By the end of 1994, the Private Sector Prison Industry Enhancement program had 74 private firms employing 1,663 prison inmates to manufacture goods ranging from circuit boards to bird feeders to graduation gowns. Airline reservations, telemarketing, data processing and map digitizing services employed others. Workman reported promising results from an enterprise in which convicts worked alongside nonconvict labor. Braun s original vision was of an industrial park of three or four firms employing 200. Thirteen years after opening Zephyr, he had added no more businesses, but his two original plants were employing about 150 prisoners.
Bureaucratic inertia slows the transition to private work for prisoners.
For example, the state corrections system in Texas has long been a leader in state-run prison industries, which probably has hindered the introduction of private sector opportunities for prison employment and production there.