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Highway Signs and Prison Labor -

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Episode Transcript

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner, and today we’ve got a bonus episode
for you — it’s an episode of another show in our network: The
Economics of Everyday Things, which is hosted by Zachary Crockett.
In the past, Zachary and his team have made episodes about Michelin
stars, snake venom, and prosthetic limbs. Today, they bring us their
reporting on highway signs and prison labor. If you like this episode,
be sure to follow the show on your podcast app; again, it’s called The
Economics of Everyday Things. And let us know what you think. Our
email is radio@freakonomics.com. Okay, here’s Zachary Crockett.

* * *

The town of Bunn, North Carolina, is easy to miss. It occupies a total

area of just half a square mile, and it’s home to fewer than 330 people.
Most of the surrounding land is used to grow tobacco and soybeans.
But off the main road, behind a series of chain link fences and secure
gates, is the state’s primary manufacturer of highway signs.

Inside the plant, workers are busy shearing giant aluminum panels,
cutting sheets of green adhesive, and measuring out the spacing
between letters. And outside in the shipping yard, the plant’s general
manager, Lee Blackman, is admiring a row of completed products.

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BLACKMAN: This sign right here is 12 foot tall. This is going

somewhere on Interstate 95 in North Carolina.

This facility makes all kinds of road signs: stop signs, yield signs,
construction signs. But its biggest products — both by size and
revenue — are those huge green signs that loom over you on the
highway.

BLACKMAN: That’s going to give you information about what road

you’re on right now, the intersections that are coming up, what is the
next town coming up, the exit and so forth.

Signs like this are all over American highways and freeways. There
are literally millions of them, and they’re so familiar that many of us
don’t stop to think about where they come from — or why they look the
way they do. Behind every highway sign, there’s a long and winding
road of economic decision-making.

ROACH: We want to make sure that we can get a good quality

product because we want it out there for 20 years. We’ve got to be
good stewards of the taxpayers’ money.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of

Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: Highway signs.

* * *

Back in the early days of the automobile, driving on American

roadways was a free-for-all.

HAWKINS: There was no coordinated effort to manage the

movement of vehicles, whether it be through road construction, a
connected network of roadways, highways, traffic-control devices.

That’s Gene Hawkins. He works for the forensic engineering firm

Kittelson, and he’s a professor emeritus in the department of civil
engineering at Texas A&M University. He’s one of the foremost
experts on the history, design, and installation of traffic signs.

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HAWKINS: The vehicles back then would not be used to travel long
distances anyway. As the ability to travel longer distances increased,
they created these trail systems, which were typically run by trail
associations.

These informal networks of roads were a predecessor to the highway

system in America. And along these roads, there were very
rudimentary ways of telling drivers where they were, and what was up
ahead. Most of these signs were hand-painted. Some had words;
others had symbols. They were made from an assortment of materials
in all different sizes and shapes, and the signs were different from
place to place.

HAWKINS: I’ve seen pictures of stop signs that looked like coffins,
signs with skull and crossbones on them.

As people started driving further and crossing state lines, they didn’t
know how to interpret all the markers they saw.

HAWKINS: The state highway department people recognized we

need to do a better job of providing a consistent, uniform system of
traffic control devices.

In the 1930s, these efforts culminated in the Manual on Uniform Traffic

Control Devices, or MUTCD for short. It provided a set of standards for
traffic control devices across America’s growing system of roads.
Today, it’s run by the Federal Highway Administration, and every state
in the U.S. adheres to its guidelines. It’s nearly 1,200 pages long. And
it lays out the ground rules for more than 500 signs, markings, and
signals — everything from the octagon shape of stop signs to the
precise size of an exit sign on the freeway. These rules are
determined by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control
Devices. Hawkins serves as the committee’s chair.

HAWKINS: The MUTCD gets into issues such as the design of the
signs. Typically we’ll give some indication on when or how to use the

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device.

Technically “highway” sign refers to any type of sign that

communicates something to drivers on the road. And the MUTCD
breaks these signs down into three categories.

