Jobs belong to free Americans
by Rawly Bransom
editor-in-chief

   We’ve all had those annoying calls as we sit down for dinner.
   “Hello is Mr. Bransom there?” the voice asks.
   My response is usually either a lie saying I am not there or just a gentle slamming of my phone.
   Many of us consider telemarketers the plague of the 21st century.
   Companies have tried to create devices that disrupt telemarketer calls by sending signals to computer modems, but to defeat these devices, companies just had add firewall protection.
   National do-not-call lists and telemarketers’ numbers on caller I.D. were ways government agencies tried to discourage the use of telemarketing.
   I tried telemarketing once. I needed a job, and it was decent money.
   I was called every name in the book. All it was to me was a job.
   Oregon’s Perry Johnson Inc. found a way to keep the pay low in an industry with ever-increasing laws restricting it.
   Johnson’s workers are inmates at the Snake River Correctional Institution. The center chose the corrections facility as a source of cheap employees instead of moving to India for cheap labor.
   At the corrections facility, employees work 40 hours a week, are rarely if ever late and do not mind having their calls monitored or digitally recorded for only $130 a month, significantly less than the minimum wage for a week.
   Generally, prison officials praise work programs for keeping inmates calm and teaching job skills they can use to change their lives on the outside.
   Critics of this program claim giving inmates such jobs is not teaching them real world skills because those jobs will be overseas or in prisons.
   Prisons aren’t a place to find cushy jobs, even if the inmates are under paid.
   They are a place of punishment for a person who could not follow society’s rules. We do not put people in jail unless they should be punished.       Selling software to executives is not punishment.
   Telemarketing may have caused my ulcer, but I still don’t want inmates calling my house or my place of business.
   It’s time U.S. companies started to take responsibility here at home. Using prisoners or people from third world nations hurts the United States.      Companies should give these jobs to those who need them most—law-abiding American citizens—and stop putting their pocketbooks ahead of their country.