Business Opportunities Weblog

Prisoners Make Someone a Profit

By on May 1, 2013 in News

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Prisoners don’t just make license plates anymore:

“We Have the Time to Do It Right,” is one of the mantras on the unit’s corporate website; “Built with Conviction” is another.

Although 40 of 50 states still produce license plates behind bars, prison businesses have diversified. Inmates at Arizona Correctional Industries at the Lewis prison complex in Buckeye fix diesel tractors. Nearly a thousand Tennessee and South Carolina convicts use draw knives and hand scrapers to “antique” floors for a company that markets interiors with a vintage look.

The Pendleton, Ore., penitentiary sells a line of Prison Blue work apparel. California has a product in development: its own denim collection, Folsom Prison Blues.

In the U.S., prison industries—correctional facilities with for-profit ventures that sell goods and services to the public—will have sales of over $2.2 billion this year, according to the National Correctional Industries Association, a Baltimore-based trade group. Silver State’s auto-restoration shop here in Indian Springs brought in $130,000 of the facility’s $6 million in fiscal 2010 revenue.

Besides auto-restoration, Silver State Industries also has a shop that packages old playing cards into souvenirs for Nevada casinos, and others that print books and make clothing.

Photo by stoupa/ShutterStock.

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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  • http://n.a. cindy hawkins

    The problem of course is that the incarcerated are considered ‘LEGALLY’ non functional, although ironically, they contribute to the labor force and turn out products. Clearly the inequity in that situation ought to be addressed. Moreover, it would clearly give much-needed acknowledgment and confidence boosts to men and women doing time, who are in fact, while ‘guests of the state’…making something useful, as they are acquiring job skills for themselves.

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