Lee Blackman
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
That's going to give you information about what road you're on right now, the intersections that are coming up, what is the next town coming up, the exit and so forth.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
A sign manufacturing plant, this is just one of the many plants that we have. All these plants are different industries. The other ones that I have a hand in are the metal plant down in Anson County, woodworking and upholstery up at Alexander. Optical plant we have over in Nash.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
The other general managers have a wide variety of plants that they look after, whether it be janitorial, laundries, sewing plants.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
We also do a lot of work for any tax-supported entity within the state of North Carolina.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
If you pay taxes, and I'm a taxpayer in the state of North Carolina, I want everybody to be as frugal with my tax dollars as they can be.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
We can take these men and we teach them. And once they start doing the job, they're figuring out, hey, I can do this. They start believing in themselves. They've got the confidence. They know they can do that job. And they can walk into a prospective employer and say, let me show you what I can do.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
Our plant is actually divided into two different halves. This is what we call the project end where we manufacture mostly your big overhead signs that you see there. The other end is what we call the maintenance sign of the plant. That's where your smaller signs, let's say your 30, 36-inch stop signs that you'd see in a rural setting, your standard speed limit signs are back there.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
That's got the exact specifications that DOT wants for this sign. The type of sheeting, the color of sheeting, the overlays. So this routing sheet is going to follow this sign all through the process.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
We use four different gauges or thicknesses of the metal. Our largest sheet is 48 by 144, which is four foot wide, 12 foot long.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
There's no paint on the side. It's all sheeting and it's all translucent ink. This piece of equipment is called a squeeze roll applicator. The machine is set to a specific brush and that will directly apply the sheeting to the piece of metal.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
What he's doing now is he's pasting out the horizontal measurements for the line of copy. He knows how far from the bottom these letters are going to be, how far from the top, and he's setting all that up. He's going to hand lay every one of these letters individually. It tells you the exact distance from one letter to the next, from the edge of the sign coming up to the first letter.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
This sign right here is 12 foot tall. This is going somewhere on Interstate 95 in North Carolina.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
So you know everything down to the spacing of the font. You know the spacing, the different size fonts, and that determines too, you know, bigger sign, bigger font, smaller sign, smaller font. These letters can only be off an eighth of an inch. It's not a whole lot of leeway.
Freakonomics Radio
Highway Signs and Prison Labor
These signs right here are ready to go, whether it's going to a specific project on a specific road or whether it's what we call a division where it's going to go to a specific DOT division.