Look for that Prison Label.

• Author: Light, Julie
• Position: Inmate work programs raise human rights concerns

The assembly lines at CMT Blues look like those at most any other U.S. garment factory. Workers hunch over industrial sewing machines intently stitching T-shirts. Unlike most garment workers, however, all of these are male. There is an even bigger difference: Armed guards patrol the shop floor.

CMT Blues is housed at the Maximum Security Richard J. Donovan State Correctional Facility outside San Diego. It is part of California's Joint Venture Program that links companies to state prisons. Seventy workers sew T-shirts for Mecca, Seattle Cotton Works, Lee Jeans, No Fear, Trinidad Tees, and other U.S. companies. The highly prized jobs pay minimum wage. Less than half goes into the inmates' pockets. The rest is siphoned off to reimburse the state for the cost of incarceration, a victim restitution fund, the inmates' families, and mandatory savings accounts. The California Department of Corrections and CMT Blues owner Pierre Sleiman say they are providing inmates with job skills, a work ethic, and income.

But two inmates who worked for CMT Blues say Sleiman and the Department of Corrections are operating a sweatshop behind bars. What's more, the inmates say that prison officials retaliated against them when they blew the whistle on what they claim was corruption at the plant. The prisoners claim they were forced to replace "Made in Honduras" labels with "Made in U.S.A." tags in an effort to defraud consumers. And they say they were not paid minimum wage, paid on time, or paid for their first month of work, as required by law.

They are suing CMT Blues, the garment labels that subcontracted the T-shirt manufacturer, Donovan's warden, other prison officials, and the California Department of Corrections for labor law violations, civil rights violations, and fraud. The suit, filed on August 23, 1999, in Los Angeles, has been moved to San Diego County, and the plaintiffs' attorneys expect to go to trial within a year.

The CMT Blues case is a window onto the "prison industrial complex." That term refers to the increasingly close relationship between private corporations and what were once exclusively public correctional institutions. It encompasses not only prison labor, but the host of firms profiting from private prisons, prison construction, and services like health care and transportation. In today's America, incarceration has become a booming business.

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