I have noticed for some time now that when I hear the phrase "Made In America" my reaction is not quite what it used to be. You see I've always thought the idea of outsourcing the work out of the U.S. might be good for the business man, but it does remove jobs from the country. That isn't the only negative. As more and more industries move outside of the country a lot of the infrastructure totally ceases to exist in the country. This leaves us in situation where large components in our electrical grid for example cannot even be manufactured in the U.S. any longer.

Yes, you read that right. If certain components in our electrical grid fail we have to hope we have them in stock or purchase them abroad. This was not always the case. So is the U.S. totally self sufficient? No. Could it be made self sufficient in the event of a catastrophe? Sure. How long it would take to spin up and retool a facility to do these things, train people to do them, etc. That is the issue. How long can you and your family survive without electricity? Look around your house at the electrical things you use. Imagine if none of those worked for weeks, months, years...

So this is tied into the OLD thinking when people used to say "Made In America". That was what it meant decades ago in my youth. That isn't what I think any longer.

When I hear "Made In America" today the question that immediately goes through my head is "Was it made by inmates in prison, or people who need a job and are not in prison?"

Yes, that is actually what I think. I was watching an ad the other day for a T-Shirt and they happened to mention it was Made In America and that was the question that went through my head.

Some of you have already read my articles about the Prison Industrial Complex. Some of you may not have.

Back in 1994-1995 time frame I worked for a place called Correctional Products and Services, Inc. in a northern suburb of Denver, Colorado. I started there as a Temp and was quickly hired. I worked there for a couple of years until I went on to work for IBM.

I remember being surprised at what this place did when I first worked there, but it actually took me many years before something went CLICK in my head an I truly thought about the ramifications of that work.

The place was a two sided warehouse with offices in front of both. In one warehouses we had table saws, drill presses, staining rooms with vents, etc. The other warehouse was full of racks full of parts, wooden parts, plastic parts, metal parts, and all that would be needed to package things up.

I built the picking lists for the people to know what to pull from the warehouse for orders, I printed out the Bills of Lading to give to the trucks, and thus I often dealt with the trucks. I kept track of orders and would end up creating a Shipping List of my own design that the entire company ended up relying on heavily. Later I'd also take on a second role as another customer service rep so I actually took orders, built them, and interfaced with our clients. I'd also let them know when things were shipping, where they were, etc. I'd also have the role of dealing with all the temp employees as this place always had a lot of those. I spent a lot of time using Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel. :)

That wasn't the thing that was important here. What is important is who our clients were.

The Clients

Our clients were prisons. We would ship furniture kits by the diesel truck load to prisons around the country. Sometimes it would be raw parts, and other times fully finished pieces. We didn't usually finish them those were rarer orders. We'd often ship assembled pieces that simply needed to finish them, stain them, upholstery them, etc.

So why were these going to prisons? Inmates would finish the process and would assemble them regardless of what stage we sent them. We sent them a lot of furniture desks, tables, credenzas, chairs of all kinds, book shelves, dressers, etc.

The longer I was there I noticed less and less wooden parts being ordered by some places. They were just ordering the screw kits or metal parts that would go along with this. I did an analysis and told them "Hey, do you know we're losing money on this?" I was increasingly realizing that many of the parts they stopped ordering because they had the inmates making those parts. I eventually told them I was trying to get a computer related job as that was my specialty. Then one day they gave me a weeks severance and I was the only person in the history of the company that got severance. Why did they do it? Well that losing money thing I mentioned was catching up to them. They needed to reduce staff and they knew I was looking for another job as I was open about it and they were actually supportive. They gave me a weeks severance, and 4 days later I was working at IBM so it worked out well.

I think back to that place often these days. You see I also chatted with some truck drivers from Juniper Valley Products from Canyon City, Colorado. The truck driver. He was an inmate from Canyon City quite some distance away, and he'd wander around with no guards or anything. He just drove the truck. I remember the inmate I spoke to the most as he was a Black Belt in some form of Karate and he'd ended up in prison for kicking someone's ass.

