For some, it seems that crime really does pay.

Mother Jones, a progressive news magazine, recently reported on how prisoners are no longer just laboring at making license plates and other state-mandated busywork. Inmates in some states are now doing manufacturing chores and other tasks for corporations who have, undoubtedly, found a way to profit from America’s prison explosion.

Each month, prisoners in California process hundreds of thousands of pounds of beef, chicken products, milk and bread. In Texas, prisoners make furniture and mattresses, brooms and brushes, toilets and sinks. Boeing subcontractor Microjet once used prisoners to cut airplane components at $7 an hour; on the outside, that job would have paid $30 an hour.

Some inmates have even been subcontracted out to sew lingerie for Victoria’s Secret. According to Mother Jones, one contractor, Unicor, outsources call center work to inmates.

Predictably, advocates of paying prisoners minimum wage or pennies for their work on behalf of corporate America say that it’s important because it gives them training. And yes, this wouldn’t be so bad if these inmates, a disproportionate number of them black males, could take those jobs and parlay them into real work once they are released.

But chances are that won’t happen.

Many of those corporations took those unskilled jobs to Asia and to environs south of the border a long time ago. Unless an ex-prisoner moves to India or to a sweatshop in Thailand or Mexico, they won’t get another job like the one they worked at in prison.

Chances are they’ll be unemployed -- and ultimately, back in prison.

The ironies and the injustices in this situation are staggering.

First of all, there’s an undeniable link between America being the world’s top jailer and the flight of jobs overseas. When we stopped being a producing nation, the economic base in many of our major cities collapsed.

Detroit, for example, stopped turning out cars and started turning out violence and drug dealers. Even the service jobs moved to suburbs as the drug trade became the economic engine of poorer, mostly black communities.

We all know that a disproportionate number of people in prison are serving time for non-violent drug offenses like possession and selling. Yet now, some are doing jobs in prison that, had they been available on the outside at a decent wage, might have thwarted them from choosing a path that led to incarceration.

Yet I don’t expect that will change anytime soon. I hope, however, that more young brothers, especially those who have absorbed cultural messages about criminality being cool, will learn about the budding relationship between prisons and private companies -- and realize that they’re being played by the very system that they think they’re thumbing their noses at.

I hope that somehow, they ultimately learn that when they are incarcerated, they create profits and jobs for everyone else except themselves. In addition to providing a cheap source of labor for manufacturers -- something that is bound to catch on as fuel costs make it more expensive for companies to ship work overseas –- they also create jobs in rural white communities that have become company towns for prisons.

Somehow, more young black males must begin to turn the anger they feel at being marginalized in society by the lack of jobs and respect into resistance; a resistance to not be driven to commit crimes that will land them in prison -- and possibly doing work to enrich the same companies and communities that contribute to their devaluation.

This is what they need to think about the next time they see a rapper, or anyone else for that matter, glamorize incarceration.

And learn that the best way to defy the criminal justice system isn’t by surviving it, but by staying out of it.