HAWKINS: There’s regulatory signs, which tell you what to do. It

expresses the law, like a stop sign or speed limit. There are warning
signs, and those are yellow diamond signs, which warn you of a
potential hazard, like a curve in the road or a pedestrian crossing. And
then there are guide signs which give directions.

Guide signs are those enormous placards on the freeway that tell you
which exits, or intersecting highways, are coming up, and how far
away they are. And everything you see on one of these signs is a
calculated decision, starting with the font. Most signs use a special
sans-serif typeface that’s unofficially called Highway Gothic. It’s
almost exclusively designed for highway signage.

HAWKINS: The spacing between the letters in the highway alphabet

is much greater than the spacing between the letters on a printed
page for reading.

The words on these guide signs are almost always set in mixed case,
with initial capitals followed by lowercase letters. There’s a good
reason for that.

HAWKINS: If you know what city name or street name you’re looking
for, you could recognize that it was on a sign even before you could
read it, when it’s mixed case. For example, my name, Hawkins — the
H sticks up, and the K sticks up. The word English — the E sticks up,
the G descends and the L sticks up. So if you’re looking for the city
“Hawkins” or the road “English,” you have a shape that you’re
expecting to see, and you can see that shape from further away than
you can actually read the letters. And that was recognized as a real
advantage when the traffic is moving at 70 miles an hour.

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There are also guidelines around the size of the font on highway
signs. And from below, it’s hard to grasp just how big the characters
are.

HAWKINS: If it’s an overhead sign, it’s 20 inches for a capital letter. So

the letter is almost two feet tall. The general rule is that the space
between lines of text is going to be equal to the height of the line of
text. So it’s very easy to have a freeway sign that may only have three
or four lines of copy that could end up being ten feet tall.

Then, there’s the color of the sign. In the 1950s, the federal
government looked into the legibility of black, blue, and green signs.
Officials staged a test with hundreds of motorists on a road in New
York and found that 58 percent of drivers preferred green. Turns out,
the color green has another benefit, too. It provides the best base for
retroreflectivity — basically, what makes signs legible when they’re
illuminated by a car’s headlights in the dark. The reflectivity of signs
has come a long way. Engineers initially used something called cat’s
eyes — tiny marbles embedded in each letter on the sign. These have
since been replaced by reflective sheeting that covers the whole sign.

HAWKINS: Most of the sign sheeting made in the United States is

what’s called micro-prismatic sheeting. Essentially, if you look at a
bicycle reflector, it looks like a series of ridges inside. And it is a similar
structure in micro-prismatic sheeting, just really, really, really small.

Now, not every sign on the freeway is green. Some of them are brown.
Those are typically used for tourist attractions, or recreation points, like
state parks. And every now and then, you’ll also see a blue sign full of
corporate logos. Those are called service signs, and their purpose is
to tell you what kinds of services and businesses are coming up —
say, a Chevron gas station in 2 miles, or an Arby’s at the next exit.
These are actually ads, and businesses pay for the real estate.

HAWKINS: In most states, they contract that with a business who

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goes out and collects money from those businesses that want to put a
logo. And sometimes they have to do a lottery. Sometimes it’s a
bidding process.

To qualify, a business usually has to fall into one of a number of

categories: gas, lodging, food, camping, attraction, or pharmacy. And
the fees vary from state to state. In Arizona, a placement can range
from $1,100 in a less-populated area to more than $6,000 in a busier
urban location. In other states, like North Carolina, it might only be a
few hundred bucks. For state transportation departments, service
signs can bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

But most highway signs aren’t lucrative for the public entities
responsible for them. Making them is an intensive and costly
endeavor. There are dozens of companies that make the smaller
ones, like stop signs or speed limit signs. But few manufacturers are
capable of producing the enormous green highway guide signs.
When a state transportation department needs a new one, the job
goes to someone like Renee Roach.

ROACH: I work for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. I

am the state signing and delineation engineer.

Roach has a big job to go along with that big title.

ROACH: We maintain over 80,000 miles in North Carolina. Any signs,

we lay out exactly where they need to go, what do they need to say,
destinations, route markers and things like that. Any of the pavement
markings that are out there on the road, we also place — the size, the
color, the location of those.

