United States 1929

Synopsis

In the early 1900s, most prisons were involved in selling on the open market products made by inmates. The money earned from these sales was most often used to finance the prison itself. However, manufacturers, employers, and labor leaders in the open market argued that they could not compete with the prisons, which had a free labor force that could not strike. State governments could outlaw the sale of convict-made goods from their own state, but they had no control over the sale of prison-made goods imported from other states. The passage of the Hawes-Cooper Convict Labor Act in 1929 allowed states to remove the interstate commerce nature of prison-made goods and to prohibit the sale of such goods in their state, even if the goods were produced in another state.

Timeline

• 1914: On the Western Front, the first battles of the Marne and Ypres...