SILICON VALLEY mavens seldom stumble into San Quentin, a notorious Californian prison. But when Chris Redlitz, a venture capitalist, visited seven years ago, he found that many of the inmates were keen and savvy businessmen. The trip spurred him to create The Last Mile, a charity that teaches San Quentin inmates how to start businesses and code websites, for which they can earn up to $17 an hour. One of the first people it helped was Tulio Cardozo, who served a five-year sentence after a botched attempt at cooking hashish, which also left him with severe burns across half his body. Two years after he was released, he got a job as a lead developer in a San Francisco startup.

Such redemptive stories are the model for what the prison system could be. But they are exceptions—the rule is much drearier. Prison labour is legally required in America. Most convicted inmates either work for nothing or for pennies at menial tasks that seem unlikely to boost their job prospects. At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons operates a programme known as Federal Prison Industries that pays inmates roughly $0.90 an hour to produce everything from mattresses, spectacles,road signs and body armour for other government agencies, earning $500m in sales in fiscal 2016. Prisoners have produced official seals for the Department of Defence and Department of State, a bureau spokesman confirmed. In many prisons, the hourly wage is less than the cost of a chocolate bar at the commissary, yet the waiting list remains long—the programme still pays much more than the $0.12-0.40 earned for an hour of kitchen work.

Similar schemes exist at the state level as well, making the market of 61,000 captive labourers worth well over $1bn. California’s programme expects to generate $232m in sales this year, much of it from construction and textiles, though $10m is also expected from meat-cutting. In Idaho, prisoners roast potatoes. In Kentucky, they sell $1m worth of cattle.

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