Working in the Big House
Being a prison guard in an overcrowded penitentiary has got to be one of the world’s worst jobs. It’s dangerous, it’s demoralizing, it’s essentially menial, and it’s low-skilled enough that there will always be a willing pool of replacement workers around to ensure the jobs are insecure and low-paid. Of all the jobs that need the protections afforded by a union, prison guard is definitely among the top.
However, prison guard unions pose one of the most vexing problems for progressives. They do a great job for the members by ensuring them all the benefits due to “working families,” such as health benefits, decent pay and fair work rules. But they do immeasurable harm to society by creating not only a constituency for, but a vested interest in the perpetuation of our egregiously unjust criminal justice system.
With an increasing percentage of our adult male population under lock and key, the issue of reform is growing more and more urgent. Draconian mandatory sentences, “three-strikes” laws and the mean-spirited, futile “war on drugs” are all putting huge economic and logistical strains on the prison system in the United States. Even conservative states and politicians are starting to question the cost of their zealous urge to prosecute and punish – if not in lives, then certainly in dollars. Prison guard unions and the political and civic organizations of towns where prisons provide a large percentage of the jobs fundamentally change the character of the debate over criminal justice issues by introducing an economic-interest counterweight to the compelling forces favoring reform. And furthermore, because organized labor is involved, the voices against reform are as likely to be Democratic as Republican.
The classic case is in California, where there is a hardly-coincidental correlation between Governor Gray Davis’s opposition to fundamental criminal justice reform and the critical support of the prison guard’s union. This problem is likely to be repeated in many states where big labor supports Democrats, because labor has a compelling interest in supporting the building of prisons (which provide more jobs, and thus more members and dues) and no real need to take a position on a matter like the drug war, even if its members had a strong opinion on it. This forces pro-reform progressives to form unlikely alliances with maverick Republicans and Libertarians on these kind of issues – a trend which can only be bad for the future of Democratic politics on a national level.
1:14:40 PM 
|
|
