Abstract
The US has the largest population in prisons worldwide, and the fact that this population is unproductive is a growing concern for stakeholders. This paper proposes the adoption of community service frameworks for integration of inmates into the workforce. The proposal is informed by the penal labor code that legalizes involuntary service as punishment for crime for convicted offenders. The paper draws from practical situations and research on effectiveness of the policy to argue for its adoption and implantation as a component of prison reform strategy.
Penal Labor: Policy Proposal Against Special Privileges
Introduction
America imprisons many people more than any other country in the world. The Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 report approximated the number of people in American federal and state prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, local jails, and limitary prisons at 2.3 million (Swayer & Wagner, 2019). In its 2015 fact sheet, the Sentencing Project noted that the number represents a 500% increase from 40 years ago. The increase on prison population is attributed to changes in sentencing laws and policies rather than rise in crime rates. The implication for prison population is that the numbers are unlikely to experience a downward trend in the near future. The observation is of utmost concern to many stakeholders. According to the US Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (2015), a project commissioned to examine expenditure on prisons established that the country spends at least $80 billion annually on incarceration. State governments contribute fifty-seven percent of the $80 billion, with ten percent going to the federal government. A number of stakeholders, including politicians base their advocacy for prison reforms on such expenditures. While calls for reform are justifiable, little attention is given to the potential of inmates as a labor source for local authorities. Denying prisoners some privileges through integration into the American workforce would ensure a tradeoff between substantial investment on incarceration and benefits drawn from the large pool of skill sets that is prison population.
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In an increasing era of calls for reform of the US criminal justice system, part of the effort is directed towards improving the lives of prisoners, a process that requires more funding to ensure inmates enjoy their constitutional privileges. This paper proposes an alternative reform strategy that deviates from the traditional role of advocating for reduction in prison population – turning the prison population productive. At least 2.2 million adults are held in American prisons ( The Sentencing Project, 2015s), implying they form a rick pool as a labor force in the current economic dispensation of high labor costs and labor unrests. The proposal seeks to explore the possibility of a win-win situation for the government through integration of prisoners into the workforce. Prison populations have diverse skill sets local government can source to cut down costs through assignment of labor roles. In addition, the military can benefit through recruitment of prisoners showing exceptional rehabilitation progress into its workforce.
A Case Against Special Privileges to Prisoners
The question about what prisoners do during their time in prison cannot generate inspiring or satisfactory answers. In an article featured under the Marshall Project, Metcalf (2018) observed, “We aren’t deadbeats – our days are, in fact, incredibly full”. However, the answer refers to a personal opinion of any inmate. To justify the assertions, Metcalf (2018) embarked on enumerating the details of what a prisoner’s day looks like. In a nutshell, a typical day for a prisoner, bar for their role in the facility, revolves around, eating, exercising, personal hygiene, receiving visitors, attending security checks, reading, and watching television. By any standards, the procedure qualifies as underutilization and wastage of human resources. Drastic reforms are needed to change the current state of affairs through programs that make prisoners productive. Lacity, Rottman, and Carmel (2016) suggested the adoption of a framework they referred to as impact sourcing where prison inmates were to be employed to perform digitally enabled business services for the public and private sectors. According to Lacity et al. (2016), the need for such a policy framework is informed by an understanding that at least 95% of prisoners would be released. However, more than seventy percent of the released inmates experience recidivism because of repeat offences. Therefore, prison employment programs are argued to be the best alternative for assisting in successful reintegration of inmates into the society. The programs have the potential to impact individuals, families, and communities positively. The policy proposal to limit some of the privileges enjoyed by inmates by enrolling them into prison employment programs is based on this understanding.
It is important to reiterate that calls for reform of prisons center on improving the lifestyle of inmates by adding them privileges. However, it is crucial to understand that the current American criminal and justice system adopts a punitive approach in rehabilitation of prisoners. Implementation of prison work programs represents a paradigm shift from the ineffective strategy. The need to remove prisoners from their comfort zones is imperative. Limiting prisoner privileges implies enrolling them to different work programs as garbage collectors and cleaners for local authorities, community workers, or even in the military. The objective is to put into use the large pool of human capital in prisons. The policy proposal seeks to highlight the viability of the strategy and situations where it has been used, including benefits realized by local authorities using the approach.
The Concept of Prison Work Programs and Implications for Stakeholders
Stakeholders keen on undertaking prisons reforms through work programs should be apprehensive of the relationship with penal labor. Penal labor is a form of legal slavery or involuntary servitude under the 13 th Amendment of the constitution of the US. However, the process is only legal where it is explicitly deployed as punishment for a crime for which an individual is convicted. Legal labor uses rehabilitative programs, but is not applicable to inmates in custody who have not been convicted. Nevertheless, implementation of the rehabilitative program should be done with care to avoid offending stakeholders who perceive all forms of penal labor as modern slavery. The intentions of the program should clearly be articulated. In the use, programs under penal labor seek to reduce repeat offending by providing inmates with training and work experience, making them resourceful labor pools for local and state governments and their economies.