Most highway signs have a sticker on the back with the dates that it
was manufactured and installed. Roach knows exactly how long
every sign has been on the highway, and when it probably needs to be
replaced. A good sign might last anywhere from 12 to 20 years before
the natural elements start to degrade it. But sometimes, replacements

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happen far sooner.

ROACH: There is vandalism. You’d be surprised at how much

vandalism. They may get hit or destroyed.

Whenever Roach needs a new highway sign, she turns to a trusted

supplier.

ROACH: The vast majority of our signs are coming through Bunn.

In North Carolina, nearly every highway sign in the state comes from
the sign plant in the small town of Bunn. That’s why we took a trip out
there to see the manufacturing process for ourselves.

CROCKETT: Is this whole thing we’re looking at here one sign?

BLACKMAN: Yes, it is. It’s pretty awesome. When we get out in the
yard, I’ll show you some really big signs.

As a general manager who oversees the plant, Lee Blackman is in

charge of running day-to-day operations. I talked to him on the factory
floor, over the sounds of welding torches and miter saws.

BLACKMAN: Our plant is actually divided into two different halves.

This is what we call the project end, where we manufacture mostly
your big overhead signs that you see there. The other end is what we
call the maintenance side of the plant. That’s where your smaller signs
— let’s say your 30-, 36-inch stop signs that you’d see in a rural
setting. Your standard speed limit signs are back there.

The process for making a highway sign begins with a detailed

blueprint, sent over by Renee Roach at the North Carolina
Department of Transportation.

BLACKMAN: That’s got the exact specifications that D.O.T. wants for
this sign, the type of sheeting, the color of sheeting, the overlays. So
this routing sheet is going to follow this sign all through the process.

The first step of the fabrication process is selecting the right kind of

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aluminum for the job.

BLACKMAN: We use four different gauges or thicknesses of the

metal. Our largest sheet is 48 by 144, which is four-foot wide, 12-foot
long.

The workers haul these huge sheets over to the shearing department,
where they’re cut to size. Sometimes, signs are so big that they have
to be split up into as many as 14 different panels.

BLACKMAN: When the contractor gets it out on the job site, they’ll put
it together like a puzzle.

The sheared metal is sanded down to get rid of any blemishes or

rough patches. Then, it’s coated with green reflective sheeting.

BLACKMAN: There’s no paint on the sign — it’s all sheeting and it’s all
translucent ink. This piece of equipment is called the squeeze-roll
applicator — the machine is set to a specific pressure, and that will
directly apply the sheeting to the piece of metal.

Then comes one of the more technical parts of the job: putting the
letters on the sign. For large highway signs, each letter is printed
individually and placed by hand according to very strict
measurements.

BLACKMAN: What he’s doing now is he’s spacing out the horizontal
measurements for the line of copy. He knows how far from the bottom
these letters are going to be, how far from the top, and he’s setting all
that up. He’s going to handle every one of these letters individually. It
tells you the exact distance from one letter to the next, from the edge
of the sign coming up to the first letter.

CROCKETT: So you know everything, down to the spacing of the

font.

BLACKMAN: You know the spacing, the different size fonts. And that
determines too: you know, bigger sign, bigger fonts, smaller sign,

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smaller font. These letters can only be off an eighth of an inch.

CROCKETT: That’s not a whole lot of leeway.

BLACKMAN: It’s not a whole lot of leeway.

From start to finish, it can take around 12 hours to finish a single large
highway guide sign. Once a sign is done, it’s taken out into the storage
yard. There, racks upon racks of enormous highway signs are lined
up, to get transported all over the state of North Carolina.

BLACKMAN: These signs right here are ready to go — whether it’s

going to a specific project on a specific road, or whether it’s what we
call a division, where it’s going to go to a specific D.O.T. division.

North Carolina’s Department of Transportation pays around $42 per

square foot for the sign itself. Depending on the size, that could run
anywhere from $1,400 for an exit sign to $8,500 for a large guide sign.
Then, there’s installation. If the sign is ground-mounted, labor and
support beams might run an additional $18,000. If the sign has to
hang over the road — either on a cantilever or a structure that spans
the entire highway — that cost could be as high as $200,000.

