The concept of working inmates is a good idea, assuming the labor is not abused by prison officials for their own personal benefit.
Prison life is a boring, dreary experience. If inmates have meaningful work to do, they have less idle time to get into trouble, and hopefully they’ll acquire marketable skills that could help them find employment when they get out of prison, which most of them will at some point.
A recent report, however, by Mississippi’s legislative watchdog committee suggests that the state made a mistake when it turned this responsibility for working state inmates over to a private nonprofit company.
Mississippi Prison Industries Corp. is tanking financially, has made questionable expenditures and is doing a poor job of recordkeeping, including tracking just how beneficial its services are in reducing the numbers of inmates who return to prison when they get out. This is according to the Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review.
Over the past six years, according to PEER’s analysis, Mississippi Prison Industries has seen its net worth fall by $6.7 million and its cash balance delcine by more than $4 million.
Its financial situation has deteriorated so much, according to PEER, that the corporation might have to seek bankruptcy or dissolve if it doesn’t make some drastic changes to the products it is producing with inmate labor and the amount of money spent on administration.
Among the expenditures are some obvious red flags — more than a half-million dollars on lobbying the Legislature and almost a quarter-million dollars in travel in one recent year.
Then there’s this nugget, as provided by Rep. Jerry Turner, the chair of a separate committee in the House that was created to monitor government efficiency and accountability: Over the past year, even as its finances were swooning, Mississippi Prison Industries raised the salaries and benefits of the administration and employees by 27 percent. That’s one suspicious way to stay nonprofit: Give cushy salaries and benefits to employees.
The Legislature needs to revisit its 1990 decision that created Mississippi Prison Industries. The state is one of only two in the nation that privatized this function. Maybe it made sense at the time as a way to combat the problem with wardens and other corrections officials treating inmates as if they were indentured servants.
That corrupt system, however, appears over time to have just been replaced with something that, while not as bad or as directly, may still be taking advantage of inmates for personal gain.