Penal labor in the form of community service, which is advocated by this policy proposal, was first conceived in the US in 1966 as punishment for female traffic offenders in Alameda County, California (Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, 2019). Since then a number of counties have adopted the strategy. Therefore, the proposal is based on practical applications that have proved to be effective for rehabilitation of inmates. Unlike other forms of penal labor where a prisoner may be force to work for a private entity that may or may not pay for their labor, community service places the inmate at the center of the local community enhancing their interpersonal skills. This facilitates reintegration into the society upon release from prison. Prisoners need to be motivated by the understanding that as offenders, they ought to make good the loss suffered by the victim. It I important to recognize that community service under penal labor is not intended to benefit the authority in question, but the individual. The service acts as a form of reparative sanction linking the service to the offense sanctioned, meaning that it can be positive in that it invokes responsibility from the offender for their actions. Nevertheless, the incarceration system also benefits because the program lifts a significant burden. Active engagement in community service provides prisoners with crucial lessons on the effects of their actions and the need for social tolerance in dealing with others. Prisoners can be enrolled in programs offered by the government or non-governmental organizations. Implementation of penal labor is a preserve of the sentencing judge who orders community services under probation for a specified number of hours. The duration of community services varies from local authority to another. For instance, penal labor in Washington requires performance of between 50-200 hours of work (Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, 2019). During community service, the offender interacts closely with the public; hence, screening is necessary to guarantee public safety.
Practical and Policy Implications of the Proposal
Implications of the policy proposal need to be looked at from the number of the Americans under the penal labor. Jones (2018) observed that the American criminal justice system has an estimated 6.7 million people under correctional control, including probation and parole, collectively known as community supervision. Approximately 4.5 million American adults are under the community supervision program, though reforms in the criminal justice system have not targeted the probation and parole as an effective way of implementing penal labor programs. However, the programs vary across cities. For instances, residents of Pennsylvania face higher prospects of being subjected to correctional control compared to those in New York despite similarity in crime rates between the two cities. Those hailing from Michigan face low chances of incarceration compared to residents of Alabama, though Michigan has stringent correctional measures. The variations in approaches to penal labor and community services may create differences in effectiveness of the strategies.
Prisoner rehabilitation programs cost money, but the benefits they generate cannot be understated. The most notable benefits are decreases in recidivism, which lowers prison population. On the other hand, educational, vocational, and drug rehabilitation programs that bring people closer to the community, decreasing the likelihood to re-offend and enhancing their potential to contribute to the economy. Community services is a job training opportunity which criminologist have associated to be equally effective in reducing recidivism rates and is cost-effective. Minnesota applies penal labor under its work-release program that allows inmates to undertake community service when nearing their release dates. Prisoners taken through the program have twice as much chance of being employed following two years of release compared to those with no work experience because they did not participate in the work-release program. As a result, work-release program beneficiaries are less likely to be re-arrested or sent back to prison. According to Duwe (2015), review of Minnesota’s work-release program revealed that the state saved at least $1.2 million from the resultant decrease in prison population, which translates to $700 saved per inmate who participated in the program. In addition, vocational training is an opportunity for inmates to give back to the community and improve the economy in the process. The review also showed that Minnesota’s beneficiaries of the program pain more than $0.5 million in taxes compares to non-beneficiaries (Duwe, 2015).
Findings on the effectiveness of programs for integration of prisoners into employment are consistent across studies. Peled-Laskov, Shoham, and Cojocaru (2019) found out that rehabilitation through community service with emphasis on employment yielded positive margins in absorption to employment, competitive wages, and reduced recidivism. Cultivation of prisoners into the employment culture is not a preserve to the criminal justice system. Halushka (2016) noted that under the penal labor jurisdiction, employees of organizational selected for community service take upon themselves to nature cultural capital with the objective to mitigate stigma and enhance interactions with employers. Under most work programs, inmates are taught aspects of disclose of sensitive information, dressing codes, dealing with negativity and stereotypes, negotiating the challenging norms of work culture, and retaining resilience and confidence in the face of rejection. Overall, inmates who enroll in work programs acquire pertinent skills and knowledge to be functional members of the community upon release from prison. The potential of community services to generate benefits across different sectors in the society has been recognized by scholar, leading to suggestions for development of effective programs under penal labor to put the wasted human capital in prisons into meaningful use. Through insourcing, private companies seek to benefit from the programs because of the associated low labor costs, which are projected to help in the current economic hardships. Therefore, penal labor is gaining significance among different stakeholders owing to its economic potential rather than social impacts.
Conclusion
The US leads the world in terms of the percentage population in prison. Different factions are recognizing the detriments of keeping such a high and unproductive prison population on the taxpayers. As result, community service programs under the penal labor code are muted as the most suitable alternative for integrating inmates into the economic fabric of the country. Practical application of work programs for inmates has shown them to be effective in improving re-integration of offenders into the society. Through community service programs, inmates can improve their social and work skills, placing them at an advantage when it comes to securing jobs compared to those who do not participate in the programs. Advocates of prison reforms recognize the role of community service in reducing recidivism, but it is important to understand these are outcomes of the benefits realized by inmates after training under work-release programs. Therefore, stakeholders need to collaborate towards ensuring community service is implemented across prisons as a strategy for exploiting the abundant human capital in prisons. However, implementation needs to take into consideration the opposing voices from factions that believe penal labor to be illegal and exploitative in all its forms. In addition, research into the benefits of the program and the cost of implementation under different settings must be conducted to ensure success of the policy.
References
Centre for Justice and Reconciliation. (2019). Community service. Retrieved from http://restorativejustice.org/restorative-justice/about-restorative-justice/tutorial-intro-to-restorative-justice/lesson-3-programs/community-service/#sthash.tSQ5R35A.dpbs
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