Highway Signs and Prison Labor

0:03Hey there, it's Stephen Duffner. And today we've got a bonus episode for you. It is an episode of another show in our network. It's called The Economics of Everyday.

0:30Again, it's called The Economics of Everyday Things. And let us know what you think. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. Okay, here is Zachary Crockett.

0:47The town of Bunn, North Carolina, is easy to miss. It occupies a total area of just half a square mile. And it's home to fewer than 330 people. Most of the surrounding land is used to grow tobacco and soybeans. But off the main road, behind a series of chain-link fences and secure gates, is the state's primary manufacturer of highway signs. Inside the plant, workers are busy shearing giant aluminum panels, cutting sheets of green adhesive, and measuring out the spacing between letters. And outside, in the shipping yard, the plant's general manager, Lee Blackman, is admiring a row of completed products.

1:32This sign right here is 12 foot tall. This is going somewhere on Interstate 95 in North Carolina. This facility makes all kinds of road signs. Stop signs, yield signs, construction signs. But its biggest products, both by size and revenue, are those huge green signs that loom over you on the highway. That's going to give you information about what road you're on right now, the intersections that are coming up, what is the next town coming up, the exit and so forth. Signs like this are all over American highways and freeways. There are literally millions of them. And they're so familiar that many of us don't stop to think about where they come from or why they look the way they do.

2:20Behind every highway sign, there's a long and winding road of economic decision-making. We want to make sure that we get a good quality product because we want it out there for 20 years. We've got to be good stewards of the taxpayers' money. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, highway signs. Back in the early days of the automobile, driving on American roadways was a free-for-all. There was no coordinated effort to manage the movement of vehicles, whether it be through road construction, a connected network of roadways, highways, traffic control devices.

3:11That's Gene Hawkins. He works for the forensic engineering firm Kittleson, and he's a professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A &M University. He's one of the foremost experts on the history, design, and installation of traffic signs. The vehicles back then would not be used to travel long distances anyway. As the ability to travel longer distances increased, they created these trail systems, which were typically run by trail associations. These informal networks of roads were a predecessor to the highway system in America. And along these roads, there were very rudimentary ways of telling drivers where they were and what was up ahead.

3:55Most of these signs were hand-painted. Some had words, others had symbols. They were made from an assortment of materials in all different sizes and shapes, and the signs were different from place to place. I've seen pictures of stop signs that looked like coffins, signs with skull and crossbones on them. As people started driving further and crossing state lines, they didn't know how to interpret all the markers they saw. The state highway department people recognized we need to do a better job of providing a consistent uniform system of traffic control devices. In the 1930s, these efforts culminated in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or MUTCD for short.

4:43It provided a set of standards for traffic control devices across America's growing system of roads. Today, it's run by the Federal Highway Administration, and every state in the U.S. adheres to its guidelines. It's nearly 1 ,200 pages long, and it lays out the ground rules for more than 500 signs, markings, and signals. Everything from the octagon shape of stop signs to the precise size of an exit sign on the freeway. These rules are determined by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. Hawkins serves as the committee's chair. The MUTCD gets into issues such as the design of the signs.

5:26Typically, we'll give some indication on when or how to use the device. Technically, highway sign refers to any type of sign that communicates something to drivers on the road. And the MUTCD breaks these signs down into three categories. There's regulatory signs which tell you what to do. It expresses the law, like a stop sign or speed limit. There are warning signs, and those are yellow diamond signs, which warn you of a potential hazard, like a curve in the road or a pedestrian crossing. And then there are guide signs which give directions. Guide signs are those enormous placards on the freeway that tell you which exits or intersecting highways are coming up and how far away they are.

6:16And everything you see on one of these signs is a calculated decision, starting with the font. Most signs use a special sans-serif typeface that's unofficially called Highway Gothic. It's almost exclusively designed for highway signage. The spacing between the letters in the highway alphabet is much greater than the spacing between letters on a printed page for reading. The words on these guide signs are almost always set in mixed case, with initial capitals followed by lowercase letters. There's a good reason for that. If you know what city name or street name you're looking for, you could recognize that it was on a sign even before you could read it when it's mixed case.

7:07For example, my name, Hawkins, the H sticks up and the K sticks up. The word English, the E sticks up, the G descends and the L sticks up. So if you're looking for the city Hawkins or the road English, you have a shape that you're expecting to see and you can see that shape from further away than you can actually read the letters. And that was recognized as a real advantage when the traffic is moving at 70 miles an hour.

