May 5, 2008 By Bob Bauder For The 5 min read

LUZERNE TWP. – John DiDominic is a modest man. He refuses to take credit for the 2.1 million Pennsylvania license plates that flow from his shop yearly.

“The foremen run the shop,” he said. “I just keep them going.”

But the fact remains that DiDominic is ultimately responsible for every license plate issued these days by the state Department of Transportation.

DiDominic is the supervisor of an inmate work gang at the State Correctional Institute at Fayette, AKA the license plate capital of Pennsylvania.

Separated from the outside world by layer upon layer of concrete, steel and razor wire, 85 or so inmates under DiDominic’s watch punch out license plates at an average rate of 10,000 per day.

About 146 prisoners toil daily at various tasks in the prison’s precision metal shop, but the license plate line by far produces the largest volume of finished product.

“On a good day, we can do 17,000 plates, complete, stock to finish,” DiDominic said.

Pennsylvania, like many states, uses prison labor to make license plates. State inmates have been doing it since the early 1920s when former Prison Labor Superintendent John R. Wald patented a die for stamping numbers and letters onto metal plates. Inmates have been making plates in Fayette County since the prison opened in July 2003. Before that, all plates originated from the state prison in Pittsburgh.

The metal shop at Fayette is only one part of a $33.2 million annual Department of Corrections inmate labor program known as Pennsylvania Correctional Industries.

“Our main focus here is to teach and prepare inmates so they can sustain meaningful employment and become productive, tax-paying citizens when they are released,” said Tony Miller, the program’s acting director. “Kind of a secondary benefit is to reduce inmate idleness.”

The program is totally self-sustaining – no taxpayer money is used to fund it – through annual profits that amounted to about $1 million last year.

The metal shop is a separate 60,000-square-foot building inside the prison grounds.

A typical work day begins shortly after 7 a.m. and ends around 2:30 p.m. with about an hour for lunch. Prisoners are searched by hand and must pass through metal detectors on their way out. Hand tools are inventoried at the start and end of each day.

Shop foremen working under the labor program supervise the inmates. Two corrections officers are stationed inside the shop during each work shift.

Inmate laborers make a variety of metal furniture, recreational equipment and signs, mainly used in prisons and agencies such as the state police and the transportation department.

The license plate production line is the busiest.

A license plate starts as part of a large aluminum coil made by Jupiter Aluminum in Hammond, Ind., which makes its product exclusively from recycled metal.

The long aluminum sheet that makes up each coil is fed via rollers through a cleaning bath and straightener. That’s where the process gets interesting.

Regular license plates are not painted. The blue, white and yellow coloring and words “Pennsylvania” and “visitpa.com” that appear on each plate are actually pieces of printed vinyl. The vinyl comes in a roll and is automatically attached to the aluminum.

After the vinyl is applied, the aluminum is cut into individual blanks. Inmates check the blanks for quality and send them off to embossing presses, which imprint letters and numbers.

Standard license plates for passenger cars start with three letters, followed by four numbers. When making the plates, the three letters are set then the numbers are changed for each plate, 0000 to 9999.

When a batch is finished, the press operator changes one letter in the sequence and starts again. Dies are used to stamp each letter and number on a plate. Each blank requires seven dies.

A press is manned by two inmates standing on opposite sides. One feeds blanks into the press. The other changes dies so each plate is stamped with a different sequential number.

The pace is hectic. Feed and stamp.

Feed and stamp. It goes on continuously, plate after plate, batch after batch.

Plates are then fed into a roller that applies a coat of blue ink onto the raised letters and numbers. They are dried in an oven and packaged in numerical order in boxes of 100.

Before the plates are shipped, each is again checked for quality.

Classic car and military plates are typically painted. Specialty plates for organizations such as college alumni groups, veterans organizations and volunteer fire companies receive a vinyl application.

The only difference is that specialty plates receive an organization’s logo. The logos are computer designed by inmates according to customer specifications.

Curtis Nichols, foreman of specialty plate production, said computer design and the vinyl application have given the prison almost unlimited ability to make specialty license tags for any organization.

“What I anticipate is you’re going to pull up to a stop sign some day, look around, and not one license plate is going to look the same,” he said.

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