In Memoriam

Kyle Lindquist 1960 - 2003

Kyle Lindquist passed away, still imprisoned, in November 2003. Our condolences to his family; we considered him a part of ours, and he will be missed.

Kyle was one of the first prisoners of the drug war featured on The WALL section of our web site, and one of the first contributers to our newspaper.

In memory of Kyle, we present this essay, originally published anonymously in the July/August, 1997 issue of The Razor Wire:

South American Sweat Shop - or Federal Prison?

By Kyle Lindquist, Prisoner of War in America

I truly believe that if the Feds could no longer profit or capitalize by keeping us in prison they would seriously start looking at early release for nonviolent violators. Think about this for a minute, here at F.C.I Sandstone, they have a factory that employs I would guess 100 to 150 people.

I swear to you that when you look in the door, you would think that you were looking into a South American sweat shop. There are at least 80% Latinos working in there, doing piece work. This means, the more they produce, the more they get paid. Now there are a lot of these guys doing time whose only crime was being in the US and working illegally. This gets them about 5 years.

The Feds have no problem bringing them into the Federal Prison System and putting them to work for an average of about $.60 an hour, producing goods that they in turn sell to the Government Agencies for $5.00 or more, and in the end, who actually pays for these products? You guessed it the American taxpayer.

Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but what the Feds are saying is, it is illegal to come the States and work for private employers, but it's O.K. to come to prison at a cost of about $25,000 a year to the taxpayer and the B.O.P. will create a slave labor force that creates goods that the government turns around and bills the taxpayer for.

I'm just using this one factory as one example. I think there are about 90 UNICOR factories operating in this country. I can't help but wonder what the public would think about this type of activity if they were made aware of it.

To read more about Kyle, Click Here.