7:45There are also guidelines around the size of the font on highway signs. And from below, it's hard to grasp just how big the characters are. If it's an overhead sign, it's 20 inches for a capital letter. So the letter is almost two feet tall. The general rule is that the space between lines of text is going to be equal to the height of the line of text. So it's very easy to have a freeway sign that may only have three or four lines of copy that could end up being 10 feet tall. Then there's the color of the sign. In the 1950s, the federal government looked into the legibility of black, blue, and green signs.

8:33Officials staged a test with hundreds of motorists on a road in New York and found that 58 % of drivers preferred green. Turns out, the color green has another benefit, too. It provides the best base for retro-reflectivity, basically what makes signs legible when they're illuminated by a car's headlights in the dark. The reflectivity of signs has come a long way. Engineers initially used something called cat's eyes, tiny marbles embedded in each letter on the sign. These have since been replaced by reflective sheeting that covers the whole sign. Most of the sign sheeting made in the United States is what's called microprismatic sheeting.

9:19Essentially, if you look at a bicycle reflector, it looks like a series of ridges inside. And it is a similar structure in microprismatic sheeting, just really, really, really small.

9:36Now, not every sign on the freeway is green. Some of them are brown. Those are typically used for tourist attractions or recreation points, like state parks. And every now and then, you'll also see a blue sign full of corporate logos. Those are called service signs, and their purpose is to tell you what kinds of services and businesses are coming up. Say, a Chevron gas station in two miles, or an Arby's at the next exit. These are actually ads, and businesses pay for the real estate. In most states, they contract that with a business who goes out and collects money from those businesses that want to put a logo.

10:21And sometimes they have to do a lottery. Sometimes it's a bidding process. To qualify, a business usually has to fall into one of a number of categories. Gas, lodging, food, camping, attraction, or pharmacy. And the fees vary from state to state. In Arizona, a placement can range from$1 ,100 in a less populated area to more than$6 ,000 in a busier urban location. In other states, like North Carolina, it might only be a few hundred bucks. For state transportation departments, service signs can bring in millions of dollars in revenue. But most highway signs aren't lucrative for the public entities responsible for them.

11:04Making them is an intensive and costly endeavor. There are dozens of companies that make the smaller ones, like stop signs or speed limit signs. But few manufacturers are capable of producing the enormous green highway guide signs. When a state transportation department needs a new one, the job goes to someone like Renee Roach. I work for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. I am the state signing and delineation engineer. Roach has a big job to go along with that big title. We maintain over 80 ,000 miles in North Carolina. Any signs, we lay out exactly where they need to go, what do they need to say, destinations, route markers, and things like that.

11:51Any of the pavement markings that are there on the road, we also place the size, the color, the location of those. Most highway signs have a sticker on the back with the dates that it was manufactured and installed. Roach knows exactly how long every sign has been on the highway and when it probably needs to be replaced. A good sign might last anywhere from 12 to 20 years before the natural elements start to degrade it. But sometimes replacements happen far sooner. There is vandalism. You'd be surprised at how much vandalism. They may get hit or destroyed. Whenever Roach needs a new highway sign, she turns to a trusted supplier.

12:33The vast majority of our signs are coming through Bunn. In North Carolina, nearly every highway sign in the state comes from the sign plant in the small town of Bunn. That's why we took a trip out there to see the manufacturing process for ourselves. Is this whole thing we're looking at here one sign? Yes, it is. It's pretty awesome. When we get out on the yard, I'll show you some really big signs. As a general manager who oversees the plant, Lee Blackman is in charge of running day-to-day operations. I talked to him on the factory floor over the sounds of welding torches and miter saws. Our plant is actually divided into two different halves.

13:13This is what we call the project end where we manufacture mostly your big overhead signs that you see there. The other end is what we call the maintenance sign of the plant. That's where your smaller signs, let's say your 30, 36-inch stop signs that you'd see in a rural setting. Your standard speed limit signs are back there. The process for making a highway sign begins with a detailed blueprint sent over by Rene Roach at the North Carolina Department of Transportation. That's got the exact specifications that DOT wants for this sign. The type of sheeting, the color of sheeting, the overlays. So this routing sheet is going to follow this sign all through the process.

