My corporate overlords; companies whose bags I made while incarcerated in Taiwan
“They chew you up, but they gotta spit you out” — McNulty (The Wire)
Every prison in Taiwan is a Gulag; a forced labor camp. Every inmate has to work. No work, no chance of early release. The Gulags make all kinds of things: tea boxes, bags, nougat, clothes hangers, one factory even makes our commissary forms.
Prison language is heavy in euphemisms: we’re not called inmates, we’re called students; our parole officers are called teachers; the prison is called a factory. I wonder if officials think of a prison as just a factory with walls. Semantics. Whatever helps them sleep at night. The prison loves to extol all the benefits of work: it keeps us inmates happy, keeps us from being bored, we get to earn a decent wage, and it will teach us valuable skills they can use in the future. Fucking communists. I ain’t Boxer and this ain’t Animal Farm. It’s all bullshit. Prisons are a business and business is very good.
The factory I was in made bags; both cloth and paper. Depending on the bag our jobs change. Sometimes, we put tacks in the bags. Other times, we need to flip them inside out. We always need to fold the sides and bottoms and cut the loose threads. The scissors the prison gives us are small and dull. We use the same scissors to trim our nose and pubic hairs. I cut a lightning bolt down south; I’m the boy who lived. The easiest bags are the ones where we just need to tape the tops shut with double sided tape. The most mundane are the ones where we stick shoe strings (handles) through the top of the bags. If you have ever gotten a bag with handles that look like shoelaces in Taiwan, there’s a good chance it was made in prison. By far the biggest pain in the ass were the drawstring bags that we had to put in the drawstring. It was time consuming, tedious, and most of the old folks couldn’t even do it. They just made the young kids do it.
All work in prison is tedious and time consuming. They’re not trying to teach us anything, they’re just throwing bodies at tasks. Rehabilitation in Taiwan is a fantasy. Based on the work I’ve done the prison must think I’m going to be making bags upon my release. I’ve applied for other jobs in prison, asked to be an English teacher. “We don’t have English teachers in the prison.” “Why not? It would actually teach these people something and at least give them a shot at a chance not to come back.” “No. You do what we tell you to do.” I’ve applied for a job stocking shelves at a local convenience store. I met all the requirements: less than 1 year left on my sentence, no infractions, non-violent crime, non-rapist and non-drug dealer. Was denied for no reason. Apparently the only thing the prison deems me qualified to do is make bags.
I’ve done every job related to the bags from holding the bags so a guy can stick his hands in them and flip them inside out (btw this is the most tiring), to folding the sides, to folding the bottoms, to counting them and boxing them up. Eventually I proved adept at folding the bottom of the bags. Yeah, I know how sad/funny that previous sentence is. Whenever I was done folding I’d go help prepping and counting. Being paid to do a job, technically that makes me a professional. A professional bag maker. From duffel bag boy to paper bag boy.
We would work Monday — Friday from 8:30am to 11:30am and 1:00pm — 4:30pm. We’re suppose to get paid monthly but usually we’ll get the the previous month’s salary around the middle of the month the following month and we’re not allowed to pull out all of the money we earn. The money goes into a separate account that we can access only when we leave. We are only allowed to withdraw a certain percentage while incarcerated. For example, at the end of my 16 months, I had 930 NTD. 930!!!! That’s about $30. Furthermore, every 2 months we have to chip in 200 NTD for factory use commissary: dishwashing liquid, soap, trash bags, bleach, etc. That’s right, we buy the supplies we use to clean the prison. In essence, we’re paying the prison for the right to clean.
Here is a list of all the companies I have personally made bags for. I kept a list and wrote down the name of every bag I ever made. Some of these bags I’ve even used before. I didn’t know they were made by prisoners. I never thought that these bags, this nothing, was somebody’s misery. When I was out I tried looking up the names online, sometimes I got a hit, sometimes I didn’t. Although, I did find some pictures of the type of bags we made. Since I’ve been out I boycotted all of these companies. Because, well, fuck them.
chiate88.com; it’s a bakery, they make pineapple cakes. Based in Taipei.
Shing Feng Pastry, a Bakery based in Taoyuan.
