As a prisoner, watching your family struggle financially is a tangible pain. A pain that twists the soul and keeps you up at night. This feeling of powerlessness leads to an overwhelming stress that often drive harmful behaviors such as fighting, substance abuse, and drug dealing. For other prisoners without dependents, financial struggles bring a different kind of pain. Hunger pain. The inability to meet basic needs during incarceration can break your spirit. It causes feelings of worthlessness that also fuel negative behaviors. Not to mention poor financial situations commonly lead recently released prisoners to return to prison.
In March of this year, Cummins-Meritor, a joint-venture company operating at Correctional Industrial Facility (CIF), gave prison laborers a $1.50 raise bringing their pay to $2.00 an hour. Kudos to Cummins-Meritor and the administration at CIF for “throwing-a-dog-a-bone.” The problem is these men are not dogs, they are people with families. These men do not need the proverbial bone, or in this case a $1.50 raise. They need a viable means to financially support their families in spite of their absence. They need a means to build a financial nest egg capable of aiding their successful transition back into society. A financial nest egg could provide a safety net as they work to obtain meaningful employment; or potentially form the basis to transition ex-prisoners into small business ownership.
The payment of sweat shop wages is not the alarming part of the story. What is alarming is the fact that as a Joint-Venture, all prisoners employed by Cummins-Meritor are entitled to, at bare minimum, Federal Minimum Wage or prevailing wage in their locality for their respective job. This means as a matter of Federal and Indiana law, prisoners employed by the Brake Shop should be earning between $15.00-$17.00 an hour. Instead they are being paid $2.00 an hour.
The balance is going into IDOC’s coffers. Prisoners at Cummins-Meritor work ten-hour days, six days a week in dangerous, filthy conditions without the necessary personal protection equipment. At Federal Minimum Wage that would mean over four thousand dollars a month to assist in the support of their families before taxes. Or four thousand dollars a month towards building a financially secure, law abiding life.
Instead of reinforcing their self-worth and humanity through the validation of their work ethnic and labor, IDOC chooses to validate their status as slaves through embezzlement? How many families lost housing, transportation, etc, because Indiana’s penal system identify more as slave masters than rehabilitators.
Here’s a parting thought… Earlier this year prisoners in Tacoma, Washington won a $23 million dollar judgement due to a prison administrations. Then, a month later, CIF administrators in their infinite generosity, decide to give brake shop workers a $1.50 raise after fifteen years of paying .55 cents an hour. History shows that the only generous slave master is a scared slave master. Sometimes if you throw-a-dog-a-bone it can keep the dog from turning around and biting you in the ass. Sometimes.
A slave is only a slave if they submit. Inaction is acquiescence. Acquiescence is submission.
About the Author
Landis Reynolds is an IDOC Watch correspondent who is currently incarcerated at the Correctional Industrial Facility. You can can contact him via GTL Connect here or by writing to him directly at:
Landis Reynolds #157028, CIF
5124 W. Reformatory Rd.
Pendleton, IN 46064
Photo: Sympathy Labor Parade — 1916. Source: Wikimedia Commons.