Pubdate: Sat, 22 Feb 2014
Source: Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, GA)
Copyright: 2014 Ledger-Enquirer
Contact:  http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/237
Author: Alva James-Johnson

PRISON LABOR SPARKS DEBATE

On weekday mornings, when most Columbus residents are just starting 
their day, hundreds of Muscogee County Prison inmates are already on 
the job. In shifts starting as early as 6:30 a.m., they are dispersed 
throughout the city to collect trash, clean city buildings, dig 
ditches, maintain roadways and work at locations such as golf 
courses, the animal shelter and the recycling center.

The program, now the largest county prison work camp in Georgia, has 
existed for more than 135 years, according to the Muscogee County 
Prison website. It saves the city between $17 million and $20 million 
annually, officials said. Local entities also benefit from funds the 
program receives from the state.

"The most compelling reasons for our existence are revenue and 
custody of state and county offenders," the prison website reads. 
"The inmate subsidy paid to Muscogee County Prison by the State of 
Georgia is $20 per inmate per day. Based on 528 state inmates, our 
inmate subsidy receipts should reach more than $3.8 million dollars 
per year, which is deposited into the Columbus Consolidated 
Government's general fund. Also, we provide inmates the opportunity 
to earn their GED, as well as 'On the Job' (OJT) training to help 
prepare them to return to society as productive citizens."

But for some in the community -- and across the nation -- such 
monetary incentives raise concerns about the motives of a prison 
system disproportionately populated with black males, a group that 
has provided cheap labor throughout American history. Critics believe 
there's a "prison industrial complex" that has allowed private 
businesses and government entities to profit from the rapid expansion 
of the U.S. inmate population, which today is one of the largest in the world.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New York Times best-seller "The New 
Jim Crow," links the rise in the U.S. prison population to the War on 
Drugs launched by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, resulting in 
mandatory drug sentences that disproportionately affected blacks.

Local law enforcement officials have said they don't keep track of 
drug arrests by race. But last year the Ledger-Enquirer obtained 
arrest statistics from the Georgia Uniform Crime Reporting program 
showing that blacks accounted for 74 percent of arrests on marijuana 
possession charges. The local data correlated with national 
statistics released by the American Civil Liberties Union showing 
that blacks were arrested at four times the rate of whites for the 
use of marijuana, despite both groups using the drug at the same rate.

"Today, due to recent declines, U.S. crime rates have dipped below 
international norm," Alexander wrote in her book. "Nevertheless, the 
United States now boasts an incarceration rate that is six to ten 
times greater than that of other industrialized nations -- a 
development directly traceable to the drug war."

Locally, civil rights organizations such as the National Association 
for the Advancement of Colored People have tried to rally the 
community around the issue.

Johnnie Warner, director of the Columbus Black History Museum, has 
been among those pushing for change. He and some friends recently 
founded the American Freedom Society, a group that meets weekly to 
discuss the problem.

"How could you have profit in a prison system?" Warner asked at a 
recent meeting. "You know the American way: If there's money in it, 
they are blinded from humanity."

Last month the controversy surfaced at Columbus Council when the Rev. 
Richard Jessie, a local minister, called the county prison work 
program "slavery" and said he wouldn't celebrate Martin Luther King 
Jr. Day because of it. Jessie received swift rebukes from City 
Manager Isaiah Hugley and Councilor "Pops" Barnes, both black men. 
Hugley said he took exception to the suggestion that he, as a black 
man, would be associated with slavery. He and Barnes said the program 
is a benefit to inmates because it teaches them job skills and responsibility.

"I verbalized what my position on that is," Barnes said recently. 
"And I don't have anything more to say about that."

Hugley said he hasn't changed his mind, either. Each prisoner costs 
about $13,256 annually, which doesn't include health care benefits 
the city provides, he said. And he believes the labor they provide is 
a good trade-off.

"What I see, being a department head here and as city manager, is 
that the prisoner has an opportunity to interact outside the jail 
with society," he said. "That prisoner gets to gain valuable work 
experience that will help that person to re-enter society with skills 
that will hopefully get them some type of employment that won't get 
them back into the system again.