13:58The first step of the fabrication process is selecting the right kind of aluminum for the job. We use four different gauges or thicknesses of the metal. Our largest sheet is 48 by 144, which is four foot wide, 12 foot long. The workers haul these huge sheets over to the shearing department, where they're cut to size. Sometimes, signs are so big that they have to be split up into as many as 14 different panels. When the contractor gets it out on the job site, they'll put it together like a puzzle. The sheared metal is sanded down to get rid of any blemishes or rough patches. Then it's coated with green reflective sheeting.

14:43There's no paint on the side. It's all sheeting and it's all translucent ink. This piece of equipment is called a squeeze roll applicator. The machine is set to a specific brusher and that will directly apply the sheeting to the piece of metal. Then comes one of the more technical parts of the job, putting the letters on the sign. For large highway signs, each letter is printed individually and placed by hand according to very strict measurements. What he's doing now is he's pasting out the horizontal measurements for the line of copy. He knows how far from the bottom these letters are going to be, how far from the top, and he's setting all that up.

15:26He's going to hand lay every one of these letters individually. It tells you the exact distance from one letter to the next, from the edge of the sign coming up to the first letter. So you know everything down to the spacing of the font. You know the spacing, the different size fonts, and that determines too. You know, bigger sign, bigger font, smaller sign, smaller font. These letters can only be off an eighth of an inch. It's not a whole lot of leeway. It's not a whole lot of leeway. From start to finish, it can take around 12 hours to finish a single large highway guide sign. Once the sign is done, it's taken out into the storage yard.

16:04There, racks upon racks of enormous highway signs are lined up to get transported all over the state of North Carolina. These signs right here are ready to go. Whether it's going to a specific project on a specific road, or whether it's what we call a division, where it's going to go to a specific DOT division. North Carolina's Department of Transportation pays around$42 per square foot for the sign itself. Depending on the size, that could run anywhere from$1 ,400 for an exit sign up to$8 ,500 for a large guide sign. Then there's installation. If the sign is ground-mounted, labor and support beams might run an additional$18 ,000.

16:50If the sign has to hang over the road, either on a cantilever or a structure that spans the entire highway, that cost could be as high as$200 ,000.

17:03But there's a catch that saves the state a ton of money. The Bunn sign plant is located inside a prison that's staffed by incarcerated individuals. And that allows Renee Roach to get a good deal on signs. They can generate a lot of those signs really quickly for a fairly inexpensive price. This isn't unique to North Carolina. Most states across America use prison labor to make stuff. not necessarily highway signs, but a variety of products all around us. Coming up after the break, Zachary Crockett takes a look at prison labor. As a whole in society, we are not incredibly sympathetic towards prisoners having to do work.

17:49I think if you asked the average American, they would be like, good. But if you explained exactly how it worked, they would be a little more unsettled. That's coming up. I'm Stephen Dubner, and you are listening to a bonus episode of The Economics of Everyday Things. We'll be right back.

18:13We are back with this special episode from The Economics of Everyday Things. Here's Zachary Crockett. Like most working people, Christopher Barnes has a daily routine. I get my thoughts together, get down, and then get my hygiene together. He brushes his teeth, washes his face, and at around 7 in the morning, he makes the short commute to his workplace. I work at EG Sheeting. I sheet the metal and trim it and get it ready for screening. I've been in that department the whole time I've been down here. Barnes and his colleagues make highway signs. My family, they'd be like, what you doing to sign plant?

18:58And I tell them I make the signs in the streets. It's like, wow, I thought somebody else did that. This isn't just any sign plant. It's located inside Franklin Correctional Center, a medium security prison in Bunn, North Carolina. And Barnes is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. He's one of around 800 ,000 incarcerated people with jobs in America's prison system. They grow crops, repair roads, fight wildfires, and manufacture a surprising number of the products we encounter in daily life, from office furniture to reading glasses. It's estimated that more than$11 billion worth of goods and services every year can be traced back to workers who are mostly paid pennies per hour for their labor, or even nothing at all.

19:50We wanted to learn more about how prison labor became a central part of the economy, and we found out that the story goes back to the founding of our country. Around the world, work has long been used as a form of punishment. The U.S. colonies under British rule were no exception. Britain shipped over criminals and sold them to farms in Virginia and Maryland. They worked in the fields alongside enslaved people, and together their labor sustained our early agrarian economy. As America's justice system evolved, we began to send convicts to prisons. You don't really see the first prison labor until the beginning of the 19th century.

