Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1879 — Labor Statistics. [ARTICLE]

Labor Statistics.

Superintendent Wright, of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, has prepared a report for the next Legislature of that State. He says that the number of convicts in 1878 in all the State prisons of the Union was 29,197, of whom 13,186 were employed in mechanical industries. The greatest number was in New York and the smallest in Rhode Island. Three systems of labor were found to be in practice. The first is the contract system, which is adopted in Massachusetts and generally in the Northern States, and which consists in selling the labor of the prisoners for a stipulated time and at a fixed price per day to the highest bidder, the work usually being done within the walls of the prison, under the supervision of an agent of the purchaser. The second is the lessee system, which consists in leasing convicts to a party for a specified sum per year, with the provision that the lessee shall feed, clothe, and discipline the convicts, and, indeed, attend to the entire work of their care and maintenance. This system is adopted in some of the Southern States. The third is the “publicaccount” system, according to which the oificers of the prison purchase all the raw materials, manufacture the goods, and sell them in the open market for the best price they can get, the same as any manufacturing establishment. At the rate of 40 cents a day, which was the average, the wage-earn-ings for the whole year amounted to $1,624,515. At $2 per day, which is the average price of similar labor outside of prisons, these same men would have earned $8,122,576. The products of prison labor, if we take the labor at $2 per day, did not exceed $20,000,000 in 1878, while the products of all the mechanical industries of the United States amounted to $5,000,000,000.