Beth Schwartzapfel wins this month’s Sidney Award for her expose of the United States’ huge and exploited prison workforce. Some 870,000 prisoners work full time, a workforce equal to those of Vermont and Rhode Island combined. The average wage in state prison is 20 cents an hour and inmates have virtually no rights at work.  They aren’t eligible for disability, OSHA doesn’t protect them as carefully as workers on the outside, and they don’t pay into Social Security.

We tend to think of prison jobs as rehabilitation, but Schwartzapfel found that job training programs are few and far between. The vast majority of working inmates are assigned menial jobs to keep their own facilities running. The image, above, is digitally stylized treatment of a CAD drawing by an inmate named Joshua, who works in a rare prison job program. In his spare time, Joshua designs and builds grandfather clocks, like the one partially pictured in the illustration. 

[Image credit: Illustration based on a CAD drawing by “Joshua,” an inmate-worker, who in his downtime at work at the Brown Creek Metals Plant in Polkton, NC designs and builds grandfather clocks.]