When I got my first job in GIS, the small rural county I had just started working at decided to use this new technolgy to convert all the old drated mylars and vellums showning property boundaries and parcel lines into vector databases that could be electronically searched and conflated with other data sources, as well as used as a basemap (because it was so carefully surveyed) for any future cartography.

This is higly labor-intensive work (as is all cartography) that still involves a great deal of expertise, at least at the supervisory level. The county had originally planned to give this task to a company that employs convicts at the state prison to do the data entry work, monitored by a handful of experts in the technology. The company trains and pays the convicts something like fifty cents an hour, the prison system provides the facilities, and the convicts get to participate in a program that gets them out of the slammer, trains them for a data entry profession, and looks good on their parole records. The client (the county that contracts for the work) pays the company a fee for the job, and the taxpayer saves big bucks.

It sounds like a great system, everybody wins, right? My instincts told me it was a way to exploit convict labor and get out of paying honest men and women a living wage. And the workforce would be docile, with the taxpayer picking up the bulk of the costs of their housing and upkeep (benefits). Anyone who didn't do the job or caused trouble went right back to the chain gang and the rockpile. No pesky union.

In spite of all the advantages of slave labor with someone else paying for their upkeep, it turned out that it was still too expensive. Both the county's accountants and subsequent history demonstrated that hiring civil service employees and paying them industry scale salaries with benefits got the job done in less time with less expense than going with the prison labor. And the county wound up with equipment, trained staff, corporate memory, and management experience it would have otherwise not have acquired. So where did the cash difference go?

Now, can we see the parallels with this case and the subbing out of military support activity to private contractors?