But there’s a catch that saves the state of a ton of money. The Bunn
sign plant is located inside a prison that’s staffed by incarcerated
individuals. And that allows Renee Roach to get a good deal on signs.

ROACH: They can generate a lot of those signs really quickly for a
fairly inexpensive price.

This isn’t unique to North Carolina. Most states across America use
prison labor to make stuff — not necessarily highway signs, but a
variety of products all around us.

* * *

Like most working people, Christopher Barnes has a daily routine.

BARNES: I get my thoughts together, get down, and then get my

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hygiene together.

He brushes his teeth, washes his face. And at around 7 in the

morning, he makes the short commute to his workplace.

BARNES: I work at EG sheeting, I sheet the metal and trim it, and get
it ready for screening. I’ve been in that department the whole time I’ve
been down here.

Barnes and his colleagues make highway signs.

BARNES: My family, they be like: “What you doing in the sign plant?”
and I tell them, I make the signs in the streets. It’s like: “Wow, I thought
somebody else did that.”

This isn’t any sign plant. It’s located inside Franklin Correctional
Center, a medium-security prison in Bunn, North Carolina. And
Barnes is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. He’s one of
around 800,000 incarcerated people with jobs in America’s prison
system. They grow crops, repair roads, fight wildfires — and
manufacture a surprising number of the products we encounter in
daily life, from office furniture to reading glasses. It’s estimated that
more than $11 billion dollars’ worth of goods and services every year
can be traced back to workers who are mostly paid pennies per hour
for their labor, or even nothing at all. We wanted to learn more about
how prison labor became a central part of the economy. And we found
out that the story goes back to the founding of our country. Around the
world, work has long been used as a form of punishment. The U.S.
colonies under British rule were no exception. Britain shipped over
criminals and sold them to farms in Virginia and Maryland. They
worked in the fields alongside enslaved people. And, together, their
labor sustained our early agrarian economy. As America’s justice
system evolved, we began to send convicts to prisons.

APPLEMAN: You don’t really see the first prison labor until the
beginning of the 19th century.

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Laura Appleman is a professor of law at Willamette University in

Oregon. She’s researched the history and economics of prison labor.

APPLEMAN: What quickly became common is something called the

industrial prison. Prisoners were essentially rented out to for-profit
companies for labor. They were putting together furniture. They were
making clothes, making wagons, whatever was local. Originally, it was
to recoup the expense of prisons. But then they realized, “Hey, we can
make some money here.”

When the 13th Amendment was passed after the Civil War, banning
slavery and other forms of unpaid labor, a notable exception was
carved out.

APPLEMAN: 13th Amendment outlaws slavery — except when you

have been convicted of a crime.

Across the South, thousands of emancipated slaves were locked up

for petty offenses. They were forced to grow crops on penal farms.
Later, they were shackled together in chain gangs that built roads for
government contractors. These practices persisted for many
decades. And eventually, they morphed into a larger and more
institutional system.

APPLEMAN: Things didn’t really start going into the big time until the
’80s, ’90s. When mass incarceration really started booming, costs
skyrocketed. And prison labor is the way that government is trying to
pay for it.

Today, more than a million people are incarcerated in America’s

federal and state prisons. Housing and feeding them is very
expensive. The median cost per person is around $64,000 a year.
That cost falls on the state — and ultimately, taxpayers. The
government offsets those costs by putting prisoners to work as much
as possible.

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At the majority of prisons, you’ll find them doing a lot of the internal
labor — they cook the meals in the cafeteria, do laundry, clean the
buildings, and maintain the grounds. But they also work in
government-run prison factories, like the sign plant at Franklin
Correctional Center. Louis Southall is the prison warden. He oversees
the 300 incarcerated men who live there.

SOUTHALL: We’ve had offenders here from DUIs all the way up to
incarcerated for taking someone’s life.

Almost all of those men have a job, whether it’s sweeping floors or
mowing the lawns. But according to Southall, only the best workers
get to work in the sign plant.