Mos Burger. I used to like Mos Burger too. Not anymore. Tastes like crud.
Din Tai Fung. DTF is overrated anyways. There are better and cheaper XLB places.
GoGo Sports center; they sell athletic gear.
Eva Airlines Sky mall Sanrio Characters
China Airlines
I don’t know how I’m going to get out of Taiwan if I can’t fly Eva or China Airlines. I’ll just have to take Cathay Pacific. Japan Airlines is cool too, their logo looks like the rebel alliance logo from Star Wars.
Claid Jeans 克雷德國際服飾有限公司
台灣卡多摩嬰童館股份有限公司
Shing-long Textile Factory | 借問站 | 友善服務真正讚
Eslite Bookstore 誠品
Le Meridien, Taipei. This was my favorite hotel in Taiwan. sigh. Guess I’ll be staying at the W from now on.
台灣華歌爾, they make lingerie
Apple official retailer
Evergreen, not sure what this is, may just be another name for Eva Airlines?
Red Lantern
Acer
HTC
Asus
Asia’s Super 5 in 1 food expo
TFFA.org.tw, this stands for Texas Foster Family Association, this one surprised me.
Sputnik, 斯普尼克寵物用品
Jourdeness
I-Mei Mid autumn festival
院百貨
A bakery in Kaohsiung玉珍齋
A Bakery in New Taipei city龍鳳當
南蠻當
Shin Kong Mitsukushi 新光大
SOGO
The only department store not on the list is Breeze, which happens to be the best one. On a completely unrelated note, Breeze also has my future wife Yuan Yuan as model. She doesn’t know it yet, but we’re gonna get married. Right now I’m pre-currency, I’ll probably wait until I’m post-fame to let her know.
A few questions and observations:
If the prisons are operated by the government and the government is making a profit off the inmate’s labor, then isn’t it in the government’s best interest to keep prisons as full as possible? To not rehabilitate the inmates? Is this the real reason for the long sentences handed down by the Judicial system?
I wonder if these companies know that they are using prison labor or if they outsource it to a 3rd party and that 3rd party outsourced the work to prison labor.
These are jobs nobody wants to do, true. Nevertheless isn’t prison labor taking jobs away from people on the outside? Somebody, somewhere wouldn’t mind doing this.
There are over 65,000 inmates across 24 prisons in Taiwan. For comparison, Taiwan’s inmate population is about the size of France’s but France has 3 times the population (67 million to 23.5 million). If the Gulags were a company it would be the single biggest employer in Taiwan. How much of the country’s GDP does prison labor account for?
Exactly how much (in NTD) is this industry worth? Tens of millions? No doubt. Hundreds of millions? Absolutely. Billions?
How much gets skimmed off the top? How much goes in the pockets of officials, wardens, politicians, and C.O.s?
Between the profits from our work and the margin they make off our commissary, just how much does the prison make annually? I bet it’s the most profitable of all the government owned companies. That’s including Taiwan China Petroleum, Taiwan Power company, Taiwan Water company and Taiwan Sugar Corporation.
What is the relationship between politicians and my corporate overlords. Do some politicians sit on the board of some of these companies? Hold shares in these companies? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?
Forced labor is slavery, no matter how the government or prison authorities try to word it, and it is illegal. Prisoners are a vulnerable population, they’re easily exploited. We are by law, sentenced to a term of imprisonment, which means we were locked away from the public for a period of time stated by the courts. Nowhere in our sentencing does it say that we should be forced into slavery. It is not right that we should be forced to work for commercial companies. The so-called “wages” are such a pittance that even after working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, we only receive 150–200NTD a month. We still have to rely on friends and family outside to send money for basic necessities.Commissary prices are ever increasing; cigarettes, tea, snacks, stamps, etc. But “wages” never go up. It is 2018, no adult, whether in prison or out should be forced to work for less than $6 a month.
I have finished the January, February and March 2017 chapters. Only April — September 2017 and my critical analysis tying it all together left. I’m chugging along and making steady progress, I’m the little writer that could! Still on track to have a rough draft of the book completed by the time Taiwan allows me to go back to L.A., which is May 2018.
Like what you read? buy me a cup of coffee (or just gimme some moola)
