Interstate Traffic in Convict-Made Goods

We are agreed today that convicts benefit from being engaged in productive enterprises, and that society benefits from having them employed.But free labor finds it just as impossible to compete with prison labor, while maintaining anything approaching an American standard, as it would if such labor were socially undesirable.The most satisfactory compromise has seemed to be a program of state use.Although this still deprives free labor of a portion of its normal market, it ends price competition, which has proved to be the most demoralizing factor accompanying the sale of convict-made goods in the open market.Faced with free trade among the states, such a program was merely a cul de sac.Although a state might withdraw the products of its own prisons from public sale, its markets were still flooded with convict-made goods from other states.The obvious next step was to put an end to this traffic.-But, although Congress forbade the importation from abroad of convict-labor products as early as 1894, it took no step to end the interstate traffic in such goods.The states considered themselves powerless to regulate this phase of interstate commerce without express Congressional consent, which was not forthcoming.Finally, in 1918, the Child Labor Case, 247 U. S. 251, holding that interstate traffic in goods which "are of themselves harmless" cannot be prohibited, raised serious doubts as to the constitutionality of such legislation if passed.Nevertheless, Congress finally decided to risk a judicial veto and adopted the Hawes-Cooper Act, 45 Stat.at Lg. 1084 (1929), which became effective January 19, 1934.The unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Whitfield v. Ohio, 297 U. S. 431

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