JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The title of this quick post seems both irresistibly attractive and horribly repelling in an oh-g_d-is-this-what-we’re-down-to dissertation for a moderately-good university. But really all this post is is a title–I stumbled upon this table looking for emigration figures to illustrate a dot-matrix map from the United States Industrial Commission (printed in 1900), volume 3, which concentrated on the statics and sociology of prison labor. So what this table shows is the effect of prisoners’ labor on the price of pork and pork fat in the Chicago market for a ten year period at the end of the 19th century, and what we see is that the “free” labor in prison in this area produced cheaper prices in the fat market. There you have it. [Source: Internet Archive, here.]