Question

1. 2) Prisons in the U.S. have typically required prisoners to do cleaning and food preparation without pay. Suppose these prisoners are allowed to accept paying factory jobs within the prison and that food preparation and cleaning services must now be done by paid non- prisoner employees. Would you expect to see any differences in the method used to perform these tasks? Would these tasks to become more capital or labor intensive? Explain.

Answer 1

The prisoners doing the factory jobs are non-skilled workers, but paid workers and these workers will be deployed where there is a need of low cost manual workers and the factory wants to produce labor intensive goods. But, paid non-prisoner employees will be skilled to do the work of cleaning and cooking. It will make them demand higher wage. In response to it, prison would deploy some machines and capital intensive devices to do the work. It will suit to the skills owned by the non-prisoner employees who are skilled to do these tasks. Hence, the approach of work will be changed. Work at prison, will be more sophisticated with the use of capital.

Non skilled prisoners will work to produce labor intensive products and skilled non-prisoner employees will produce goods that will deploy capital. It will help balance MU of capital per dollar  cost of capital to the MU of workers per dollar  cost of labor.