The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The labor cutbacks will help trim $1.7 million in non-essential expenses in the department's proposed $1.1 billion budget for the 2009 fiscal year, said Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a corrections spokeswoman.

"When you calculate fuel costs, and couple that with overtime for officers, it produces a costly proposition that this budget can't support," Fedkenheuer said.

For years, inmates were available for painting, cleaning public parks, landscaping and other jobs that required little or no skilled labor. They cleared empty lots in Newark and rode on garbage trucks in Lambertville.

They also took on more ambitious projects, replacing the roof at the Cape May Zoo, working on the New Jersey side of Ellis Island and helping to renovate and build homes in Trenton for Habitat for Humanity, said Bill Freeman, a corrections supervisor who oversees the department's Community Labor Assistance Program.

While Freeman said inmate work details will still go out on the highways, clean beaches at the Jersey Shore and tend to state parks, he expected demands for other services to start piling up because state work takes priority.

"There's not going to be any opportunity to satisfy requests," he said.

County jails, which take a slightly different approach to funding smaller-scale versions of inmate labor programs -- by charging inmates for the privilege of working -- already have noticed an increase in demand.

"I'm getting a lot of calls from mayors," said Scott Nodes, correctional administrator at the Hunterdon County Jail in Flemington.

In May, the jail began putting weekend-only inmates to work for towns and nonprofit agencies.

"Boy, they did a great job," said Arnie Shapack, a board member of the Tewksbury Township Library, which had inmates seed and grade the grounds over Memorial Day weekend.

Shapack estimated the inmates saved the library hundreds of dollars in labor costs. He said he'd like to see them return to scrape the library's 200-year-old building to make it ready for painting.

Inmates at county jails usually pay a processing fee of about $25, and as much as $10 thereafter each day they work, for the duration of their sentences on drunken driving convictions, motor vehicle violations, and other low-level offenses.

The fees cover overtime for guards, the cost of fuel used in transporting the prisoners, and other program expenses. In some cases, the fees are deposited in county coffers.

Morris County, which has been using and lending out inmate crews since the 1980s, put more than 2,900 inmates to work in various municipalities in 2007, according to figures from the county jail. An additional 4,500 inmates worked for nonprofit groups last year, according to the figures.

Combined, the crews logged 109,000 work hours.

Demand there, too, has been on the rise, said Lt. Sarah Potter, who oversees the program.

"We've had a huge increase in the number of requests," said Potter, of the county sheriff's office.

Despite the program's magnitude, its numbers were still only a fraction of the labor once supplied by the state prison system.

At the height of the state's inmate labor program in the late 1990s, there were 115 work details statewide, extending 1.5 million hours of work to the public each year, according to Freeman, the corrections supervisor who oversees the operation.

"We're just in a rough time statewide," Freeman said. "When decisions are made that are economic decisions, we have to go with them."
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