes of exterminating the Jews of Europe. However, a plethora of documentary evidence, long suppressed, shows that prisoners were relatively well-treated, compensated for their hard work and allowed to purchase luxuries to which even the German public did not have ready access. This is not the image of abject deprivation that the Holocaust lobby would like you to entertain.Far from being the "death camps" as you have heard so often, places like Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald were not in the business of extermination. They were work camps, critical to the German war effort. But did you know that the Jewish workers were compensated for their labor with scrip printed specifically for their use in stores, canteens and even brothels? The prisoner monetary system was conceived in ghettos such as Lodz, carried to camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau and still existed in the displaced persons camps that were established by the Allies after World War II. Here is the story of the money the court historians do not want you to even suspect existed.
Piles of incinerated corpses were indicting images at Nuremberg, used to prove that the German-run concentration camps during World War II were intended for purposes of exterminating the Jews of Europe. However, a plethora of documentary evidence, long suppressed, shows that prisoners were relatively well-treated, compensated for their hard work and allowed to purchase luxuries to which even the German public did not have ready access. This is not the image of abject deprivation that the Holocaust lobby would like you to entertain.
irrefutable proof is the existence of a means of exchange for goods and services: Money. There were at least 134 separate issues, in different denominations and styles, for such notorious places as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Oranienburg, Ravensbrück, Westerbork and at least 15 other camps. (See Paper Money of the World Part I: Modern Issues of Europe by Arnold Keller, Ph.D., 1956, pp. 23-25 for a complete listing.)
A monetary system was also in existence in the ghettos, most notably Theresienstadt and Lodz, which produced beautiful notes (veritable works of art) that make U.S. currency look dull.
There are numerous dealers in rare currency and numismatics who specialize in selling "concentration camp money" or "Holocaust money" as it has been sometimes called. But the very fact of its existence does not seem to have raised questions - as it should have - about what really did (and did not) happen inside the so-called "death camps" where the Holocaust scrip was circulating in the first place.
This scrip was not negotiable outside of the camp for which it was issued. This decreased the chance of a successful escape and made it impossible for the general public to purchase some of the rare luxuries available in the camps. According to Albert Pick in Das Lagergeld der Konzentrations- und D.P.-Lager: 1933-1945
full article with pictures at link below...
http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/ccmoney.html
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