"And what the city of Columbus gets out of it," he added, "we get the 
value of the labor those prisoners can provide while they gain 
experience as carpenters and electricians and plumbers and 
maintenance workers. And that labor saves the taxpayers dollars 
because we would have to hire persons who would be on the government 
payroll. There's a savings to the city, we know, of somewhere between 
$17 and $20 million."

At the same time, Hugley said he understands the concerns about 
inequities in the justice system.

"Do I think there's uneven justice based on the number of 
African-Americans in prison? I would say yes," he said. "When we've 
got blacks making up 13.8 percent of the nation's population, but 
they make up 31.1 percent of the prison population, a red flag goes 
up for me. ... I don't know what's going on with all of that, but 
there appears to be a disparity.

"And, as an African-American, that disparity concerns me," he added. 
"It's disturbing when you look at the stats. And so I can understand 
how one might see that."

Convict leasing

Last week dozens of people gathered at the Columbus Public Library to 
watch "Slavery by Another Name," a film focused on forms of forced 
labor for thousands of African Americans from the Civil War to World 
War II. The screening was part of a film series organized by Columbus 
State University's Department of History and Geography, which 
received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to 
educate the community about civil rights issues and initiate dialogue.

The film, based on a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas A. 
Blackmon, tells the stories of slaves and their descendants who were 
arbitrarily arrested after the Emancipation Proclamation and forced 
to work in coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads quarries 
and farm plantations under horrendous conditions.

Gary Sprayberry, chairman of CSU's Department of History and 
Geography, said there's a big difference between today's prison 
system and the convict lease system of the post-slavery era -- but 
that there's also reason for concern.

"In the convict lease system, prisoners were leased out to private 
enterprises and were routinely flogged, humiliated, starved and 
denied access to any form of decent health care," he said. "When they 
died, their bodies were routinely discarded, buried in unmarked 
graves, and their families were never notified of their fates.

"Today, prisoners obviously have more rights," he said. "But they are 
still utilized as cheap sources of labor, saving local governments 
millions. And if the accused happens to be poor and can't afford 
proper legal representation, he or she is more likely to end up 
behind bars and more likely to end up being used by the county to 
perform menial, backbreaking tasks."

How the program works

Muscogee County Prison Warden Dwight Hamrick said his top priorities 
are to provide the Columbus Consolidated Government with labor and to 
rehabilitate the inmates. He said there are a total of 576 beds -- 
528 are for state prisoners and 48 for prisoners from the local county.

About 385 inmates leave the prison for work each day and about 104 
work inside the prison doing food service, laundry and cleaning the 
dorms. Of those who do outside detail, about 300 to 350 work for the 
city's Public Works Department.

As of Wednesday, 378 of the inmates were black, 149 white, 26 were 
Hispanic and three were Asian.

Hamrick said he doesn't get caught up in debates about the 
demographics of the prison population or comparisons to slavery.

"I'm not the judge. I don't sentence anybody to prison," he said. "I 
don't see black or white. I see inmates with blue stripes on their pants."

All inmates are required to work, he said. Those who refuse to work 
are placed in isolation/segregation cells.

"The majority of these guys want to go outside the wire," he said. 
"They want to be on the truck. An idle mind is not good. Time really 
drags if you're doing nothing. The busier we keep them, the quicker 
the time goes."

Prisoners who work on sanitation, golf course, recycling and landfill 
details earn $3 per day, while those who do jobs such as facility 
maintenance, street beautification and transportation get nothing. 
Those who earn money receive a payment once they're released from prison.

Hamrick said he doesn't know why some inmates get paid and others 
don't. It was a decision made before he was hired in 2010, he said, 
and the inmates are paid out of the Public Works budget.

He said all the inmates are minimum to medium security and have 
committed lower-level crimes than those in a state prison. They also 
have shorter sentences and are closely supervised.

"Are they a threat to society? Yes, they are inmates," he said. "But 
we don't have murderers and rapists. They wouldn't be eligible for a 
county facility."

Hamrick said GED classes are not mandatory, but some men take 
advantage of the opportunity to better themselves. In 2012, 41 men 
earned On the Job Training certificates and 10 received GEDs. Last 
year, the number of OJTs dropped to 26 and GEDs increased to 29. He 
said most of the prisoners come from other parts of the state and 
leave Muscogee County when they're released, so the prison has no 
idea how many get jobs as a result of the program.

