Bozelko: Ex-cons fare better after piece of PIE

Approximately 2,200 federal inmates were released on July 19, based on new calculations of their sentences under the First Step Act. According to Fox News, this was "the largest group to be freed so far under a clause in the First Step Act that reduces sentences due to 'earned good time.' "

An additional 1,045 federal inmates had already been freed without incident, and more inmates will be trickling out.

The Marshall Project reports that the White House was hurriedly and harriedly looking for jobs for them at the time. After all, employment is essential to inmates' successful re-entry, and the historic nature of the First Step Act and the fact that the Republican Party has accomplished far more than the Democrats by way of prison reform means a First Step Act failure is not an option.

The last-minute, slapdash search shouldn't have been necessary. Jobs could have been lined up already for many of these released inmates if we had embraced and expanded private employment for them.

Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Programs are prison labor whereby private companies employ inmates as they would anyone else, but the work is performed in prisons. PIE programs operate in 44 jurisdictions around the country (including North Carolina and South Carolina), and many of the businesses involved in the program employ their inmate workers when they get out.

Businesses that received PIE certification in Iowa, Kansas and California hire incarcerated workers after their release. A full 40% of employees in the corporate office of Televerde, a marketing company, worked for them behind bars in Arizona.

One of the few analyses of the PIE program, conducted by the University of Southern Carolina'sSchool of Social Work, found that it helps released prisoners find employment sooner than inmates who weren't involved with PIE programs, and that the wages are higher for those who were in the program.

Private employment helps female inmates especially, which is important because the Prison Policy Initiative reported last month that there are virtually no widespread assistance programs awaiting women who leave custody every year.

Even though private employment of inmates has both rehabilitative potential and recidivism-reducing power, it's vilified. It's blamed for low wages, stealing gigs from free workers and being exploitative -- a vestige of slavery. And those charges aren't totally baseless.

But pennies-per-hour prison earnings are associated with non-PIE employment; PIE programs pay the prevailing wage to the inmates and certify that they're not displacing other workers in order to operate in correctional facilities. Wage concerns are insufficient reason to reject the PIE programs.

When we say that public-private prison labor partnerships have been around for 150 years, it's because people once leased convicts; there's only one loophole in the 13th Amendment abolition of slavery, and it's punishment for a crime. People take any attempt to protect prison labor programs as a defense of slavery.

Comparison to slavery is still not enough to ignore the promise of the PIE programs. Even abolition experts concede that slavery isn't the work that you do or what you're paid, it's the status of being owned. To me, living and participating in an economy with little to no income is slavery.

Freedom is getting a piece of the pie, which is what these public-private partnerships make possible.

Chandra Bozelko is a columnist with GateHouse Media. She writes the blog Prison Diaries (prison-diaries.com) and is the vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Reach her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

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