Need workers? Japan's penal system has the answer: prison labor.
The Justice Ministry began advertising its captive labor supply on its Web site this year in hopes of getting more company work orders as the prison population rises.
The advertisement, started in March, praises the benefits of labor in prison, outlines the types of products available and provides links and phone numbers for companies to call.
"Making prisoners have a regular work life helps them maintain their mental and physical health, nurture a labor spirit, and promote a disciplined lifestyle," the Web page says.
Eight-hour workdays are part of nearly all prisoners' sentences in Japan, and the country's largest prisons can have dozens of factories making shoes, wooden toys and other goods. But job orders are declining because of the weak economy and outsourcing of production abroad.
Between 1998 and 2004, orders dropped 40 percent to 7.2 billion yen. But the number of inmates sentenced to prison time plus labor has surged 50 percent over the same period, to 61,000 in 2004.
Shotaro Watanabe, an official at the ministry's Corrections Bureau, said prison factories were also having trouble because the inmate population is aging and workers are not as productive as they used to be.
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