ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) organizational model and illustrates the importance of inmate work with an analysis of wage and discipline data from the United States Penitentiary at Lompoc, California, a high-security penitentiary for offenders with violent criminal histories. UNICOR, a financially self-supporting organization within the BOP, was created by an act of Congress on 23 June 1934, with an initial investment of $4 million. The chapter explains UNICOR with the management strategy at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution at Pekin, Illinois. Inmate work enables prison administrators and managers to achieve a high quality of life for staff and inmates in correctional institutions, ranging from low to high security level. Inmate work has become so valuable to inmates that work opportunities have become a customary and an expected aspect of inmates’ life, even in newly opened facilities.
