Starbuck’s website earnestly touts their "uncompromising principles" and commitment to social responsibility. The company’s mission statement, framed in a suggestive green, includes a promise to "contribute positively to our communities".

But the last point of their mission statement falls with a thud, a caveat to the self-congratulatory tone, stating that Starbucks recognizes that "profitability is essential to our future success".

They sure do. Starbucks has long been known to use the immensely profitable source of captive prison labor to process their products. This tactic allows them to avoid paying fair wages for services rendered and sidestep the burdensome costs of health insurance and retirement. The prison providing the labor gets a cut of the wages paid, thus reducing prison maintenance costs to the managing correctional department.

The amount actually paid to the captive laborer is negligible [for example, prisoners earn approximately 22 cents/hour in the enormous California prison system; other systems pay closer to the minimum wage]. Frequently prisoners have no choice but to work if they do not want to lose their "benefits" such as parole considerations or other incentives predicated on "good behavior".

Starbucks is not alone in exploiting the "new slavery": Nintendo, Microsoft, Dell, Boeing, and Colgate- Palmolive have been among recent corporate employers of captive labor. But Starbucks, with their alleged commitment to "social responsibility" and their self-conscious "crunchy" sensibility appears particularly hypocritical.

The use of prison labor is not new. In fact, capitalism arose in tandem with the growth of a criminal justice system designed both to control labor and to punish crimes against production and property. Indeed an earlier version of Adam Smith’s work on the foundation of capitalist economic theory, Wealth of Nations, was called Lectures on Police.

Smith’s younger contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, continued the linkage of nascent capitalism with efficiency and economy in punishment. He advocated a kind of prison called "panopticon"—which means, roughly, " watching everything all the time." Bentham’s architecture for a prison or inspection house was based on "inspection principle" defined succinctly as "seeing without being seen".

In this conceptualization the architecture would allow the "apparent omnipresence of the [chief] inspector…combined with the extreme facility of his real presence". There would be a central point from which the "inspector" could exercise his omniscient control over inmates who would be housed in individual "cells" designed to prevent them from communicating or even seeing one another, whereby even the "slightest whisper" could be monitored by the "Inspector".

Starbucks and their fellow corporate users of captive labor are perfectly at home within the modern-day Panopticons which are proliferating across the American landscape, provided with high tech surveillance equipment to increase the omniscience of their operators.

But over and above the totalitarian architecture and management of the "inspection principle" is the insistence that these Panopticons be designed to "force labor."

Bentham himself wrote that the incarcerated are the perfect fodder for the monopolist contractor-manager: "The confinement, which is his punishment, preventing his carrying the work to another market, subjects him to a monopoly; which the contractor, his master, like any other monopolist, makes, of course, as much of as he can."

Employed by contractors, not the state, Panopticon managers should be given wide latitude and incentive to attract them to the task:

"I would do the whole by contract. I would farm out the profits, the no-profits, or if you please the losses, to him who, being in other respects unexceptionable, offered the best terms…his success in it, if he does succeed, may be regarded in the light of an invention, and rewarded accordingly, just as success in other inventions is rewarded, by the profit which a monopoly secured by a patent enables a man to make…Give the contractor all the powers that his interest could prompt him to wish for in order to enable him to make the most of his bargain"

More than 200 years have passed since the grim Bentham penned these lines. Yet they sound right up to date in today’s prison-industrial complex. Since the 1990s prison management has been increasingly privatized.

These "contractors" to pad their bottom lines freely use prison labor. Two of the biggest private prison providers in the country are CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) and Wackenhut Corrections.

Moreover, the prison-industrial complex is inherently racist, with at least 63% of prison populations from Black and Latino minorities.

It is almost as though slavery just turned into the prison-industrial complex. As Green-Rainbow Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner has said, the Prison-Industrial Complex is used to control and exploit "surplus labor."

Already at the end of the civil war, the southern ruling class carried on the slave system by this means. "Convict labor" was developed, whereby prisons leased out prisoners to private companies that paid fees to the state. The prisoners worked outside the prison during the days and were rarely paid for their labor.

The Benthamite-inspired principle of leasing "was financial profit to the lessees who exploited the labor of the prisoners to the fullest, and to the government which sold the convicts to the lessees."

The convict leasing system was eventually replaced by other ways to force captive labor on plantations, industrial prisons and the infamous "chain gangs," who were—and still are—mainly African-Americans. Chain gangs can now seen along the roadsides of the south. Perhaps they are even a "tourist attraction" for those nostalgic for the days of slavery.

Starbucks, despite its misleading green borders and protestations of social responsibility, has tapped into the lucrative captive labor market by using the services of the largest purveyor of private-sector prison employment programs in the country: Signature Packaging Solutions based in Washington state.

SPS has, as its website cheerily trumpets, a "history of award winning, innovative packaging solutions," neglecting of course to mention that these solutions frequently use captive labor. Kate Garsombke writes in "Prison Coffee":

The majority of the jobs come during the holiday season…when companies are in a rush to package as much product as possible. Inmates spend their holidays packaging chocolate-covered Starbucks coffee beans and Nintendo Game Boys for minimum wage. "A majority of people don't even realize that these products are being manufactured by prisoners," says one inmate. "They need to know that they are buying these products from a company that is basically getting rich off prisoners."

Garsombke further notes that Starbucks defended its use of prison labor saying that its contract with SPS is "entirely consistent with our mission statement."

Starbucks and other corporations exploiting captive labor are "paying prison workers less than they're paying on the outside, but they aren't reducing the markup to the consumer," says Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News and himself a prisoner. Wright notes another benefit to corporations using captive labor is that when there is a lull, prisoners are simply sent back to their cells, whereas on the outside workers have to be laid off, with all the legal ramifications attendant on that process.

No doubt the old Inspector-General himself, Jeremy Bentham, is sipping his Starbucks latte and smiling down from that big Panopticon in the sky.

In response to my inquiries, Swati S., of Starbucks Customer Relations acknowledged that his company "contracted with Signature Packaging Solutions, a company that has occasionally supplemented its workforce in the past with domestic inmates…."

He insisted that this practice "reflects good business and social practices consistent with our Mission Statement, which guides us to treat each other with respect and dignity, embrace diversity as a key component of the way we do business and contribute positively to our communities…."

Moreover they paid "the prevailing minimum wage for the job-enabling them to contribute toward incarceration costs, support their families, and pay taxes and victim restitution." It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the inmates "owed their soul to the company store," and saw little money themselves. "There were waiting lists of inmates who wanted to work.…

Working could help rehabilitate inmates by providing a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, and improving self-esteem."

"Signature Packaging Solutions ended its use of prison labor in May 2004…."