Prison Labor: Can U.S. Point Finger at China?

Horror stories are surfacing anew about the Chinese prison labor system and the sale of its products in the United States. But consider what is happening to the 64,000 U.S. convicts in the Florida prison system:

Prisoners are required to work -- or face punishment. Most inmates, even ones digging ditches on chain gangs, are paid nothing. Moreover, some of the products they make, such as boots and license plates, are exported to foreign countries.

Therein lies a question: Because inmates in many U.S. prisons are obliged to work, do Americans have the right to condemn China's prison labor practices?

The question arises because China's "reform through labor" penal system, known in Chinese as laogai, is becoming a hot issue in Congress and the media amid the mounting debate over whether Beijing should be allowed to retain its trading privileges.

Senate and House committees held hearings May 21 and 22 on allegations that goods made in Chinese prisons are being imported into the United States in violation of U.S. law and a U.S.-China agreement. Among those offering testimony about how easy it is to buy convict-made goods was Harry Wu, a former inmate laborer who has gained worldwide fame for returning to China to document the nation's "prison economy." An ABC "Nightline" program broadcast the night after the hearing featured videotape from another witness indicating that binder clips were being made in a Chinese women's prison for a U.S. office-supplies company.

All of this is generating potent ammunition for critics of U.S. trade with China, who contend that Beijing is profiting from the toil of people railroaded into working cruelly long hours under appalling conditions. TV ads being readied by the Family Research Council, a group seeking to overturn China's most-favored-nation trade status, accuse Beijing of employing "slave labor."

But some academic experts call this argument a classic example of hyping an issue to advance a political agenda.

"Harry Wu and others have tried to stir up a great controversy about how goods made by forced labor are flooding into our market," said James Feinerman, a professor of Asian Legal Studies at Georgetown University. "But in fact, it's only a tiny fraction of all Chinese goods. And it seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy for us to get on our high horse about China making its prisoners work, given the fact that we do the same thing with our prisoners."

The importation of goods made in Chinese prisons, while against U.S. law, should be a "non-issue because the amounts are so small," agreed James Seymour, a senior research scholar at Columbia University whose book on Chinese prisons is scheduled to be published shortly. Although the precise amount is impossible to determine, Seymour's book cites Chinese economic data indicating that the output of Chinese prisons constitutes less than one-fifth of 1 percent of total Chinese production.

The U.S. federal prison system, and many state prison systems, require all able-bodied inmates to work, often in tasks that are designed to save taxpayers money, such as cleaning up highways, painting public buildings or making office furniture. Those who refuse typically are deprived of privileges or sent to higher-security institutions.

Pay is far below minimum wage -- 12 cents to $1.15 an hour for federal inmates, and less than that in many state systems. So their products usually are barred from sale except to government agencies. But ironically, while the law prohibits importing prison-made goods and restricts their sale across state lines, there is no law barring their export.

Thus, boots made by Florida prisoners have been shipped to Trinidad, license plates have been sent to Nicaragua and cedar-lined boxes have been exported to the Dominican Republic, according to Pamela Jo Davis, president of Pride Enterprises, an organization that pays about 4,300 Florida inmates 20 cents to 50 cents an hour for their labor and provides job training as well.

"Being in Florida, we're targeting Latin America and South America," Davis said. "Those are clearly our trading partners."

Florida's prisoners are not the only ones making goods for export; blue jeans bearing the brand name "Prison Blues," made by Oregon inmates, have become big sellers in Asia.

Critics of China's penal system argue that it shouldn't be viewed as even remotely similar to the one in the United States.

"Are you willing to compare the American system with the gulag [in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin] or the Nazi [labor camp] system?" said Wu, who directs the Laogai Research Foundation in Milpitas, Calif.

Added Jeffrey L. Fiedler, president of the AFL-CIO's Food and Allied Service Trades Department, who investigates violations of U.S. prison labor laws: "The whole system is different. There is no law or due process in China."

In China, Fiedler noted, a person accused of petty thievery or other misdemeanors can be sentenced to up to three years in a labor camp, with a possibility of an extended sentence, based simply on an administrative decision by local law enforcement authorities, with no formal trial. And while serious offenders usually are tried, judges often are Communist Party loyalists who dispense justice arbitrarily, according to experts on the Chinese system.

Moreover, some of China's inmates are imprisoned for political activism -- or "counterrevolutionary offenses," as the Chinese put it. But by virtually all accounts, the number of such people -- about 2,700, according to the U.S. government -- is dwarfed by the numbers of others convicted of crimes such as murder, rape and robbery. (Wu estimates that 6 million to 8 million people are laboring in the various branches of the penal system.)

"Most of the people in the laogai are of course ordinary criminals, not political," said Chen Pokong, a 33-year-old visiting economics scholar at Columbia who spent five years as an inmate.

Chen's case illustrates what many experts find most troubling about the Chinese penal system -- the extensively documented evidence that prisoners often are treated brutally. Chen, who said he was sentenced in 1989 for helping to lead a student democracy movement in the southern province of Guangdong, said he spent two years in one facility where prisoners were forced to carry heavy stones for eight hours to load on ships. "Then, until midnight, we made artificial flowers; sometimes we had to work through the night," he said. "If you collapsed before you finished the quota, you were heavily beaten."

Columbia's Seymour said some of the prisons he researched for his book were "totally inhumane," while in others, "conditions were much better." Prisoners generally received some paltry wage, he said.

But repugnant as conditions in Chinese prisons might seem to many Americans, Georgetown's Feinerman said, they are based on a decision by the Chinese authorities "to make offenders pay a harsh penalty, on the theory that it scares people so they won't come back into the prison system. You can argue that it works. They have very low rates of recidivism. Who are we to argue with their choices?"