Solution was an inside job

Has anyone tried this here? A printer in Iowa, where the unemployment rate nudges 2 per cent, was so desperate for workers that he put a proposition to the warden of the local state prison. He would hire the inmates and pay them the same rate as anyone else.

It wasn't that there were no Iowans on the right side of the prison wall who could do the job; it was that they wouldn't. The printer, Tim Rock, would typically hire people who didn't turn up, turned up late, or turned up drunk.

After his experiences trying to hire free citizens, sober convicts sounded like ideal employees.

The warden agreed and soon after, a dozen inmates turned up in a prison van to stack Rock's finished product on pallets in the pressroom.

Rock called them "ranch hands," not prisoners, especially in front of the senior citizens who also did part-time work for him.

That was five years ago. According to Fortune magazine, Rock has since built a $US20 million a year business, and 13 of the prisoners, since freed, still work for him.