Law: Working Prisons

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New factories with fences

For years Chief Justice Warren Burger has been pleading for prison programs that would help turn the myth of rehabilitation into reality. In a speech last week at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, he offered his latest vision of tomorrow's prisons: "Factories with fences around them." Inmates would turn out an array of goods for "reasonable compensation"; a fair amount would be deducted for room and board and the released workers eventually would take their places as more productive members of society. His plan, he said, has special urgency because the nation is expected to spend up to $10 billion on new institutions over the next decade. Asked the dismayed chief: "Are we going to build more warehouses?"

Prison industry dates back at least 150 years to the days when New York's Sing Sing claimed to be self-sufficient by virtue of its blacksmithing and other activities. But labor and business opposed these programs as unfair competition, and most of them were eliminated. Only recently have they begun to make a limited comeback, and those prisons that do offer jobs have too few available and generally pay less than $1 per hour. Undeterred by those difficulties, Burger said, "I cannot believe that this great country of ours—the most voracious consumer society in the world—could not absorb the production of even as many as 100,000 prisoners."