Mr. HARDY. Mr. Chairman, could I come in on that one? Mr. HARDY. There's a very strong feeling of the administration, and I am speaking of myself, for the use of industries as a training tool for inmates. There are several shops such as the tag plant or the industrial laundry-these industries produce money for our Department and are all right for that purpose-but for the training of men going back on the street I see no relationship to what they are doing out there and what these industries do on the street except develop work. You sometimes wonder whether the tail is wagging the dog with overemphasis on prison industries in a correctional setting. I think it's necessary for income for these institutions. But I would like to say, Mr. Chairman, that there are other activities for training inmates that are non-income-producing but which do train them in an area where they can come back into the community and tie in with the type of training for jobs available for them. Senator MATHIAS. I thought I understood Mr. Gregory to say that these industries were geared to train inmates for the outside. If that is not the case-why? Mr. HARDY. I don't want to contradict my assistant. Senator MATHIAS. Well, I don't see why. If they aren't specifically geared they ought to be, so that they can provide relevant training in the industries. Mr. HARDY. First we try to get new industries that tie in with. the community work plus these old industries such as the tag plant and the laundry. They have been with us for 20 some years or more and we just can't wipe them off the board because we lose income. So there are certain inmates who are assigned to industry for purposes of institutional need and they work in these restricted operations. But our thrust now is to get them into the vocational complex program, our college program, and what have you, so they will be better prepared to step out of the gates of Lorton. Now the youth center, which we developed in 1960 has no industries. It's our feeling that prison industries should have a relationship with what the man will be doing in the future. Senator MATHIAS. Could you, Mr. Gregory, give me statistics on idle time for inmates. Mr. GREGORY. In various institutions? Senator MATHIAS. In all institutions. Mr. GREGORY. No; I can't. This is a little bit out of my domain. Mr. HARDY. I can speak to that. You are speaking of idle time? Senator MATHIAS. Yes. Mr. HARDY. At the Lorton Reformatory today I could say that we have 300 man-hours of idle time. We have 300 man-hours or man-days of idle time at anytime we look at our employment situation in the Lorton Reformatory. This doesn't mean we have 300 men sitting idly by during the day while they should be working, but we have to take so many program units. If you have 1,200 men or I'll make it easy for myself and say 1,300 men, we have a program for 1,000 men to be in an active program. That means that 300 would be idle but you have 1,000 with 6 or 8 hours work. Now you have to take that overpopulated people and dilute our program and make it 1,000 in order to give everybody some work to do. So what I am saying sir, instead of a 6-hour day, I will say 8 hours because we have things that interfere with the workday, you have a man working actually 4 hours a day at Lorton in its program. I would like to speak of this further as we get to the implementation of the Court Reform and Criminal Procedures Act. We will have additional men idle in the program if we don't do something about these people to meet our responsibility. Senator MATHIAS. What percentage of the inmates are in the industry program? Mr. HARDY. We have currently about 275 inmates in this program out of a total of 1,400. Senator MATHIAS. Mr. Chairman, I am tempted beyond the point of being able to resist. How many automobile engines do you have now to break down and rebuild? Mr. HARDY. We have a fleet of 1,000 or more vehicles we maintain in our department. They keep being surveyed incidentally. Of that fleet there is a certain number that has to continuously be under repair: first, second, third, and fourth echelon maintenance. That is from changing tires to putting in new transmissions or new motors. The number of men that we have in the garage I would have to ask Mr. Boone to give an account on that— he is superintendent and responsible for that. Senator MATHIAS. Primarily, I am thinking of the automobile engines you might have on blocks for repair or being rebuilt. Mr. HARDY. I would say that we have about eight live motors on the block being used by the inmates training in automobile repair work. We also have a number of vehicles having body repair work. Senator MATHIAS. How does that number compare with the number they had when we went out to look at them? Mr. HARDY. It hasn't increased very much since you were out there. It's not to the level we would like to see. There are other brands coming in that we will talk about which will stick