Stephanie Salter

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

Are there no prisons … and the union workhouses, are they still in operation?

— Scrooge, from “A Christmas Carol,” 1843

Washington, D.C., Dec. 25, 2011 — In an unprecedented Christmas Day signing ceremony, President Obama today affixed his signature to an omnibus Congressional bill known as “The Rescue Confinement Act of 2011.”

Both the House and Senate earlier had passed remarkably similar versions of the new law with comfortable majorities made up of Republicans, conservative Blue Dog Democrats and centrist Democrats.

“This law is not perfect,” Senate majority leader Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., stated, after the president signed the bill into law without comment. “But we have bipartisan agreement that this was the best possible solution for a grave national problem.”

Sessions was referring to the bankruptcy of 40 states’ unemployment compensation funds, an eventuality that was predicted in December 2009 by the U.S. Department of Labor.

At that time, 25 states already had depleted their unemployment compensation funds and had borrowed some $24 billion from the federal government to keep benefits coming to the increasing ranks of jobless Americans.

As the Labor Department had warned, the situation only deteriorated.

Despite continuing gains in the financial sector and such industries as health care and technology, most U.S. workers saw little economic recovery. Unemployment shrank only fractionally in a few states, actually increased in several, and remained static in most.

The national 2011 rate currently hovers at about 14 percent.

Critics of The Rescue Confinement Act say it essentially creates 21st century versions of Dickensian Era debtors’ prisons and workhouses, but such sentiments carried little sway on Capitol Hill.

On Jan. 3, a massive process will begin of transporting hundreds of thousands of long-unemployed American adults, and their children, to scores of federal “rescue” sites across the country.

While the bill’s authors have been careful not to call the complexes “prisons,” the citizens assigned to them will be unable to leave until (a) they have managed to accrue sufficient funds through “rescue labor” to attain their release or (b) an unconfined relative or friend has met the fairly stiff emancipation fees for individuals or families.

The confinement complexes were created from a variety of existing structures and institutions that once performed far different functions for society. Because the United States’ genuine prison population has not appreciably decreased, and most correctional facilities remain over-crowded, no actual prisons could be converted to rescue sites.

Many of the facilities are former military bases that were shuttered during the last decade. Others were once large, consolidated high schools whose districts could no longer afford to keep them open.

Several inner-city rescue sites were sports stadiums and arenas that were abandoned after larger and more luxuriously appointed facilities were built — many at taxpayers’ expense — rendering the old structures obsolete. In the suburbs, similarly abandoned small Walmarts — replaced by “super stores” — were converted, as were strip malls whose tenants all went bankrupt.

At least one confinement complex, in Indianapolis, served as that Indiana city’s international airport until a new airport nearby was built and opened in 2008.

House majority leader Michelle Bachman, R-Minn., was visibly upbeat at a joint news conference with Sessions that followed the bill’s signing. Bachman was one of the original sponsors of the sweeping new law, co-authoring the earliest versions even before the Republican Party recaptured both the House and Senate in the 2010 mid-term elections.

“As some of us have been preaching for years, a successful America is like a successful corporation,” Bachman said. “If the people at the top are not willing to make tough choices — no matter the hue and cry from short-sighted bleeding hearts — the bottom line will suffer grievously and the corporation, or country, will fail.”

Sessions said chronic joblessness and the mounting indebtedness it has created for millions of Americans and state governments “has done nothing but pull down the rest of the nation and hamper our efforts to fully resuscitate the economy.”

Sessions said that multiple analyses provided to Congress by budget officers from a dozen top U.S. corporations and several privatized state prisons showed that “billions upon billions” could be saved by housing and feeding the unemployed and indebted in federal rescue facilities rather than continuing to provide some form of unemployment compensation.

“Once we put sentimentality aside, this was a no-brainer for most of us,” Sessions said.

He pointed out that the new law would mitigate the nation’s unemployment woes “without raising anybody’s taxes,” while contributing an additional benefit:

Low-cost labor provided by indebted citizens working to attain their release from confinement complexes will be competitive with that of third-world countries, which have siphoned off nearly all U.S. manufacturing jobs over the last three decades.

“We are bringing American jobs back to America,” Sessions said.

Asked whether confined children would be expected to work, Bachman said, “That is what we envision, yes.” She said children’s smaller hands and usually keener eyesight make them “excellent candidates” for certain types of textile jobs as well as for washing out reusable bottles.

Current child labor laws would not apply to the confined children of indebted citizens, she said, “because they will all be an entirely new classification of people not covered by existing U.S. statutes — sort of like we did with enemy combatants at Guantanamo.”

Sessions and Bachman both were asked about indebted Americans who might feel so humiliated at being sent to confinement complexes, “some would rather die.”

Bachman sighed deeply and said, “If they would rather die, they’d better do it,” to which Sessions added, “and decrease the surface population.”

Stephanie Salter writes for The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind. Shecan be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com. CNHI News Service distributes her column.
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