Federal Prison Industries Competition In Contracting Act Of 2006

FEDERAL PRISON INDUSTRIES COMPETITION IN CONTRACTING ACT OF 2006 -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2006)

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to H.R. 2965, the Federal Prison Industries Competition in Contracting Act.

The Federal Prison Industries program was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression. This program was enacted as a way to protect the public by teaching prisoners real work habits and skills, so that when they are released, they will be better able to find and hold a job to support themselves and their families and be less likely to commit crimes in the future.

It is clear that the program has done just that. Follow-up studies covering as much as 16 years of data have shown that inmates who participate in Prison Industries are much more likely to be employed and much less likely to commit crimes than prisoners who do not participate in the program. While this certainly benefits offenders and their families, the real public policy benefit is that, as a result of this program, there are fewer victims of crime.

Contrary to the indication given by the proponents of this bill, the FPI program does not have a significant impact on business and labor. In its first year of operation, the percent of Federal contract procurement from FPI represented one-fourth of 1 percent of total annual Federal agency procurement dollars; and it is the same today, one-fourth of 1 percent, and this is just Federal procurement. It is obviously a minuscule portion of the total economy.

Critics, who were philosophically opposed to the program back in the 1930s and they are still opposed today, suggest that FPI has caused substantial losses in jobs for law-abiding citizens. The furniture and apparel industries are the two industries in which FPI has traditionally done most of its work. When asked under oath, representatives of these industries testified that the FPI sales represent an insignificant and negligible portion of their industries. At our last hearing, the office furniture industry representative was not able to point to any loss to his industry caused by FPI.

I am the first to concede that there may be problems with FPI that need improvement, and we have made improvements through activities in Congress and the FPI board over the last 10 years. While it is understandable that every company that does not get a contract that FPI gets may be disappointed, just as they would be disappointed if another company got the same contract, the public safety and institutional safety and management benefits of this program have an insignificant impact on business and labor, and it is a public policy success story.

All able inmates in the Federal system are required, by law, to work. Non-FPI inmate jobs pay about $0.12 to $0.30 an hour, while FPI jobs pay about $1 up to $1.15 per hour. There are currently enough FPI jobs for only 18 percent of the work-eligible population. The other 82 percent of the prisoners work in non-FPI-related maintenance jobs.

In 2000, FPI jobs represented 25 percent of the prison jobs. In recent years, however, because we have passed restrictions like there are in this bill, there are fewer jobs and that has caused the elimination of over 2,000 jobs at the same time that the prison population has increased by 23,000 inmates, and it is still increasing. This bill will shrink FPI jobs even more.

We need to promote, not reduce, Federal Prison Industries jobs because the FPI program strongly supports education. To hold down an FPI job, an inmate must have completed high school, or be making steady progress towards obtaining a GED, and maintain a good record of behavior. This is not only true for those who hold FPI jobs but also those who are on the waiting list for a job, as well as those seeking to establish eligibility to be placed on the waiting list; and once in an FPI job, an inmate cannot earn more than $0.40 an hour until he earns a GED. That is why FPI is not only a great job skills development and education development tool, but it is also a great management tool to help ensure prisons operate efficiently and safely for prison employees as well as inmates. I have never met a prison administrator who does not support this program.

Few offenders enter the program with marketable work skills. The vast majority do not even have basic work habits, such as showing up for work on time each day and working cooperatively and productively with others. Such work habits are required to maintain an FPI job. These are the same work habits required to be a good, productive, desirable worker anywhere, and that is why inmates who have FPI work experience have been found to be significantly more employable than those that do not.

I oppose this bill because it will obviously reduce job opportunities. The bill amends the current requirement in law for agencies to purchase goods from FPI and establishes a competitive bid process for agency purchases of goods and services from FPI, unless the Attorney General and the Bureau of Prisons certify that they cannot safely run the prisons without the particular contract award. It is unrealistic to expect that any official would publicly admit such a level of incompetence in order to obtain a contract, so it is unlikely that that provision will ever be used.

The bill claims to make an effort to replace mandatory source and service contracts by providing a transition preference program for agencies using FPI, by authorizing new options such as providing products or services to charitable and nonprofit organizations contingent on appropriations, by allowing FPI to provide services and products to Federal agencies on a noncompetitive basis if they would otherwise be provided from offshore, and by authorizing work training programs for FPI to produce goods and services for private companies if the goods and services are not produced anywhere in the United States.

However, there is no basis for concluding that these authorities would replace the loss of jobs now available and legally sanctioned, and it is unlikely to suspect that the appropriations would be made or that the job training programs will be sufficient because most of the job training programs are 2 years at most. Obviously, people with longer sentences cannot benefit from that.

So before we decimate what the Department of Justice defines as the most important rehabilitation program, without a reliable replacement for those jobs, I believe we should direct a comprehensive study of its impact on labor and business and its beneficial impact on public safety before we do anything else.