to the vocational and academic stage and you will be able to pinpoint that. Senator MATHIAS. What about the chairman's question? The routine jobs in the laundry that are unskilled-the end prdouct of which is developing skill? Also, how about your masonry program? Mr. HARDY. We train men in brick masonry. Men are trained in our dormitory renovation program to give them experience in working on active projects in placing mortar, and they move from there. Many have moved into the Lincoln Heights project. Many are working on the National Capital Housing projects and have done a wonderful job. Men who are trained in house wiring move into the projects in the institution and into the Lincoln Heights project. We get into all the building trades. Senator MATHIAS. That is the point. What is your relationship with unions in recognizing your inmates in program training? Mr. HARDY. There are some unions which are helpful and supportive and there are other unions that are restrictive and our men can't seem to crack those areas of employment. Before I go on record and be reported in some paper as to what the unions are thinking, I would just like to say that some unions are resistant and some are very helpful. Senator STEVENSON. Thank you, Mr. Hardy. Mr. HARDY. Our next witness is Dr. Arnold Trebach, who has worked with the Department of Corrections as a consultant and representing the Urban Coalition. Dr. Trebach has so many things going that I can't keep a full background on him but he is here to speak on the common market and the regional and private industries in corrections. STATEMENT OF ARNOLD S. TREBACH, PH. D., SENIOR CONSULTANT, CRIMINAL JUSTICE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT Dr. TREBACH. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, as Mr. Hardy indicated, I am an independent criminal justice consultant, a private citizen and, in fact, I am a constituent of Senator Mathias. Senator MATHIAS. Very welcome news. Dr. TREBACH. Thank you. I am not an official of the Department, however I do count myself among the friends of the District of Columbia Department of Corrections. I am proud to say that because in my opinion it either is or is fast becoming about the best correctional department in the country. I say that with full appreciation of its being a far-ranging statement. Having said that I still must point out that in my opinion as good as the Department is, that it, like virtually all American correction, is still perpetuating a form of what I call slavery or peonage in terms of the work program that it has in institutions. I know it is a strong word but there is no other way for me to describe the situation which they have in Lorton and all American institutions where men are working because they must work if they want any money at all. They are now being paid wages of 12 cents an hour. It may be higher in Lorton. It can be higher in the New York Bureau. But it might run up to 36 cents or a little bit higher. Unless we face the fact that we do have this system, which is accepted as normal in American practice, we haven't faced one of the most fundamental problems in our attempt to control crime in this country. I think this type of thing is crime producing. In this sense. Look at a man who commits a crime. What are the characteristics? The most outstanding characteristic of the criminal we worry about, the people who commit violent crimes, is that they are poor. Man is wretched. We then take them and rehabilitate them, we make them infinitely poor and infinitely more wretched. There is something perverse about that. Change must fully come in our approach to how we provide work for men serving a sentence. Clearly change must come in the correctional industry. Change must come in the way we direct and compensate those men under sentence who in effect run the insti tution. These are the men locked in an industry, in the kitchen, or what have you. They are paid-but they are paid peon wages. Now I do happen to know that Mr. Hardy, Mr. Montilla, and Mr. Gregory are among the leaders who continue to change the situation and clearly change must come. Now among the changes that are contemplated are some projects on which I have been working such as the following: There should be full wages for the most productive workers in these institutions. By full wages I mean that we are rapidly coming to the point where this system or any other system must pay the sweeper the regular wage that he gets on the outside if he just sweeps the floor and is an inmate. We must pay a worker in the industrial shop the competitive wage that he would get on the outside. Incidentally I did this study for the National Urban Coalition, I looked around to see if anywhere in this country I could find an example which had recognized this single problem fact that a man working in an institution should get paid what he gets paid on the outside. I could find no existing example in