SOUTHALL: This is a million-dollar corporation, and you don’t want to

have somebody down here that may have anger issues or have
destructive issues. You can have one offender destroy a whole sign
and it may cost tens of thousands of dollars.

While the sign plant is on prison grounds, it’s actually run by a

separate entity, called Correction Enterprises. It’s a part of the North
Carolina Department of Adult Correction, and it has 27 production
facilities across the state — all almost entirely staffed by prisoners.
Again, here’s Lee Blackman, the plant manager who we met earlier
on the factory floor.

BLACKMAN: Our sign manufacturing plant, this is just one of the

many plants that we have. All these plants are in different industries.
The other ones that I have a hand in are the metal plant down in
Anson County; woodworking and upholstery, up at Alexander; Optical
Plant we have over in Nash. The other general managers have a wide
variety of plants that they look after, whether it be janitorial, laundries,
sewing.

Correction Enterprises uses prison labor to make dozens of products.

Employed prisoners sew the linens used in prison beds. They process

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canned peas and beef patties for prison cafeterias. They manufacture
air fresheners, hand soap, motor oil, prescription glasses, picnic
tables, and license plates. Last year, Correction Enterprises sold $121
million dollars’ worth of goods. Almost all of those sales were to
government agencies in the state of North Carolina — many of which
are required to shop through the company.

BLACKMAN: We also do a lot of work for any tax-supported entity

within the state of North Carolina.

By using prison labor, Correction Enterprises is able to offer the

government prices that are well below market rate. At a typical
business, labor accounts for around 25 to 35 percent of the cost to
produce goods. At Correction Enterprises, it’s only around 2.5
percent. That’s less than $3 million in labor costs on $121 million in
sales. Blackman says the benefits of those savings trickle down.

BLACKMAN: If you pay taxes — and I’m a taxpayer in the state of

North Carolina — I want everybody to be as frugal with my tax dollars
as they can be.

But that frugality is only possible because prisoners aren’t protected

by most employment laws. Again, here’s law professor Laura
Appleman.

APPLEMAN: Prison labor is classified as, quote, “non-market work.”

So you don’t have to pay them anything near the minimum wage.

For incarcerated workers, pay depends on the type of job they have,
and where they work. Most jobs pay somewhere between 13 cents
and 52 cents an hour. In some states, like Kansas, prisoners are paid
around five cents an hour. And in others, like Alabama and
Mississippi, prison jobs don’t pay at all.

APPLEMAN: All states are in on this, and it’s a great source of very
low-cost labor.

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Almost every state in America has its own version of Correction

Enterprises. And prisoners often do much riskier work than building
furniture and spacing out letters on highway signs. Some prison jobs
are a part of work release programs that send incarcerated men and
women to the outside world. At the height of the pandemic, prisoners
transported dead bodies to morgues and disinfected medical
supplies. After a hurricane or an oil spill, they’re dispatched to clean up
the mess. And when wildfires break out, they’re airlifted into the heart
of the forest.

Federal prisons have their own system for taking advantage of cheap
labor. The government-owned Federal Prison Industries, or FPI, has
more than 60 work facilities across the country. It manufactures
around 300 products — boots, jumpsuits, tools, medical supplies,
body armor — even electronic components for guided missiles, which
it sells to the Department of Defense. But prisoners don’t just do work
for the government. Sometimes, the state leases out their labor to
companies in the private sector.

APPLEMAN: The companies really want to keep it quiet. But I think

they’re thrilled because it’s so much cheaper, and the state
government is thrilled because they make some money.

Prisoners have sewed underwear for Victoria’s Secret, worked in call

centers for cell phone companies, and made cheese that was sold in
Whole Foods.

APPLEMAN: Forty-six states run agricultural programs within their

prison systems. They raise a lot of food. And some of it’s used for the
prison itself and some of it is sold on the open market.