20:34Laura Appelman is a professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. She's researched the history and economics of prison labor. What quickly became common is something called the industrial prison. Prisoners were essentially rented out to for-profit companies for labor. They were putting together furniture. They were making clothes, making wagons, whatever was local. Originally, it was to recoup the expense of prisons. But then they realized, hey, we can make some money here. When the 13th Amendment was passed after the Civil War, banning slavery and other forms of unpaid labor, a notable exception was carved out.

21:19The 13th Amendment outlaws slavery except when you have been convicted of a crime.

21:30Across the South, thousands of emancipated slaves were locked up for petty offenses. They were forced to grow crops on penal farms. Later, they were shackled together in chain gangs that built roads for government contractors. These practices persisted for many decades, and eventually they morphed into a larger and more institutional system. Things didn't really start going into the big time until the 80s, 90s, when mass incarceration really started booming. Costs skyrocketed, and prison labor is the way that government is trying to pay for it. Today, more than a million people are incarcerated in America's federal and state prisons.

22:18Housing and feeding them is very expensive. The median cost per person is around$64 ,000 a year. That cost falls on the state, and ultimately taxpayers. taxpayers. The government offsets these costs by putting prisoners to work as much as possible. At the majority of prisons, you'll find them doing a lot of the internal labor. They cook the meals in the cafeteria, do laundry, clean the buildings, and maintain the grounds. But they also work in government-run prison factories, like the sign plant at Franklin Correctional Center. Louis Southall is the prison warden. He oversees the 300 incarcerated men who live there.

23:02We've had offenders here from DUIs all the way up to incarcerated for taking someone's life. Almost all of those men have a job, whether it's sweeping floors or mowing the lawns. But according to Southall, only the best workers get to work in the sign plant. This is a million-dollar corporation, and you don't want to have somebody down here that may have anger issues or have destructive issues. You can have one offended destroy a whole sign, and it may cost tens of thousands of dollars. While the sign plant is on prison grounds, it's actually run by a separate entity called Correction Enterprises.

23:40It's a part of the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, and it has 27 production facilities across the state, all almost entirely staffed by prisoners. Again, here's Lee Blackman, the plant manager who we met earlier on the factory floor. Our sign manufacturing plant, this is just one of the many plants that we have. All these plants are different industries. The other ones that I have a hand in are the metal plant down in Anson County, woodworking and upholstery up at Alexander. Optical plant we have over in Nash. The other general managers have a wide variety of plants that they look after, whether it be janitorial, laundries, sewing.

24:25Correction Enterprises uses prison labor to make dozens of products. Employed prisoners sew the linens used in prison beds. They process canned peas and beef patties for prison cafeterias. They manufacture air fresheners, hand soap, motor oil, prescription glasses, picnic tables, and license plates. Last year, Correction Enterprises sold$121 million worth of goods. Almost all of those sales were to government agencies in the state of North Carolina, many of which are required to shop through the company. We also do a lot of work for any tax-supported entity within the state of North Carolina. By using prison labor, Correction Enterprises is able to offer the government prices that are well below market rate.

25:15At a typical business, labor accounts for around 25 to 35 % of the cost to produce goods. At Correction Enterprises, it's only around 2.5%. That's less than$3 million in labor costs on$121 million in sales. Blackman says the benefits of those savings trickle down. If you pay taxes, and I'm a taxpayer in the state of North Carolina, I want everybody to be as frugal with my tax dollars as they can be. But that frugality is only possible because prisoners aren't protected by most employment laws. Again, here's law professor Laura Appelman. Prison labor is classified as, quote, non-market work. So you don't have to pay them anything near the minimum wage.

26:06For incarcerated workers, pay depends on the type of job they have and where they work. Most jobs pay somewhere between 13 cents and 52 cents an hour. In some states like Kansas, prisoners are paid around five cents an hour. And in others, like Alabama and Mississippi, prison jobs don't pay at all. All states are in on this. I mean, it's a great source of very low-cost labor.

26:38Almost every state in America has its own version of correction enterprises. And prisoners often do much riskier work than building furniture and spacing out letters on highway signs. Some prison jobs are part of work release programs that send incarcerated men and women to the outside world. At the height of the pandemic, prisoners transported dead bodies to morgues and disinfected medical supplies. After a hurricane or an oil spill, they're dispatched to clean up the mess. And when wildfires break out, they're airlifted into the heart of the forest. Federal prisons have their own system for taking advantage of cheap labor.