California Prison Labor

The intent in this paper is to focus on the California Prison Inmate Labor initiative, or Proposition 139. That Proposition established the possibility of allowing private employers to contract for employment of inmates. There were strong feelings on both sides of the issue, and those will be discussed in the following pages.

The prison labor initiative, or Proposition 139, was initially proposed by Governor George Deukmejian, who favored its passage in order to reduce the cost to the taxpayers of housing prisoners, as well as providing prisoners with some means to increase their work skills and avoid future incarceration. The Constitutional provision forbidding prison labor had been promulgated in 1879, with the intent of avoiding the sordid and exploitative practices that were current at the time. During Ronald Reagan's term of office in California, he attempted to Institute prison labor, but was stopped by the courts. Deukmejian himself earlier attempted to repeal the constitutional ban against the private use of prison laborers, but the state legislature did not support this effort.

The initiative included a number of important provisions. Essentially, this initiative sought to amend the state constitution in order to allow laborers to work at private enterprise jobs. The state Constitution did allow prisoners to engage in private enterprise that would put them in competition with either industry

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s solely involved with public enterprise as in a publicly-owned factory within the prison walls. While unions were more concerned with competition at the level of convict laborers in private enterprise, the private sector was more concerned with the opposite situation. In an article dealing with that very issue (Factories behind bars, 1991), the author noted that the effort to increase the productivity of prisoners, and create productive, competitive, industries behind bars was growing. The prison establishment did not view the goal of the effort as making a profit, or becoming competitive with private industry, but saw the goal as contributing to the rehabilitation of prisoners by improving their skills, self-esteem. and employability upon release. Other Similar Programs: In explaining how the prison labor initiative would work, Governor Deukmejian referred to the California Youth Authority as offering a similar program that was quite successful. In that program, the California Youth Authority trained young offenders to work as back-up airline reservation clerks for Trans World Airlines. When the normal reservation system was overloaded for TWA, Youth Authority workers would take inquiries and make reservations. Bob Gore, a s

Category: Government - C