American corrections. I don't say it's not there. I couldn't find one. I found foreign examples but nothing in this country. Another change should be private enterprise taking over some of these shops employing the men at regular wages and selling the goods as freely as they come. Another change we are working on would be a mutual common market covering the mid-Atlantic region, tying together correctional systems in mutually supporting ways and the sale of products and the kind of lines that one institution does badly so that each institution builds to its capacity to produce effectively. In addition to that we need to talk about the possibility of creating a public corporation such as TVA, tying together these institutions in a more prominent fashion. As a start toward that we recently created a regional correction action council which Mr. Sisson mentioned. I will mention this in summary fashion just to bring out some of the details. I think this committee could well urge the Department to go ahead with the task of changing these work programs and changing this industry and perhaps have a member report back in 6 to 8 months with a legislative package to implement. Right now all can be done within the existing framework of law. However, there are some laws that would be helpful to move along. It seems to me there could be a law encouraging employment and fair wages for offenders serving sentence and a free flow in interstate commerce of the goods they produce. As long as the employment is voluntary and the offender keeps his wages. Right now, making one up, we have a real bag of law on this point. The older law tends to discourage the employment of offenders in a gainful way. The newer laws tend to encourage it. But when you look at the two of them they are somewhat in conflict. As for example the Prisoner Rehabilitation Act of 1965 was a neat package. That was encouraging employment. Teddy Roosevelt in the 1905 Executive order would tend to discourage the employment. There is some legislative house cleaning to be done there that would be helpful. I think this could be a law encouraging regional compact, like TVA, tying together correctional institutions. Right now they tend to be inefficient. As far as this Department goes, specifically, I think it should have the authority that it does not have now to transfer funds out of the capital budget to inmate wages so it could pay a decent salary. So that it could pay, if it desires, for efficiency to produce and other areas, full wages to inmates working for it. I believe also that the right of labor for competition wages within an institution should be common as it is now, a civil right for any American citizen not abrogated by a conviction. By that I mean that we have started to recognize and in a very surprising way started to drag out old concepts and trying to correct them that when a man enters an institution and has to work to earn anything, he has the right not to be forced to work for a peon or slave wage. Thank you. Senator STEVENSON. Senator Mathias? Senator MATHIAS. You told us that the minimum wage at Lorton is 12 cents. What is the maximum? Dr. TREBACH. Frankly I picked that out because I interviewed a man there at one point. Mr. Gregory and I have been working on these things together. We were very much together, and to that man I said, what did you make last month and I think he said $17.46. I said how much is that an hour, and he said 12 cents. I don't know that that is the minimum. I think the minimum is a lot less. There are men at $3 a month. I think I heard some say 40 cents an hour. Mr. GREGORY. Can I respond to that? There's an incentive program set up recently. We have had some men make a maximum of $108 a month. This I think is based on the number of hours actually worked which came to 83 cents which is the maximum at Lorton. This is in the industry shop. It doesn't cover the folks who work in the kitchens and other minimum jobs which have to be done for the institution. Senator MATHIAS. How does it compare with the Bureau? Dr. TREBACH. Mr. Chairman, I would like to place into the record a report I did for the National Urban Coalition entitled "Private Industries in Corrections: A Plan for Action." I wonder if I may introduce that here? Senator STEVENSON. You may. Received for the record without objection. (The report on "Private Industries in Corrections: A Plan for Action," follows:) PRIVATE INDUSTRIES IN CORRECTIONS: A PLAN FOR ACTION A PRELIMINARY STUDY REPORT TO THE NATIONAL URBAN COALITION, FEBRUARY 15, 1971 CRIMINAL JUSTICE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION, Mr. JACK H. VAUGHAN, President, National Urban Coalition, Washington, D.C., February 15, 1971. DEAR MR. VAUGHAN: In accordance with our agreement, I am pleased to submit this report on the preliminary exploration of the feasibility of establishing private industries in correctional institutions, which could become one |