Do inmates in the Dane County jail deserve a living wage?

That is currently being debated in not one, but three different committees of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. At question, is whether county inmates – you know, those found guilty of crimes not serious enough to go to state prison – should be paid a living wage for doing kitchen work and washing laundry. Such a move means inmates in Dane County would be making more than most 16 year-olds at their first part-time jobs.

The background behind this ordinance is a marriage run amok of local government facilities management and classic Madison political correctness.

Dane County has three corrections facilities, but the one which serves as a maximum security jail – located on the sixth and seventh floors of the City-County Building in downtown Madison – is getting crowded. So to alleviate the problem, county officials considered building a new facility. But when construction estimates came in at $150 million, it was dropped.

However, the talk over the new jail got Dane County discussing ways to save money. Among the ideas floated was replacing the jail’s laundry and kitchen service providers with inmates doing the work themselves.

Naturally, this angered the local AFSCME who told the Isthmus last year it supplies ‘a “highly functional” food service program’ and fights against its members losing the work.

But it was a local church group, the Madison-Area Urban Ministry, which got the living wage ball rolling. Saying prison labor is akin to “modern-day slavery,” Linda Ketcham, the executive director of the ministry, requested that inmates be paid ‘the minimum wage, if not the county’s living wage.”

In the past, as is common in most Wisconsin counties, inmates currently in the Dane Co. – and not assigned work-release privileges – get a weekly stipend or time removed from their sentence.

Leading this tomfoolery parade is Supervisor John Hendrick, who in a January 2015 neighborhood newsletter to constituents made his intentions more than clear:

Another change in the Executive Budget will terminate a contract for living wage jobs providing laundry service to the jail and transfer the work to jail inmates for little or no pay. I support an ordinance amendment to guarantee a living wage for jail inmate workers.

Since then, Hendrick has introduced ordinance “2014 OA-064” and has six co-sponsors. As the picture below shows, the intended changes to Dane County law are very clear.

Dane living wage

 

According to the ordinance’s own financial estimate, having inmates make $11.47 hourly would cost the county over $862,000 annually. While this is some cost-savings from years’ past using public employees, it’s nothing compared to the $1.1 million annually they’d save if inmates were paid wages similar to those in state prisons would end up saving Dane County taxpayers (Average daily wage for work done inside the facility: $0.96 to $3.36.).

Dane County political insiders put the chances of this ordinance passing and becoming law at fifty-fifty. This means Dane County still has a chance to avoid being a national punchline if they pass this – not even Berkeley, CA has been crazy enough to go this route.

Call it ’21st Century Slavery’ all you want, but when you’ve suddenly made working in prison more profitable than working on the outside, you might want to question how balanced the scales of social justice are.

Will Dane County supervisors be nuts enough to pass this ordinance? Probably not. With the rising costs of corrections on a local, state, and federal level even liberal Dane County would have a hard time justifying this kind of silliness if it ends up affecting one of any other number of pet projects. Then again, who am I to stop Dane County liberals from embracing their own stereotype?

Published with permission.