An investigation by the Associated Press found that food produced on

penal farms ends up in popular products like Frosted Flakes cereal,
Gold Medal Flour, and Ball Park hot dogs. Companies don’t just save
money on labor costs, they often earn tax credits for hiring work

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release prisoners. All of this makes prison labor a great deal for
taxpayers, governments, and private businesses. And the idea is that
prisoners gain key skills.

Coming up: not all prison jobs teach key skills.

Brian SCOTT: I can remember being given some of the most tedious
jobs just to keep me busy.

* * *

Brian Scott served 20 years in prison for a sex crime before being
released in 2021. For most of that time, he was at the Nash
Correctional Institution in North Carolina. And he was working at a
printing facility run by Correction Enterprises.

SCOTT: We did everything from what they call inmate stationery,

which is the paper that they gave us to write on, to, you know, we did a
brochure that detailed all of the wineries across the entire state. It was
always something different.

CROCKETT: I read on the site that they even did report cards there
for high schools and colleges.

SCOTT: Yes, and the temporary tags that you get when you purchase
a new vehicle.

The printing facility was staffed by around 130 prisoners. And the day-
to-day work was similar to what employees at any other printing facility
would do. Except, in exchange for his labor, Scott was only paid 26
cents an hour.

SCOTT: You actually started at $0.13 and then there was a raise that
you got pretty soon to $0.20. And then, you know, the $0.26 was when
you were actually operating a machine or a computer. The crazy thing
is it was actually one of the higher-paying jobs. There were many
people working back in the dorms pushing brooms or whatever, and
they were making, you know, anywhere from $0.40 a day to maybe a

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dollar a day at the most.

Every Sunday, Scott’s weekly earnings — around $14 — were

transferred into a trust fund controlled by the prison. And he says
getting full pay wasn’t guaranteed.

SCOTT: There were some individuals who would have some of their
pay taken out because they had received a lot of write-ups, or they
had some court- appointed fees. A write up was $10. But when you’re
only making $15 and they take $10, it hurts.

Most incarcerated people use their money to buy stuff at the

commissary, or canteen — a store inside the prison.

SCOTT: Ramen noodle soup was maybe $0.25. A Coca-Cola was

probably, I don’t know, a dollar and a half. When you’re considering
that you’re making $14 a week, you know, $1.50 to spend on a Coke
is a lot of money. A lot of people couldn’t afford that sort of thing.

Scott says many people with prison jobs took on side hustles to
supplement their income.

SCOTT: I don’t know how many green peppers I bought from guys
who worked in the chow hall. That was the way that they tried to
compensate for the pennies that they were being paid. We had
people who would draw a picture of your child or your spouse, and
you would pay them a fee for that.

Scott had an operation making incense sticks in his cell. He’d sell
them for one postage stamp, which was a form of currency behind
bars.

SCOTT: The process was you would get the stick off of a broom, you
would take one little square of toilet paper, which the state provided.
You would wrap it around the stick, you would get it damp. And then
you would roll it in the sage — that had to come out of the chow hall.
They would sell little bottles of oil in the canteen and I would dab it on

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the whole stick, let it dry. And there you go — you’ve got an incense
stick.

Aside from the pay, Scott says his time at the printing plant was a
tolerable experience. But, toward the end of his sentence, he was
transferred to another Correction Enterprises facility, where he
refurbished traffic signs. And that was a different story.

SCOTT: It really was a horrible place. Nobody liked being there. It was
off-site, so you got bused to this location, bused back in. And every
day when you came back, you had to go through a full strip search.
Because the labor is so cheap they would have more people than
they actually needed. I can remember being given some of the most
tedious jobs just to keep me busy. There was a building that we had to
pressure-wash during the winter. There were picnic tables outside
that we had to chip all the paint off of.

The people who run prison labor programs often say that working at
their facilities is a choice — and that if a prisoner doesn’t like a certain
job, they’re free to find other work inside the prison. But this freedom
often comes with a catch. The New York Times recently reported that
prisoners in an Alabama facility who refuse to take on work-release
jobs often face disciplinary action. Again, here’s law professor Laura
Appleman.

