The Review, Volume I, No. 9, September 1911

VOLUME I, No. 9. SEPTEMBER, 1911
A MONTHLY PERIODICAL, PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL PRISONERS’ AID ASSOCIATION AT 135 EAST 15th STREET, NEW YORK CITY.
TEN CENTS A COPY. SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS A YEAR
By E. Stagg Whitin General Secretary, National Committee on Prison Labor
The state’s property right in the prisoner’s labor exists by virtue of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States which provides that slavery or involuntary servitude may be a punishment for crime, after due process of law. This property right the state may lease or retain for its own use, the manner being set forth in state constitutions and acts of legislatures. To make this of material value the prisoner’s labor must be productive. The distribution of the product of the prisoner’s labor inevitably presents the problem of competition. The confounding of the evil of penal servitude with the methods of production and the methods of distribution which have grown out of it has produced a confusion in the thought underlying prison labor regulation by legislative enactment.
The usual penological analysis of prison labor into lease, contract, piece-price, public account and state-use systems is impossible to use in an economic analysis of the labor conditions involved. Economically two systems of convict production and two systems of distribution of convict-made goods exist; production is either by the state or under individual enterprise: distribution is either limited to the preferred state use market or through the general competitive market. In the light of such classification the convict labor legislation of the current year shows definite tendencies toward the state’s assumption of its responsibility for its own use of the prisoner on state lands, in state mines and as operatives in state factories; while in distribution the competition of the open market, with its disastrous effect upon prices, tends to give place to the use of labor and commodities by the state itself in its manifold activities. Improvements like these in the production and distribution of the products mitigate evils, but in no vital way effect the economic injustice always inherent under a slave system. The payment of wage to the convict as a right growing out of his production of valuable commodities is the phase of this legislation which tends to destroy the slavery condition. Such legislation has made its appearance, together with the first suggestion of the right of choice allowed to the convict in regard to his occupation. These statutes still waver in an uncertain manner between the conception of the wage as a privilege, common to England and Germany, and the wage as a right as it exists in France. The development of the idea of the right of wage, fused as it is with the movement towards the governmental work and workshops, cannot fail to stand out in significance when viewed from the standpoint of the labor movement.