Early Prison Work Programs
Prisons are a relatively modern social institution. Until the mid-18th century, fines, banishment from the community, corporal punishment, and execution were the primary means of punishing offenders. By the latter part of the century, incarceration was being championed as a more humane form of punishment.
Shortly after the first penitentiaries began to appear, prison administrators realized that inmates needed some way to productively occupy their time. The penitentiary system that evolved in Pennsylvania was based on keeping inmates in solitary confinement, where they could study the Bible, meditate about their misdeeds, and do penance for their crimes. The prolonged idleness and minimal contact with other people reputedly caused many prisoners to suffer mental breakdowns. To make the isolation less severe, and to help convicts prepare for honest employment after release, officials of prisons modeled on the Pennsylvania or "Solitary" system permitted inmates to work by themselves at various occupations in their cells, such as shoemaking, weaving, tailoring, and polishing marble.
By the 1820's, the New York State prison at Auburn was "fashioning an alternative mode for incarceration. Under the "Congregate" system, inmates worked together, under extremely rigid discipline, in prison factories. Prison factories during the 19th century produced shoes, barrels, carpets, engines, boilers, harnesses, clothing, and furniture-goods that could not be produced at all under the "Solitary" system, or not in quantities sufficient to generate a significant revenue. This merchandise was sold on the open market to American consumers or exported to Canada and Latin America, and the proceeds helped support prison operations.
Meanwhile, southern and Midwestern States were developing their own prison systems, some of which adopted programs that leased inmates to toil virtually as slave labor for private businesses. The convict lease system generated income for the prison and reduced overhead because the contractors in many cases were responsible for feeding and sheltering the convicts they leased. Left to the mercy of the contractors, however, leased convicts were subjected to terrible abuses. The convict lease system expanded after the Civil War, particularly in the southern States, where it became a partial replacement for slavery.
Prison factories that produced cheaply - made, low - wage consumer goods undercut free labor and private business. Aggrieved unions and manufacturers joined forces to bring about legal restrictions and even abolition of prison industrial enterprises. While not as threatening to businesses, the convict lease system was anathema to unions because it pitted free labor against prisoners in direct competition for jobs, thereby driving down wages for free labor - or depriving free labor of jobs entirely.
Yet the alternatives to the brutal convict lease systems and the notorious prison sweatshops of the l9th century were almost as bad. Inmates would sit in their cells all day long or loiter in prison factories that had work only for a handful of men. With no work to do, and without the means for constructive educational or recreational programs, inmate idleness became a serious problem. Increasing numbers of inmates in deteriorating facilities with little to do led inevitably to disruptive behavior and to the harsh forms of discipline that prison administrators felt obliged to adopt in order to prevent chaos.
There were important efforts to reform prison and prison labor practices during the last quarter of the l9th century, most notably the "state-use" system. Devised in New York State, it prohibited prisons from producing goods for sale to the public, but encouraged the production of goods for sale to the New York State Government. For the most part, however, prison administrators in the l9th century were faced with a dismal choice: either accept debilitating and potentially dangerous inmate idleness, or maintain labor programs that exposed inmates to appalling abuses and threatened the interests of private industry and free labor.
