Posted on: Sunday, February 22, 2004
Convicts answer help-wanted call in telemarketing
By Andrew Kramer
Associated Press
ONTARIO, Ore. — Chris Harry is a model employee for the call center industry in America.
The 25-year-old dresses in a button-down blue denim shirt, arrives promptly at his cubicle, speaks courteously on the phone and considers his job a step up.
"Hello, this is Chris. I'm with quality control marketing. How are you today?" he begins his calls.
He is never late, never absent and never takes a vacation. He plans to stick with his job for three years — a boon in an industry plagued by high turnover. And he gladly works for money many Americans would scoff at: $130 or so a month.
After all, he could be back swabbing cell block floors for a third of that.
"I can't complain about fair," said the convicted robber. "I did a crime and I'm in prison. At least I'm not wearing a ball and chain."
Prison inmates like Harry are the reason Perry Johnson Inc., a Southfield, Mich.-based consulting company, chose to remain in America rather than join a host of telemarketing companies moving offshore. Perry Johnson had intended to move to India.
The company chose instead to open inside the Snake River Correctional Institution, a sprawling razor wire and cinder block state penitentiary in a sagebrush field a few miles west of the Idaho line.
The center's opening followed a yearlong effort by the Oregon Department of Corrections to recruit businesses that would otherwise move offshore, and echoes a national trend among state and federal prisons to recruit such companies.
"This is a niche where the prison industry could really help the U.S. economy," said Robert Killgore, director of Inside Oregon Enterprises, the quasi-state agency that recruits for-profit business to prisons.
Ten states including Oregon employ inmates in for-profit call centers, while Oregon and many others make garments and furniture — industries that have largely moved offshore, other than in prisons. Inmates are paid between 12 cents and $5.69 an hour, according to Bureau of Prisons statistics.
Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., introduced a bill in 2003 that would exempt federal prison industries, which sell under the brand name Unicor, from a Depression-era ban on interstate trade in prison-manufactured goods — as long as those sectors are at risk of losing jobs overseas.
Perry Johnson Inc. opened its call center in an Oregon prison for half the price of relocating to India — and achieved many of the same benefits, according to Mike Reagan, director of Inside Oregon Enterprises at Snake River.
One benefit is low turnover among inmate employees. Short of escape, they have few options.
"They're looking for the quality of work they get overseas, where turnover is typically not so high," Reagan said.
At Snake River, to qualify for the call center job, inmates must have three to five years remaining on their sentence. Outside, the typical turnover is nine months.
Also, inmates make good telemarketers, prison officials said.
"They see an opportunity to talk to people and learn how to communicate," said Nick Armenakis, a manager for Inside Oregon Enterprises. "They are told that to keep these jobs, they have to be very patient and very contrite, and follow protocol."
The convicts pitch Perry Johnson's quality control consulting service to executives at American businesses, sometimes even company presidents.
Prison officials ensure convicts don't make personal calls or do anything illegal by randomly monitoring the phone conversations. Also, all calls are digitally recorded so authorities can go back later and review what was said.
Critics assail the idea of retaining American jobs in prisons as a flagrant violation of minimum wage laws and an affront to free workers.
"It's kind of a cynical joke," said University of Oregon political science professor Gordon Lafer, author of a study on prison labor.
"Obviously, it doesn't do anything for the labor market here. It's like bringing little islands of the Third World right here to the heartland of America," he said. "You get the same total control of the work force, the same low wages, and it does nothing for the inmates."
