Do you know what work inmates in the U.S. are doing? Do you know how extensive it has become? I want to give you an example.

I wrote a post about slavery and prison, and the 13th amendment earlier. It is an article on Con-sourcing that I have written similar posts to before. I think it is a VERY important issue for citizens of the United States to be aware of. Yet, I realize that even though I provide the links in some of my earlier posts most people won't follow them to see how crazy this has gotten.

This post I am going to focus on the Colorado Criminal Corrections Industry since I live in Colorado. Though as far as I have been able to tell programs like this exist in every state. I think you are about to have your mind blown when you see how much things have actually changed.

There are a couple of other points I'd like you to keep in mind as we explore this:

• Marijuana has been legal in Colorado for a couple of years now. This means the flow of new inmates related to this should have stopped in our state. This would impact any recidivism studies related to crimes involving marijuana.
• We've heard of sweatshops overseas and jobs being lost to out sourcing to other countries. People seem to be unaware that we've lost likely as many, and perhaps more jobs to prisons.
• As we look at products and services, do not many of those sound like careers and jobs that people who are not in prison would like to do? In some cases people who are not in prisons can no longer expect to get such jobs. I think you'll quickly see this list is way bigger than expected, and is no longer pounding rocks and making license plates. In fact every time I look at this list it just gets bigger.

There are a couple of entities in the state of Colorado. One of them that is doing a better job of trying to distance their public appearance that they are actually a business that the labor is done by inmates is Juniper Valley Products which sometimes is abbreviated JVP.

I made a huge reply to @thatgermandude and I realized that the reply was worth of a post of its own with more effort put into it. So let us begin.

I am first going to visit https://www.coloradoci.com/

For posterity here is what their front page looks like today May 22nd, 2017:

They also have an interesting PDF they made for marketing purposes. That can be looked at through the "Who We Are Brochure" link on the left side (also in the screenshot above if the website happens to change). This document is from 2014, so any recidivism studies it references would not yet be impacted by the now legalized Marijuana.

That is all from their marketing brochure so of course it is going to spin it as a positive. If those things were the only factors then perhaps it would be. Sadly, they are not the only factors.

Let's take a look in that brochure the services and products they offer. Keep in mind those bullet points I listed earlier.

I found that Lobster Farming one to be interesting since we are a land locked state nowhere near a salt water environment. Do those look like the jobs you thought an inmate would be involved in? How many of those look like jobs someone not in prison might love to have?

Well there are the expected License plates. Look at that list, and read through it. Think about jobs that are no longer available. Think about us complaining about outsourcing out of the country. Perhaps they went instead somewhere like this:



That last is actually in Draper, UT but a place I worked for used to ship things to their facility so they are a good example.

I believe this list might be the most surprising. Here are a few I want you to think about. Prisoners doing this work while people outside of prison can't find a job, and those released from prison likely have a tough time finding work as well. If you can get jobs in some of these fields after prison, then these days prison might be a better deal than college.

• Antique Vehicle Restorations
• Auto Collision Repair/Painting
• Culinary Arts
• Delivery & Installation - think about that one very carefully
• eBay Auto Sales
• Fleet Services - aka truck drivers - let that sink in
• Heavy Equipment
• Information Technology
• Landscape Maintenance & Beautification
• Moving Service - So inmates might actually be moving things for people
• Retail Outlets
• Sales and Showroom
• Reupholstery
• Service Station
• State & Federal Surplus
• Tablet Service
• Transportation & Tech Training
• Web Design - web designers here, what do you think of inmates doing your job?

This is just Colorado, and it is only a cursory look.

You can dig much deeper and I have done so before and the more you look the more insane it might begin to look. I've seen enough prisoners doing work recent images, and I encountered unguarded inmate truck drivers in my past. To me they look to be modern day slave plantations. It made me seriously doubt slavery actually ended. We simply put it in out of the way buildings that the public doesn't get to see. It also explains why seemingly petty crimes and sometimes things that shouldn't even be crimes at all end up with long prison sentences. It also explains why the United States has the largest prison population on the planet. Some of them are the criminals that you think of when you think of prison. Most of them are actually nothing more than slaves, enslaved by the system.

They will get out of prison and find it difficult and increasingly so to find work. This becomes more and more the case as the prison industry acquires more and more of the business. Some of these things the prisons have mostly dominated so if they have training in them then the only place they can really find work is back in prison.

In addition, I don't know about you but that list of products and services which is not even close to comprehensive looks better than many vocational schools.

Think about it... really think about it... follow the money...