After my career as an image processing software engineer in Silly Valley failed to survive the USSR's Cold War capitulation, I came to Florida looking for any work I could get that somehow fit into my resume, which was heavy into air photo and digital remote sensing. This is when I first got into GIS, which was just starting to get rolling in those days (the early '90s).

Unlike my former job which involved digital raster imagery, GIS manages vector data; points, arcs and polygons, the basic graphic elements of maps. Each one of these geometric objects contains positional information (x,y, lat/lon, etc) as well as multiple attributes representing the properties inherent to those geographic features, all stored as fields in tabular database records. (Each arc record, for example, could be a road; and attribute fields might be name, width, number of lanes, road surface material, maintaining agency, traffic volume, date of last inspection, etc). The layers of these elements can then be overlaid to form a map, and the attributes can be used by the software to select features to be mapped, or to assign symbols, text labels, colors or other graphic elements to them.

My first job at Charlotte County, where I learned the ArcInfo GIS software package, was to create the base map for the County, the map all other future mapping was going to be tied to. They took all the highly accurate hand-drafted mylar sheets of property parcels and road right-of-ways (AKA plat sheets) and scanned them. We then took those scanned datasets and digitized them by using a mouse to generate exact coordinates of each polygon corner by point and click, creating a digital map of every single surveyed land parcel in the County. Charlotte was mostly wilderness, but it had already been thoroughly surveyed and platted to support a land development scheme that had collapsed several years earlier due to real estate fraud. This is Florida, remember?

It took four of us over a year and a half to do this, over a quarter of million parcels of land spread out over several hundred square miles. This is not GIS (which involves assembling data into maps for display and analysis). This is just data entry. But someone has to do it before the GIS can start.

We were not supposed to do this, originally. The data entry was supposed to be done by Pride, Inc. Pride is a private company that undertakes this type of work using prison inmates, who earn a small hourly fee (about half of minimum wage, or less) in return for the work, as well as demonstrate their ability to learn a marketable skill and hold a steady job. It also gives the convicts points towards their parole. Isn't that wonderful? (Jody, THAT is sarcasm).

Pride had persuaded some Tallahassee politicians this would be a decent thing to do for the prison population and had lobbied actively in State Government to get contracts for State and County GIS data entry work. It sounds like a great idea, but to someone of my political persuasions it was just a way to build obscene profits from helpless, captive prison labor, with the collusion of the State, with the additional added benefit of taking a pay check and benefits away from honest men and their families. Besides being about as morally repellent as any employment scheme I've ever heard of, short of slavery, it was a way to get around the minimum wage bogeyman, and about as acceptable to me as child labor, except children can still walk off the job any time they want. The convicts probably get 30 days in the hole. Still, the meager wages and possibility of early release will probably appeal to desperate men.

At any rate, free men and women, myself and my colleagues, wound up doing the work after all. Needless to say, it was mind-numbing, soul killing labor. In spite of all of Pride's commercial and ethical shortcomings, their profit margin was still so high they could not compete with us highly overpaid government workers and our grotesquely exaggerated benefits.