Penal labour
Penal labour or prison labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios are sometimes applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
Large-scale implementations of penal labour include labour camps, prison farms, penal colonies, penal military units, penal transportation, or aboard prison ships.
Punitive versus productive labour
Punitive labour, also known as convict labour, prison labour, or hard labour, is a form of forced labour used in both the past and the present as an additional form of punishment beyond imprisonment alone. Punitive labour encompasses two types: productive labour, such as industrial work; and intrinsically pointless tasks used as primitive occupational therapy, punishment, or physical torment.Sometimes authorities turn prison labour into an industry, as on a prison farm or in a prison workshop. In such cases, the pursuit of income from their productive labour may even overtake the preoccupation with punishment or reeducation as such of the prisoners, who are then at risk of being exploited as slave-like cheap labour. This is sometimes not the case, and the income goes to defray the costs of the prison.
Victorian inmates commonly worked the treadmill. In some cases, it was productive labour to grind grain ; in others, it served no purpose. Similar punishments included turning the crank machine or carrying cannonballs. Semi-punitive labour also included oakum-picking: teasing apart old tarry rope to make caulking material for sailing vessels.
Non-punitive prison labour
In a number of penal systems, inmates have the possibility of getting jobs. This may serve several purposes. One goal is to give an inmate a meaningful way to occupy their prison time and a possibility of earning some money. It may also play an important role in resocialisation as inmates may acquire skills that would help them to find a job after release. It may also have an important penological function: reducing the monotony of prison life for the inmate, keeping inmates busy on productive activities, rather than, for example, potentially violent or antisocial activities, and helping to increase inmate fitness, and thus decrease health problems, rather than letting inmates succumb to a sedentary lifestyle.The classic occupation in 20th-century British prisons was sewing mailbags. This has diversified into areas such as engineering, furniture making, desktop publishing, repairing wheelchairs and producing traffic signs, but such opportunities are not widely available, and many prisoners who work perform routine prison maintenance tasks or obsolete unskilled assembly work that is argued to be no preparation for work after release. Classic 20th-century American prisoner work involved making license plates; the task is still being performed by inmates in certain areas.
A significant amount of controversy has arisen with regard to the use of prison labour if the prison in question is privatised. Many of these privatised prisons exist in the Southern United States, where roughly 7% of the prison population are within privately owned institutions. Goods produced through this penal labour are regulated through the Ashurst-Sumners Act which criminalises the interstate transport of such goods.
The advent of automated production in the 20th and 21st century has reduced the availability of unskilled physical work for inmates.
By country
British Empire
Imprisonment with hard labour was first introduced into English law with the Criminal Law Act 1776, also known as the "Hulks Act", which authorised prisoners being put to work on improving the navigation of the River Thames in lieu of transportation to the North American colonies, which had become impossible due to the American War of Independence.The Penal Servitude Act 1853 substituted penal servitude for transportation to a distant British colony, except in cases where a person could be sentenced to transportation for life or for a term not less than fourteen years. Section 2 of the Penal Servitude Act 1857 abolished the sentence of transportation in all cases and provided that in all cases a person who would otherwise have been liable to transportation would be liable to penal servitude instead. Section 1 of the Penal Servitude Act 1891 makes provision for enactments which authorise a sentence of penal servitude but do not specify a maximum duration. It must now be read subject to section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1948, which replaced penal servitude with imprisonment.
Sentences of penal servitude were served in convict prisons and were controlled by the Home Office and the Prison Commissioners. After sentencing, convicts would be classified according to the seriousness of the offence of which they were convicted and their criminal record. First time offenders would be classified in the Star class; persons not suitable for the Star class, but without serious convictions would be classified in the intermediate class. Habitual offenders would be classified in the Recidivist class. Care was taken to ensure that convicts of different classes did not mix.
Penal servitude included hard labour as a standard feature. Although it was prescribed for severe crimes it was also widely applied in cases of minor crime, such as petty theft and vagrancy, as well as victimless behaviour deemed harmful to the fabric of society. Notable recipients of hard labour under British law include the prolific writer Oscar Wilde, imprisoned in Reading Gaol after his conviction for gross indecency.
Labour might be either arduous but pointless work intended solely as punishment, such as the treadmill, or useful. In Inveraray Jail from 1839 prisoners worked up to ten hours a day; most male prisoners made herring nets or picked oakum for caulking wooden watercraft ; those with skills were often employed where their skills could be used, such as shoemaking, tailoring or joinery. Female prisoners picked oakum, knitted stockings or sewed.
Forms of labour purely for punishment included the treadmill, shot drill, and the crank machine.
Treadmills for punishment were used for decades in British prisons beginning in 1818; they often took the form of large paddle wheels some in diameter with 24 steps around a cylinder. Prisoners had to work six or more hours a day, climbing the equivalent of. While the purpose was mainly punitive, the mills could have been used to grind grain, pump water, or operate a ventilation system.
Shot drill involved stooping without bending the knees, lifting a heavy cannonball slowly to chest height, taking three steps to the right, replacing it on the ground, stepping back three paces, and repeating, moving cannonballs from one pile to another.
The crank machine was a device which turned a crank by hand which in turn forced four large cups or ladles through sand inside a drum, doing nothing useful. Male prisoners had to turn the handle 6,000 to 14,400 times as registered on a dial for six hours a day. The warder could make the task harder by tightening an adjusting screw, which gave rise to the slang term "screw" for a prison officer.
The British penal colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1868 provide a major historical example of convict labour, as described above: during that period, Australia received thousands of transported convict labourers, many of whom had received harsh sentences for minor misdemeanours in Britain or Ireland.
As late as 1885, 75% of all prison inmates were involved in some sort of productive endeavour, mostly in private contract and leasing systems. By 1935, the portion of prisoners working had fallen to 44%, and almost 90% of those worked in state-run programmes rather than for private contractors.
England and Wales
Penal servitude was abolished for England and Wales by section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1948. Every enactment conferring power on a court to pass a sentence of penal servitude in any case must be construed as conferring power to pass a sentence of imprisonment for a term not exceeding the maximum term of penal servitude for which a sentence could have been passed in that case immediately before the commencement of that Act.Imprisonment with hard labour was abolished by section 1 of that Act. Section 45 of the UK National Minimum Wage Act 1998 excludes prisoners from entitlement to the national minimum wage.
Northern Ireland
Penal servitude was abolished for Northern Ireland by section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1953. Every enactment which operated to empower a court to pass a sentence of penal servitude in any case now operates so as to empower that court to pass a sentence of imprisonment for a term not exceeding the maximum term of penal servitude for which a sentence could have been passed in that case immediately before the commencement of that Act.Imprisonment with hard labour was abolished by section 1 of that Act. Imprisonment with hard labour was abolished by section 1 of that Act. Section 45 of the UK National Minimum Wage Act 1998 excludes prisoners from entitlement to the national minimum wage.
Scotland
Penal servitude was abolished in Scotland by of the Criminal Justice Act 1949 on 12 June 1950, and imprisonment with hard labour was abolished by section 16 of the act.Every enactment conferring power on a court to pass a sentence of penal servitude in any case must be construed as conferring power to pass a sentence of imprisonment for a term not exceeding the maximum term of penal servitude for which a sentence could have been passed in that case immediately before 12 June 1950. But this does not empower any court, other than the High Court, to pass a sentence of imprisonment for a term exceeding three years.
See of the Criminal Procedure Act 1975 and of the Criminal Procedure Act 1995. Section 45 of the UK National Minimum Wage Act 1998 excludes prisoners from entitlement to the national minimum wage.