ELLSWORTH ? Some former workers at the Century Manufacturing plant say inmates at the Ellsworth Correctional Facility have taken their jobs.

More than 40 employees lost their jobs when the Wichita-based company closed the acrylics plant March 29. The workers can take the jobs that inmates are doing, but they would be paid less and would have to work inside the prison.

“That’s degrading to take a cut in pay and go work with a bunch of prisoners,” said former acrylics buffer Robert Myers, 27, of Lincoln, who worked for Century for eight years.

The company employs 45 inmates at the Ellsworth prison and another 63 at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.

Kerry Jackson, who worked as an art director for Century for 14 years, said he still would have a job if Century owner Jim Laubach hadn’t hired prisoners.

“I know it’s his business, and he can pretty much do what he wants, but my feeling is the jobs wouldn’t have been lost if he never started with prison labor in the first place,” Jackson said.

Laubach said declining sales led him to close the Ellsworth plant. While prisoners make between $5.60 and $7 per hour half as much as some employees at the plant Laubach says it isn’t just the cost of labor that makes operating in the prison more affordable. Utilities and other incidentals associated with keeping the Ellsworth plant open also cost the company.

Laubach said few people have taken the company up on its offer to transfer to the prison or to an entry-level job in Wichita. A handful of employees will work as supervisors in the Ellsworth prison and one will move to Wichita, he said.

Meanwhile, Kansas inmates are doing record business, said Kansas Department of Corrections spokesman Bill Miskell.

For the first time since the department began a partnership with private businesses in the prisons in 1980, the Kansas prison system grossed more than any other in the country $1,065,229 in the last quarter of 2001.

Century Manufacturing is second in Kansas in the number of prisoners it employs. First on the list is Impact Design, an Olathe-based screen-printing and embroidered-clothing company that employs 206 prisoners.

Inmates’ earnings go toward room and board, victim restitution and the Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund. They can save any amount left over or spend it in the commissary.

Donnie White, one of three Ellsworth plant workers laid off in October, said that when the company started using inmate labor a few years ago it was good for employees, who were “overrun” with work.

As people started leaving, they weren’t replaced, White said, “and they were putting more work into the prison.”

Not too many people complained at the time, because they still had jobs.

“But the company shouldn’t be able to (continue employing inmates) when times are tough like this,” Jackson said.