Private prison company Unicor makes huge profits from prison labor.

Congressional Republicans, a handful of Democrats and private-industry critics want to clamp down on Unicor, the trade name for Federal Prison Industries.
Almost 13,000 inmates working in federal lockups around the country for a few dollars a day make everything from military uniforms to office furniture to electrical parts that are sold exclusively to federal agencies. With annual revenues that reached $900 million last year, Unicor is the federal government's 36th-largest vendor.
Corrections officials say the program teaches prisoners invaluable job skills and personal discipline that help cut down on their return to prison. Inmates who work in the program are 24 percent less likely to commit more crimes than other prisoners after being released, they say.
"While it operates as a business, the real output is inmates who are trained in marketable job skills so that they can return to the community as productive members of society," Philip J. Sibal, senior deputy assistant director of Federal Prison Industries, told a congressional committee earlier this year.
Federal agencies are now required to purchase items when possible from Unicor. However, Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., is the primary sponsor of legislation to change that.
Among other things, the proposal that has drawn bipartisan support would subject prison factories to direct competition with private business by removing a requirement that makes Unicor the "mandatory source" for some products for government agencies.
The House passed such legislation in 2003 and 2006 before it stalled in the Senate both times; this year's version got stuck in the committee that held the hearing where Sibal spoke in June.
Unicor has plants at 66 prisons nationwide, critics say prisoners are doing work that law-abiding citizens could be performing. The operation isn't nearly as big as just a few years ago because the sluggish economy and tight budgets have reduced government orders, forcing the Bureau of Prisons to close or downsize 43 Unicor factories nationwide.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PRISON_FACTORIES_JOBS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-11-04-10-21-17
Colorado spending $208 million on empty solitary confinement prison.
Three days ago, Colorado shut down a brand-new prison it didn't need.

Unless the state government finds someone else who can use it, Colorado taxpayers can expect to spend $208 million for an empty building.

Finding someone else may not be easy. Colorado State Penitentiary II, also known as Centennial South, consists of 948 solitary-confinement cells. It has no dining room, no gym, no rooms where a group of prisoners could take classes or go to therapy or get vocational training. It's row after identical row of empty cells.

From the beginning, critics of this project objected, correctly, that Colorado was putting people in solitary confinement at a rate that dwarfed the national average.

Yet it was built.

It was built even though most legislators opposed the prison in 2003, according to a key player. Another bit of legislative ingenuity overcame that problem. The sponsors lumped the prison with a new University of Colorado medical campus and gained bipartisan support for two projects financed without a vote of the people.

Separately, neither project would have passed, according to Republican Norma Anderson, the Senate majority leader and bill sponsor in 2003.

"You couldn't get the votes for either one of them," said Anderson, now a former legislator living in Lakewood.

The other key players in the project were Republican co-sponsor Lola Spradley, House speaker in 2003 and resident of Beulah — prison country; Ari Zavaras, corrections chief for two Democratic governors; and Joe Ortiz, the corrections chief for a Republican governor.

And the statisticians who predicted prison populations played a part. The Division of Criminal Justice, for one, foresaw numbers of Colorado prisoners going up and up. Instead  the prison population declined along with the crime rate, while judges sentenced fewer people to prison. Today, Colorado holds about 7,500 fewer prisoners than forecast six years ago.

The National Institute of Corrections took an independent look at Colorado's solitary confinement system.

Here's what they reported:

• About 7 percent of Colorado prisoners are kept in "administrative segregation," compared to a national average of 1 to 2 percent.
• The average length of stay in solitary cells is about two years.
• Most in solitary confinement "are not being disruptive and have not been disruptive for some time."
• The solitary confinement population in Colorado kept growing even as its overall prison population declined.
• About four of 10 offenders in the system ultimately go straight from cells where they were confined 23 hours a day to the streets.
• The proportion of prisoners with known mental health problems had grown from 22 percent to 40 percent in 11 years.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21924289/colorado-spending-208-million-empty-solitary-confinement-prison