Anarchism; Feminism; Women -- Social and moral questions
The enormity of the graft under the Rhode Island contract may be
estimated from the fact that this same Company pays 62 1/2 cents a
day in Nebraska for the convict's labor, and that Tennessee, for
example, gets $1.10 a day for a convict's work from the Gray-Dudley
Hardware Co.; Missouri gets 70 cents a day from the Star Overall Mfg.
Co.; West Virginia 65 cents a day from the Kraft Mfg. Co., and
Maryland 55 cents a day from Oppenheim, Oberndorf & Co., shirt
manufacturers. The very difference in prices points to enormous
graft. For example, the Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co. manufactures
shirts, the cost of free labor being not less than $1.20 per dozen,
while it pays Rhode Island thirty cents a dozen. Furthermore, the
State charges this Trust no rent for the use of its huge factory,
charges nothing for power, heat, light, or even drainage, and exacts
no taxes. What graft!
It is estimated that more than twelve million dollars' worth of
workingmen's shirts and overalls is produced annually in this country
by prison labor. It is a woman's industry, and the first reflection
that arises is that an immense amount of free female labor is thus
displaced. The second consideration is that male convicts, who
should be learning trades that would give them some chance of being
self-supporting after their release, are kept at this work at which
they can not possibly make a dollar. This is the more serious when
we consider that much of this labor is done in reformatories, which
so loudly profess to be training their inmates to become useful
citizens.
The third, and most important, consideration is that the enormous
profits thus wrung from convict labor are a constant incentive to the
contractors to exact from their unhappy victims tasks altogether
beyond their strength, and to punish them cruelly when their work
does not come up to the excessive demands made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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