Priso Prison Outsourcing Case Study

PaperTrails is a small library in Washington DC that locates hard-to-find/rare/obscure historical documents. They are hired by anyone who is looking for such documents, for example: law firms, movie studios, university professors etc. The founder and CEO of PaperTrails is a woman name Julia Sedaris who is very successful business owner. Her company, is and continues to be, very profitable. However she was looking for a larger challenge. The federal government offered Julia a no-cost contract to digitalize and tag those historical documents. This would also allow her to expand her company by selling the digital copies to external users. The problem she found with taking on this project was finding a low labor cost way of completing the task. Not wanting to outsource the job but needing to keep the cost low she contacted her friend David Bauman. He suggested prison sourcing.

UNICOR is a government corporation that gives jobs to inmates to prepare them for their release into society. This provides a middle person so companies do not have to directly interact with prisoners. However many issues arise with this because of the concerns with quality, ethics, security and public backlash. A lot of people would think that hiring inmates would be unfair to law abiding citizens, because not only were their jobs taken away from them due to outsourcing, but also due to prison sourcing. Why should prisoners have jobs when most people in society cannot find one? Others might argue that inmate benefit from having a job. They become better behaved, they achieve a sense of responsibility and accomplishment, and even their families become proud of them. Studies have shown that prisoners are 24% less likely to return to a life of crime when they participate in the correction