APPLEMAN: Technically, it’s not forced labor, although it depends

how you define forced. It’s not the chain gang. It’s not convict leasing,
but the pressures are different. If you absolutely refuse to do anything,
your privileges are going to be taken away. And, of course, when
you’re incarcerated, privileges sort of make life bearable.

Appleman also says that, because prisoners aren’t considered

employees, they aren’t covered by employment protections — things
like workplace safety regulations and workers’ comp in case of injury.
But some incarcerated workers believe that prison labor will pay off for

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them down the line. Work programs are often positioned as a solution
to recidivism — the tendency of convicted criminals to reoffend. The
idea is that the skills you learn on the inside will help you land on your
feet once you’re out. Lee Blackman, of Correction Enterprises, made
that point during a walkthrough of the sign plant in North Carolina.

BLACKMAN: We can take these men, and we teach them. And once
they start doing the job, they’re figuring out, “Hey, I can do this.” They
start believing in themselves. They got the confidence. They know
they can do that job. And they can walk into a prospective employer
and say, “Let me show you what I can do.”

The evidence that prison labor helps incarcerated people find jobs
once they’re back out in the real world is mixed. Many companies
won’t even consider hiring people with felony convictions, and more
than 60 percent of people who are released from prison are
unemployed a year later. But, it does work out for some people.
Including Brian Scott. After he was released in 2021, he quickly found
a civilian job in the printing industry.

SCOTT: Correction Enterprises connected me with a printing

company in Burlington that had expressed an interest in hiring people
with criminal records. I think my starting pay was $15 an hour. That
first paycheck — it was more money than I would make in almost an
entire year working for Correction Enterprises.

Christopher Barnes, the incarcerated worker at the sign plant in Bunn,

North Carolina, will never see that kind of paycheck. He’s in prison for
life, with no possibility of parole. For him, the benefit of working a job in
prison isn’t the pay, the chance to learn new skills, or the promise of a
brighter future. It’s the brief moment of respite he gets from the cell
block each morning, before the machines fire up and the highway
signs are cut to size.

BARNES: Quiet. Quietness goes a long way.

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* * *

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner again. I hope you enjoyed this special
episode of The Economics of Everyday Things, with Zachary
Crockett. I hope you liked it enough to follow the show on your podcast
app. We’ll be back very soon with a new episode of Freakonomics
Radio — although for the new year, we’re switching our regular
publication schedule from Wednesday night, Eastern Time, to early
Friday morning. So if you’re an early downloader — which I know you
are — and you aren’t seeing the episode on Wednesday night, don’t
freak out! We’ll be there on Friday. Until then, take care of yourself
and, if you can, someone else too.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things are

produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced
by Zachary Crockett and Sarah Lilley, with help from Daniel Moritz-
Rabson; it was mixed by Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio
Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin
Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez,
Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jon
Schnaars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Theo Jacobs,
and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the
Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.

SCOTT: I guarantee you there are stamps floating around the system
that were purchased 25 years ago.

Read full Transcript

Sources

Laura Appleman, professor of law at Willamette University.

Christopher Barnes, inmate at the Franklin Correctional Center.

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Lee Blackman, general manager at Correction Enterprises.

Gene Hawkins, senior principal engineer at Kittelson and professor

emeritus of civil engineering at Texas A&M University.

Renee Roach, state signing and delineation engineer for the North
Carolina Department of Transportation.

Brian Scott, ex-inmate, former worker at the Correction Enterprises

printing plant.

Louis Southall, warden of Franklin Correctional Center.

Resources

“Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways,

11th Edition,” by the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal
Highway Administration (2023).

“Prisoners in the U.S. Are Part of a Hidden Workforce Linked to

Hundreds of Popular Food Brands,” by Robin McDowell and Margie
Mason (AP News, 2024).

“Ex-Prisoners Face Headwinds as Job Seekers, Even as Openings

Abound,” by Talmon Joseph Smith (The New York Times, 2023).

“Bloody Lucre: Carceral Labor and Prison Profit,” by Laura Appleman

(Wisconsin Law Review, 2022).

“The Road to Clarity,” by Joshua Yaffa (The New York Times

Magazine, 2007).

Correction Enterprises.

Episode Video

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