'Orange Is the New Black' Makes Prison Labor Look Arbitrary. But Is It Really?

All able-bodied federal inmates must work in both federal and state prisons.

Prison factories have seen a boom in recent years, with inmates producing everything from their own uniforms to the solar panels powering government buildings. For the past 80 years, most labor has fallen under the umbrella of the U.S. government corporation Federal Prison Industries (FPI), otherwise known as UNICOR.

One point Orange Is the New Black gets right? That classic image of inmates stamping out license plates for the DMV is way outdated. As the inmate population has grown, some prisons have actually become private, for-profit companies themselves — and small changes to the laws have allowed companies to "partner" with government-run prisons as well, through subcontracting or the "leasing of inmates." This sort of contracting has been legal since 1979, but began to spread nation-wide in the mid-90s starting with a model bill in Texas.

Today, nearly one million prisoners make office furniture, and manufacture textiles and clothing for stores ranging from JC Penney's to Victoria's Secret. They take hotel reservations, work in slaughterhouses, and package holiday coffees for Starbucks. (Just check out this list.)

Some companies are very upfront about their use of prison labor, such as the "Prison Blues" denim company in Oregon (slogan: "Made on the Inside to be worn on the Outside©).

So, prisons offer a captive workforce under constant oversight — and labor comes cheap.

Prisoners get paid between 93 cents and $4.73 per day, with some reports of wages as low as 16 cents. Check out this article from an internal prison newsletter, in which an inmate compares wages to rising prices in the prison canteens.

Prison labor comes so cheap, in fact, that some members of ALEC have quietly touted it as a sort of closer-to-home, reverse-outsourcing mechanism to bring jobs back to the United States. American companies who once looked to places like China and Bangladesh to cut costs have found an even more cost-efficient solution in these workers, who can neither form unions nor demand minimum wage.

Penal labor as cost-cutting mechanism isn't a new concept in American history (think: chain gangs a la O Brother Where Art Thou? and de-facto penal colonies like, oh, the whole state of Georgia). Historians Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman write: "Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way for business to address these dilemmas. Penal servitude now strikes us as a barbaric throwback to some long-lost moment that preceded the industrial revolution, but in that we’re wrong. From its first appearance in this country, it has been associated with modern capitalist industry and large-scale agriculture."

So, we have huge numbers of under-compensated, non-unionized workers as a state-sanctioned backbone of the economy? And, as Attorney General Holder pointed out, a disproportionate number of these workers are black?

Yeah, something may be wrong with this picture.

Inmate advocates argue that well-considered labor policies can also serve as job training and a focused means of filling idle hours. UNICOR has always proclaimed its goals to be "to protect society and reduce crime by preparing inmates for successful reentry through job training."

In practice, critics have been skeptical of labor programs efficacy. What's the point of training a prisoner on a factory line, hundreds of miles from their home town? Why not pay minimum wage, with salaries building into a trust pending release?

One of Attorney General's most widely-accepted talking points: Skyrocketing imprisonment has become an economic drain on tax payers. When there are so many inmates costing so much money, why not use prison labor as a means of defraying the costs of the prisons they're living in?

The answer? Many already do: Prisoners sew their own uniforms, grow their own food, and paint their own cells. And, as this trend continues, they'll also go to work for the private companies turning a pretty profit.