In the face of all the good that this program does, I do not believe that we should throw the baby out with the bath water. Mr. Chairman, I would hope that we would

defeat the bill and we maintain these jobs.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I would tell my friend from Michigan that you would get my support if you just guaranteed that the jobs would be there. We need people working on these jobs. If they are working on jobs, there will be less crime. So anything that will guarantee the jobs I can support.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate Mr. Conyers giving

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me the opportunity to respond to my friend from North Carolina, who suggested that I was misguided by opposing the bill. Perhaps I am misguided, because the bill increases crime and I am trying to reduce crime.

We know that increasing jobs will reduce crime. This bill, we know, reduces jobs. The goal of FPI has been traditionally for 25 percent of the jobs to be FPI jobs. As a result of the initiatives in this bill, many of which were enacted in 2001, the percentage of jobs has gone from 25 to 18, 2,000 fewer jobs. And if we had maintained the 25 percent, there would be 9,000 more people working in FPI jobs, with a much lower chance of getting into trouble when they are released.

This reduction in jobs will increase crime. Maybe opposing an increase in crime is misguided, but I think we ought to reguide ourselves and support those initiatives, which will actually reduce crime, not increase crime, as this bill does.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding, because, as I indicated, as a result of the initiatives that are in this bill, we have already lost thousands of jobs. And if we had had the law as it was in 2000, we would have about 9,000 more people working.

The gentleman from Massachusetts has said there are other alternatives. If we were guaranteed funding for that, I would support it. The problem is that the FPI pays for itself, so it doesn't need appropriation. If we can guarantee the funding, there wouldn't be any debate on this. The job training also may not have funding. So we don't know that that is going to take place. So there is no guarantee.

The problem with this approach is that there is no guarantee for funding. The FPI program pays for itself, and has been paying for itself for over 70 years. It works well. We know it works, and the replacements are just speculative.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. First of all, we will work together on the funding, no question about that. Furthermore, there is not a one-to-one replacement. You have about four people in prison working on what would otherwise be one job.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment would also authorize the Justice Department to acquire products from the Federal Prison Industries on a noncompetitive basis as deemed appropriate by the Attorney General.

Along with the Bureau of Prisons, the Attorney General has the responsibility for the safe, productive operation of Federal prisons and should, therefore, have the authority to ensure that all operations under his control are available to be directed to this effort. And insofar as Federal Prison Industries program is concerned, we know it is an effective tool to help the prison operations.

This could be a much more realistic option for the Attorney General to ensure against disruption at a prison from the loss of jobs and contracts than the notion in the bill that he would have to declare the prison unmanageable without a particular contract. That is what is in the bill.

It is not the wholesale authority for the Attorney General to direct any agency to award all of its FPI contracts, but only as deemed necessary or appropriate by the Attorney General, and it only covers Justice Department agencies.

Remember, Mr. Chairman, we are trying to create jobs and manage the prisons. That is what this amendment would help the Attorney General do. I hope it would be the body's pleasure to adopt the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I would close by saying this amendment would allow the Attorney General to make sure that there are enough jobs in the Federal Prison Industries to help manage the prisons. We know the more jobs there are, the less crime there will be in the future. That is the purpose of this amendment, managing the prisons and reducing crime.

I would hope we would adopt that goal by allowing prisons to be managed better and reducing crime by adopting the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment would allow the level of service contracts now being performed by FPI to continue at that level while prohibiting further expansion. There is no mandatory source provision for service contracts so they are already competitive. Most of the contracts involve work that would otherwise be done offshore, so FPI's competition is with foreign workers, not Americans.

There have been no complaints about service contracts. Service contracts constitute a significant portion of the inmate work opportunities now in the program. None of these authorities individually or combined in the bill will realistically produce sufficient work opportunities for inmates to replace the loss of jobs from the elimination of mandatory source and the loss of current service contract jobs.

Stable FPI jobs are critical to the efficient and safe operation of Federal prisons and the rehabilitation of inmates which correlates directly with public safety. There is no record to suggest that this part of FPI is broken beyond the philosophical view that it represents some kind of unfair competition to American businesses and workers; but in this case, there is virtually no competition. The reality is that this is not true, and no one has suggested that FPI service contracts today have any significant impact on American businesses or workers.

Let us at least continue the level of service contracts we have now in an effort to reduce crime in the future. We are trying to reduce crime, trying to help manage the prisons. This will be go a little way into preserving some of those opportunities.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and just acknowledge this amendment is just designed to preserve a few of the jobs that we have got left. The amendments that passed in 2000 and 2001 have cost. If they had not passed, we would have 9,000 more jobs than we have now. We have already lost jobs. We would have had a lot more jobs than we had.

We are just trying to preserve job opportunities, which have been shown to reduce crime. Now, I know it has already been said that trying to reduce crime is misguided around here, but that is the goal of the bill, and everybody who has studied it knows that is what would happen. If you have more jobs, you will have less crime. That is all we are trying to do.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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