What did I realize?

Later in life when I was listening to people talking about sweatshops and outsourcing jobs to other countries, and I was looking at places that used to be factories in the U.S. that were now decayed and like a scene from a post apocalyptic game or movie I had a realization.

I realized there was another direction jobs were going that was out of sight and out of mind. These jobs were going into the prisons. I knew that a lot of furniture manufacturing places had gone out of business as they couldn't compete with the prison labor. In fact, my first manager at CPSI came from such a business that went out of business in Boulder, Colorado.

So I began wondering what products and services these inmates were doing. I knew with a certainty they were making massive amounts of furniture. We shipped the Governor of Illinois his office desk when I worked there. I knew that at least in my state of Colorado the inmates were driving the truck too, so they didn't have to hire a truck driver.

What else? Well Google had been around for awhile and it was a handy search engine even back when I had this realization and they were still in the "Do no evil" motto phase before ABC Corp kicked all of that to the curb. So I went searching. I found out CPSI had been out of business for a long time. I found some court cases about inmate labor and them not being paid enough when the amount was well below $1/hour. Which you'd find out was consumed by things from inside the prison like toothpaste, and other things, so it wasn't actually them making a profit. I found out that at least in Colorado all State offices were mandated to have to purchase a large amount of their goods from the prisons if the prisons were making them.

I looked at the catalogs online. They are easy to find. Just pick a state and type in the state name and something like correctional products and you'll find wealth of catalogs offering services, products, etc.

I began wondering how many other businesses besides making furniture had been run out of business due to not being able to compete with the prison labor? I mean they were offering all manner of services, and every time I look their catalog of services becomes larger.

Is your job next? Do you work on the internet making web pages or in some other tech field? Guess what, inmates are doing that as well...

How deep is this rabbit hole?

I began wondering if the government was still subsidizing taking care of these prisoners? If they are then the inmates are being paid for with tax payer funds, and/or debt. Yet, they are turning around and manufacturing goods that put people not in prison out of business.

Now it is common to say prison has always been about hard labor. Sure hard labor such as pounding rocks in a quarry and doing jobs that most people don't want to do is a big deterrent. Yet it isn't that any longer and almost by stealth it has not been that for some time. It in some ways is better than going to college, or a vocational technology school. You get on the job training, and other than the stigma of prison to deal with you potentially have hands on experience. So unlike going to college and getting a degree and then trying to apply for a job where they say a degree plus 3 years of experience you actually might have the experience. You graduate from college, but how do you get the actual experience if no one will hire you to let you get it? Whereas in prison they get similar skills but they also get the experience.

So why does it sound so much like indentured servitude, slavery, etc? Because, it is...

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime.

So is this perhaps why victimless crimes such as those involving marijuana often have longer prison sentences than violent offenders? Perhaps... which would you rather have, a violent slave, or a calm one.

Is this perhaps one of the real reasons marijuana and so many other things are illegal. Yes, a lot of that is so they won't compete with the big pharmaceutical companies out there, but I suspect a lot of it is to fuel the slave labor. With more and more products being produced by the Prison Industrial Complex they need more and more slaves.

Thus, they keep making more and more things illegal. Often this day you are guilty without a trial. Things have changed.

The plantations are growing they just are behind barbed wire fences and concrete cell blocks.

So when you think of the words "Made in America" it is totally possible you'll think the same thing I do now. Was it made by a prisoner? If so then I think that is actually WORSE than outsourcing. It is encouraging the modern slave labor, it is putting non-criminals out of work just like outsourcing, and it is fueling the insatiable drive to create more and more laws to supply the increasing demand for slave labor.

It could be why we have the largest prison population on the planet in the so-called "Land of the FREE, and home of the BRAVE".

Check it out on google yourself. Look at the catalogs around the country of services and products supplied by prisons. I think you'll be surprised, and likely a bit horrified. It will also make a lot of the crazy laws start to make a lot of sense. Perhaps it'll inspire some steemit posts, where you tell us what you found.

NO VICTIM? NO CRIME!