ZDNet: Printer Friendly - E-Con 101 How would you like to have access to a reliable labor pool with 24/7 availability, practically no turnover, and no benefits? Welcome to the world
of prison inmate labor, a rapidly growing sector of the new economy where annual revenues have topped $1 billion since 1998.

Around 2 million people are currently behind bars in this country, a growth of more than 300 percent since 1980, reflecting the highest per capita
incarceration rate among all developed nations. Combine that with the lowest unemployment and tightest job market in 30 years and you've got
the formula for tapping into what might be the only low wage, labor-intensive workforce left.

In fact, inmate laborers could be the missing variable that pries assembly jobs away from the Third World and back into the American GDP. "The
benefit is that it provides a reliable, productive, motivated workforce that can reduce production costs—and that's the business bottom line,"
claims Knut Rostad of the Enterprise Prison Institute, a company that specializes in leasing inmate labor.

Made in Sing-Sing

Less talked about is what Jenni Gainsborough, communications director of the Washington, D.C.–based criminal policy analysis firm The
Sentencing Project (www.sentencingproject.org), calls a "modern business dilemma" (read: a huge publicity nightmare). Gainsborough, a former
public policy coordinator of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says, "It seems absolutely wrong that individual liberty and public safety should
be put out to bid to companies whose first concern is their shareholders and expanding their market."