Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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JUNE 25 - JULY 1, 2014 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM In another lifetime, I had the opportunity to visit the North Carolina Correction Enterprises Tag Plant, staffed in large part by sixty or so inmates from the Correctional Institution for Women in downtown Raleigh, more commonly called Women's Prison. At various Corrections Enterprises operations throughout the state, inmates make all sorts of products, including cleaning supplies for prisons and other state facilities, produce a substantial percentage of the food served in our state prisons, make furniture for state buildings, and "stamp" our license plates among other activities. Women inmates have been making license plates for North Carolina licensed vehicles since 2001. North Carolina is the first state to employ women in this process, and you likely have their handiwork in your driveway. Until I saw the process, I suffered the delusion that license plates were literally stamped, and loudly, metal on metal, by male inmates in prison-issue tee shirts. I have seen photographs and movies of men doing just that. But like most everything else in the 21st century, technology has overtaken license plate production — sort of. The North Carolina facility is large, about 30,000 square feet, and the process is far more modern than it was when the male residents of Central Prison started stamping in 1927. Despite dazzling advances in all sorts of technology, human labor — today it is female labor— remains at the core of the license tag production process in North Carolina. After all, what would those inmates be doing if they were not making license plates? Even so, the process is more complicated and tedious than one might expect. Large coils of aluminum are rolled out and covered with a plastic overlay, then cut into 12" X 6" rectangles, and four holes are punched. Numbers and letters are still stamped by hand. That is the routine for our familiar "First in Flight" plates, which used to be red but have been blue since 2009. The blue dye lasts longer and is easier for scanners to read. Production time is three to five days for each plate, and a living person handles each at least fourteen times. All told, the women make three million plates a year, or roughly 16,000 per working day. North Carolina's specialty plates — and we have more than 150 to choose among — are more challenging to produce. Many of them involve several colors, and unless the color ribbons are aligned just so, the plate will be blurry, not a great idea according to our Highway Patrol troopers. Blurry is also not good news for the women inmates who make them since their jobs are highly desirable among their peers in their Raleigh institution. One of the inmates I met on my visit was most complimentary of the facility's air conditioning system. So which specialty plates are most popular? "HANDICAPPED" is the runaway favorite with almost 50,000 plates issued. In order but far behind are Blue Ridge Parkway, Great Smokey Mountains, Disabled Veteran, UNC-CH, Animals Lovers, Vietnam Veteran, NC State University, Friends of the Appalachian Trail, and, Ducks Unlimited. While the women of Correction Enterprises produced the plate on your vehicle, you bought it from the state Division of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, the women's largest customer. The DMV has significant say so over the design of our plates. North Carolina has license plates promoting everything from colleges and universities to cures for diseases to NASCAR to watermelon, and many of those interests receive a portion of the fee for their good works. DMV, along with the Highway Patrol, gets a say on design and for good reason. Whatever the design is, it needs to be legible to law enforcement officers. The proliferation of license plate designs and charitable causes is increasingly controversial, but that is another column altogether. If you and I want our license plates to be more special than just letters and numbers — a vanity plate, we can pay a fee and can express ourselves in eight characters. I have seen some truly clever thoughts driving North Carolina's highways. DMV, however has the final say, and here are a few submissions it vetoed, and with good reason. An alarming percentage of these have to do with bodily functions and activities. PORNSTAR. OHPOOH. STUDMUFN. GOTBEER. STRIP4$. LETSM8. BRSTFEED. NOFATCHX. QUICKIE. IMSEXY. IMHIGH. 2HT2TROT. URDUMB. POTHED. TIPSY. UDIMWIT. NUDE. IMHOT. HNKYPNKY. FLOOZY. CALGRL. JUNKIE. Others channel what must be our sports preferences. HATEUNC. HATES8. HATEDUKE. That hateful list goes on and on and includes thoughts unrelated to sports that no sane person would voice in public much less display for all the world to read. I confess to being fascinated by license plates, especially our North Carolina ones. I am interested in who chooses what special plates, what clever messages are on vanity plates, and who chooses to drive around incognito with only letters and numbers to identify them. So just know I am out there in Station Wagon # 7 checking out my fellow motorists taste in tags. In the meantime, BSF+HPPY. Working Women by MARGARET DICKSON MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer, COMMENTS? Editor@upandcom- ingweekly.com.. 910.484.6200. Contest&RequestLine: 910-764-1073 www.christian107.com KeepingtheMainThing...theMainThing. visitusonline FocusontheFamily 20Countdown Magazine Adventures in Odyssey Serving Fayetteville Over 50 Years! 484-0261 1304 Morganton Rd. Mon-Sat: 6am-10pm Sun: 7am-2:30 pm Daily Specials • Breakfast • Lunch • Dinner Fresh Seafood • Hand Cut Steaks • Homemade Desserts • Italian & Greek • Children's Menu Banquet rooms available up to 100 guests North Carolina license plates are made by female inmates.