Workers smashing television tubes with small hammers clutched in their bare hands? Toxic dust from broken monitors drifting around unmasked workers, who later eat their lunch at uncovered tables just a short distance away? Is this computer recycling in some Third World country, done in secret, off the books, and unregulated? Hardly. This has, for several years, been the state of computer recycling in seven U.S. prisons, according to charges currently being investigated.

In recent months the situation has improved somewhat, sources say; that is, the people smashing the monitors with hammers now have protective clothing and are using respirators so they're not breathing toxic dust. But other serious hazards remain.

The demand for computer and television recycling is rapidly growing, as new models make old ones obsolete and legislators increasingly require that the old components be harvested rather than dumped. Cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), for example, have been banned from landfills in California, Maine, and Massachusetts. But the labor cost of disassembly is daunting, so most old computers and CRTs sent for recycling today in the United States are shipped for deconstruction to Asia, where environmental-protection and occupational-safety regulations are weak.

Federal Prison Industries Inc., the Washington, D.C.-based government-owned corporation that provides industrial work experience for inmates in federal prisons, saw an opportunity—a quickly growing industry that has low equipment costs and uses large numbers of basically unskilled workers. The company, which has the trade name Unicor, estimates that in the next five years more than 250 million computers will become obsolete, producing nearly 9 billion pounds of scrap materials, according to its Web site.

Unicor began its first computer and television recycling operation in the U.S. prison system in Marianna, Fla., in 1994. The company currently operates recycling factories at seven prisons, utilizing more than a thousand inmates. Besides Marianna, they are in Atwater, Calif.; Elkton, Ohio; Fort Dix, N.J.; Lewisburg, Pa.; Texarkana, Texas; and Tucson, Ariz.

CRTs contain some nasty stuff, much of which can become airborne when the tubes break. A 15-inch tube, for example, can contain up to 0.7 kilogram of lead solder; it also will have significant traces of phosphorus, cadmium, barium, and mercury, all of which are toxic.

Plans a few years ago to add the computer recycling operation to the newly established federal penitentiary in Atwater stirred up concerns over the safety of such operations at other U.S. prisons. A staff member at the Atwater prison first expressed worries; later, independently, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental advocacy group based in San Jose, Calif., sounded an alarm. The coalition got involved because it felt that the use of prison labor for recycling might be exploitation, says Gopal Dayaneni, a spokesman for the group, who added that a system based on underpaid prison labor undermines the nascent but growing private recycling industry.