Inside Job

By Gordon M. Henry.

Prisoners have long earned their daily bread. In the 19th century, convicts at Sing Sing worked as blacksmiths and carpenters. More recently, inmates have manufactured license plates and toiled on chain gangs performing road repairs. Now, though, increasing numbers of prisoners are taking on a more refined line of work: answering telephone inquiries for corporate and government employers.

In New York City, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has for the past two months been channeling calls to a room in the Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium-security women's prison. The cheery voice that says, "Hello. May I help you?" belongs to one of 33 inmates who handle up to 6,500 calls a day. The department's regular entry-level employees receive between $8.04 and $9.93 an hour. The Bayview volunteers, many of whom work a full 37 1/2-hour week, pocket 32 cents to 65 cents an hour, the going rate for prison work in the state.

The program has already drawn criticism from labor leaders. Says William McGowan, president of the New York State Civil Service Employees Association: "Rather than hiring appropriate personnel under their own civil service system, the state is employing convicted criminals at slave-labor prices." But state officials say the use of inmates to answer phones frees employees to serve the thousands of people who line up in the agency's offices each day to get driver's licenses and car registrations. Says DMV Commissioner Patricia Adduci: "The challenge in government today is to provide quality service at a minimal cost." The agency intends to hire some of the inmates at standard wages after they leave prison.

New York State's new answering service was patterned in part on a growing number of similar relationships between prisons and private companies. Correctional institutions in a total of ten states have taken on business partners. Since 1981, for example, the Best Western motel chain has employed inmates at the Arizona Center for Women, a minimumsecurity prison in Phoenix, to take telephone reservations. Before the program started, Best Western's regular operators were often overwhelmed by unexpected surges in calls. The prisoner-employees helped ease that problem because they could be summoned to work at a moment's notice.

Today 30 inmates answer phones for anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week, handling about 5% of all calls to Best Western's toll-free number. They earn $4.42 an hour, the same starting wage as the company's regular operators, but the convicts hand over 30% of the money to the prison to pay for room and board. Ronald Evans, Best Western's chief executive officer, calls the program a "resounding success that has solved a legitimate business need for us."

Prisoners find their new jobs valuable not only as a source of income but as a way to develop a skill that could lead to future employment on the outside. Keith Rogers, 21, was convicted of robbery in 1982 and the following year began serving a three-year sentence at the Ventura School in Camarillo, Calif., a correctional institution for youthful offenders. In February he was one of 24 inmates who began taking phone reservations for TWA through a switchboard hooked up to three trailers at Ventura. Says Rogers: "This opportunity makes my future a little bit brighter. It gives me an outlet so I don't have to get back into the same bad habits once I get out."

With reporting by Cristina Garcia/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York