Japanese Prison Labor

The AP via The Japan Times: Ministry touts perks of growing prison system workforce

Need workers? Japan's penal system has the answer: prison labor.

The Justice Ministry began advertising its captive labor supply on its Web site this year in hopes of getting more company work orders as the prison population rises.

The advertisement, started in March, praises the benefits of labor in prison, outlines the types of products available and provides links and phone numbers for companies to call.

"Making prisoners have a regular work life helps them maintain their mental and physical health, nurture a labor spirit, and promote a disciplined lifestyle," the Web page says.

I first heard about this from Alex Jones and had to check it out for myself to be sure.

Eight-hour workdays are part of nearly all prisoners' sentences in Japan, and the country's largest prisons can have dozens of factories making shoes, wooden toys and other goods. But job orders are declining because of the weak economy and outsourcing of production abroad.

Between 1998 and 2004, orders dropped 40 percent to 7.2 billion yen. But the number of inmates sentenced to prison time plus labor has surged 50 percent over the same period, to 61,000 in 2004.

Shotaro Watanabe, an official at the ministry's Corrections Bureau, said prison factories were also having trouble because the inmate population is aging and workers are not as productive as they used to be.

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I suppose this is a terminal expression of how a government might feel about those who break its laws. No matter what you've done, if you're imprisoned in some nations, you're liable to have Arbeit Macht Frei or some other dangerous nonsense looming over your heads as you serve your time.

Even if you subscribe to the idea put forth by some libertarians that supervised/forced labor under a system of private law(s) is not necessarily a bad thing, the labor mentioned above is not done under mutually arbitrated terms to provide restitution to the victims the incarcerated may or may not have harmed. Without that crucial feature, it is merely a form of economic slavery.

Posted by Drizzten at June 10, 2005 08:28 AM