Hamrick said the prison is currently 16 beds short but has been able 
to keep up with the city's demand for work:

"But if the number of inmates were to fall significantly low, I would 
be on the phone calling the Georgia Department of Corrections and 
saying, 'I can't fulfill my obligation for outside and inside detail. 
But I've never had to make that call. Unfortunately, there's a lot of 
crime out there, so we always have inmates."

Public Works Director Pat Biegler said prison labor saves the 
department about $140,000 a week. She says the department receives 
45,000 to 50,000 calls for service a year, and the inmates play a 
significant role. Yet, there's always a demand for more workers.

"If you know anything about Public Works, there is always more work 
than people to do it because we have so many public roadways, so many 
miles of ditches, so many miles of sidewalks, so many facilities," 
she said. "If you look at the volume of things the city needs to take 
care of, there will never be enough people to do everything. So 
certainly we could use more."

Biegler said the new recycling center was designed with inmates in 
the plans. But the prison has a certain capacity, she said, and 
without building additional space, there's a natural cap that exists.

"We really have reached the cap and availability of inmates from 
within the prison," she said. "So if I were planning another program, 
I would not be looking at using inmates."

Biegler said it's not a racial issue. She believes the program allows 
inmates to gain skills they need to apply for jobs in the future.

"When I look at the groups of inmates that I see during the day, 
there are white faces there, too," she said. "The whole issue of 
racial justice and equality is one that's way above my head, to be 
honest. I'm an engineer. I'm kind of straight forward. I don't view 
it that way. I see people who have broken the law. They are serving 
their time, and for the most part, as far as I know, are willing to 
get out and work. And that's a far cry from slavery in my opinion."

Dane Collins, administrator at the Muscogee County Jail, said the 
facility handles 1,100 inmates. He said the jail also has a work 
program, but it's voluntary. Inmates work with parks and recreation 
and other departments, as well as within the jail, providing food 
service, laundry and maintenance.

He said those who work in the program get an extra meal and some have 
sentences reduced for good service.

"We look for ways to incentivize that program," he said. "They're in 
jail awaiting trial. It gives people something to do."

The 13th Amendment

Warner of the Columbus Black History Museum said Columbus' prison 
labor program started at the stockades where slaves were held 
overnight in preparation for auction houses. After the Emancipation 
Proclamation, black men were taken there and formed into chain gangs. 
They were later moved to convict camps.

He said the Emancipation Proclamation prohibited slavery, "except as 
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly 
convicted." And that's why he believes black men are being exploited today.

"You do a crime, you must pay the time," he said. "My problem is, we 
did not teach them that the 13th Amendment allows slavery as a 
punishment for crime.

"If we fail to teach our children properly and thoroughly about the 
Constitution, we take away that food and knowledge our children need 
to secure their freedom," he added.

Warner said he understands the mentality of many of the young men in 
prison. He grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, 
where men hustled to make a living and going to jail was a rite of passage.

"My mother would always say if a man didn't know how to make a 
dollar, he wasn't a man,'" he said. "And she would always say, 'I 
don't know what you're going to be, but I want you to be good at it. 
If you're going to be a pimp, you be the best pimp. If you're going 
to be a hustler, you be the best hustler. If you're going to be a 
doctor, you be the best doctor.'"

In 1979, Warner was hanging with the wrong group of friends while on 
leave from the military. He said they were driving in a stolen car 
and got arrested. Warner said he spent a week in jail. He remembers 
the chains on his hands, across his belly and around his feet.

"I felt like an animal, a slave," he said. "And I said, 'This ain't for me.'"

Warner said the charges were later dropped and he was sent back to 
the military. He then turned to the Bible and it changed his life. He 
also began reading history and developed a sense of identity.

Warner said that's what's missing in the lives of many black men 
today. He also believes society has exploited their lack of self-worth.

"I believe they needed a continuation of cheap labor, and knowing the 
mindset of these young men, they used it for their own personal 
gain," he said. "We didn't want to change their mindset because we 
needed free labor."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom