This teaching case explores the business and ethics of prison sourcing, the practice of training and hiring prisoners to perform work for the private or public sectors. Although most prison employment programs train and hire workers for manual labor, such as furniture building or textiles, some prison employment programs now train and hire inmates to perform low-level Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services like call center work, data entry, and document preparation. Prison sourcing is highly controversial. Besides the usual concerns about security and quality of work performed by prisoners, the ethical aspects of prison sourcing are hotly debated. Proponents argue prison sourcing is ethical because it defrays the costs of corrections, helps individuals successfully complete their confinement and prepares them to reintegrate into society, benefitting the individuals, their families, communities, and ultimately tax payers. Opponents argue that prison sourcing is a form of slavery, hurts small businesses, and steals jobs from law-abiding citizens. The authors developed this teaching case to allow students to explore these issues. The case is a dramatized version of an actual case study of prisoners performing BPO work for a private sector company.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Global information technology networks can lower costs, increase quality, reduce response times, and disperse risks. But agile IT networks require an immense amount of hands-on management, and micromanagement can significantly increase transaction costs and erode any potential savings. Much of the micromanagement is a result of the learning curve and the labor-intensive nature of managing budding relationships with new partners. The authors use data derived from interviews with clients and suppliers to identify 15 emerging best practices in dealing with offshore suppliers of IT throughout each of the phases of development. In the early stages of developing an offshore IT network, the authors suggest that selecting the appropriate location for your offshore activities is critical and that it may be best to begin with several smaller pilot programs. As offshoring efforts become more mature, the authors recommend diversifying your supplier portfolio to spread risk and maximize competition. They also discuss how to structure contracts and break up projects in ways that provide incentives and protect intellectual property. The article describes several practices that allow for more value-added practices once a full and mature global network exists, including how to overlap networks to best facilitate supplier-to-supplier knowledge transfer.