http://peer.org/wordpress/?p=108Bureau of Prisons Promotes Confessed Liar to Run Toxic Recycling Program
Tuesday, 27 Mar 2007
Bureau of Prisons Promotes Confessed Liar to Run Toxic Recycling Program
The 2006 Public Servant of the Year was Leroy Smith, a former federal prison health and safety manager who PEER represented for his whistleblower case on toxic working conditions for inmates at an Atwater, CA prison.
Smith has accused officials at UNICOR, a U.S. government-owned corporation operated under the Department of Justice that uses federal prisoner labor in a range of industries, for being “knowingly aware of UNICOR’s non-compliance with OSHA and EPA” and has called for Congressional hearings.
The latest issue of Prison Legal News reveals that UNICOR’s 13 year-old recycling program, and its head Larry Novicky and current number two man Aaron Aragon, were investigated by the General Services Administration in 2000 for fraud. Aragon admitted lying to federal investigators and the Department of Defense and accepting small gifts from businessmen. Since then, Aragon was promoted to grow UNICOR Recycling into an $8-$10 million/year prison industry that threatens to put responsible electronics recyclers out of business and claims to be a “green” industry—even as reports of death, illness, and routine injuries in this toxic prison industry surface.
The problems in UNICOR Recycling open a window onto the environmental injustice of prison labor in general, and a prison system in which “more than 1.5 million people are released from jail and prison carrying a life-threatening contagious disease” every year, according to the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Hear first-hand accounts of the life-threatening conditions prisoners face in a coalition report, “Toxic Sweatshops: How UNICOR Prison Recycling Harms Workers, Communities, the Environment, and the Recycling Industry.”
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
