I read Ryan’s post this morning about the dignity of using state or county prisoners to do menial work on the side of the road like picking up trash or mowing the side of our roads and highways.

On first blush, I tend to agree that it certainly may be demeaning for some and it brings to mind thoughts of enslavement.

That being said, there is another view that goes something like this. For some who choose to take part in those work details, while it may be demeaning to have passerby’s see you in your prison blues, it may also be an anticipated period where one can be off the barbed-wire-enclosed compound and instead out in an ever-changing free world, albeit for a few hours at a time. Some may choose that over standing around on the yard doing nothing all day or sitting in your cell reading the same book over and over again.

Also, I must say that Governor Crist, despite his nickname and his reputation as Attorney General, has been decent on innocence issues since he took over Florida’s government in 2007; certainly better than his predecessor. While we should certainly criticize where it is due, we should also give credit where credit is due.

Driving to work a few days ago in Tallahassee, I passed not one, but two separate chain gangs picking up litter along the street. It was the first time in a long while that I had seen them.

It must have been a special day, because there they were, in their black-and-white striped Hamburglar outfits with reflective orange roadwork vests, picking up trash. Several of those temporary orange diamond signs warned drivers, “Inmates Working.” Governor Charlie Crist earned his nickname “Chain Gang Charlie” this way. Here’s a good recap, from the Chicago Tribune:

[Under Attorney General Charlie Crist, Florida] in recent years has resurrected the chain gang, built an additional 21 prisons and passed a law that requires prisoners to serve 85 percent of their sentences. In January, Gov. Jeb Bush called for the closing of state legal offices that represent inmates awaiting execution, a move that critics fear would speed the walk to death.

And from the St. Petersburg Times:

When Crist ran for attorney general in 2002, rivals called him unqualified and unethical. He was derided as a vacuous “Chain Gang Charlie” who advocated a return to roadside prison labor gangs, hitched free rides on corporate jets, flunked the Bar exam twice and practiced little law.

It got me to thinking, the armchair ethicist that I am. I might concede that people surrender certain rights when they commit crimes. (I’ll ignore the possibility that these people are innocent, though it’s a distinct possibility, as we know.) But the question is whether they surrender the right to a certain basic dignity.

We might seek a comparison with setting prisoners to work, say, making license plates. What makes that different? Well, here are some considerations. Prisoners are being held in private, they are not being made a spectacle of. They are contributing to the public good just the same, though I would argue in a more meaningful way by contributing government labor versus menial, bottom-rung tasks like picking up garbage. As well, singling out a handful of prisoners, as chain gangs do, adds a unique – and therefore unfairly apportioned – stigma to the experience of those few inmates, whereas making license plates was, as I understand, something a larger percentage of prisoners participated in.

There is something about being singled out, in public, to perform a menial and degrading task that all entails a singularly inhumane treatment of people that, while we might say are “bad people,” are people nonetheless. Instead, the proposers and enforcers of such policies come off as degrading, barbarian and inexcusably insensitive.

Speaking for me only.