Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, has admitted that his campaign used prison workers to make telephone calls on his behalf.
Mr Bloomberg insisted that his campaign was unaware that the workers were in prison and has ended its relationship with the company that contracted the prisoners.
Mr Bloomberg, who only last month entered the race to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency in November's election, said: "We do not support this practice and we are making sure our vendors more properly vet their subcontractors moving forward."
The billionaire, who is ranked by Forbes as the eighth wealthiest man in America, is the co-founder and owner of Bloomberg, a media company that posts annual revenue of about $10 billion. He said his campaign became aware of the its ties to prison labour, first reported in The Intercept, when it was contacted by a reporter.
According to The Intercept, Bloomberg's campaign contracted ProCom, New Jersey-based call centre company, through a third-party vendor. ProCom operates calls centres in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centres in Oklahoma are run from state prisons.
The news website claimed that inmates at the Dr Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison, made calls to California on behalf of Mr Bloomberg. The prisoners were required to end their calls by stating that the calls were paid for by Mr Bloomberg's campaign. However, they did not disclose that they were calling from prison.
Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for the Bloomberg campaign said: “We didn’t know about this and we never would have allowed it if we had. We don’t believe in this practice and we’ve now ended our relationship with the subcontractor in question.”
A latecomer to the race, Mr Bloomberg, 77, has spent more on campaign advertising in the past few weeks than his main Democratic rivals have all year.
Despite that, the former mayor of New York has failed to break into the top tier of candidates in opinion polls.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from last week, only about 5 per cent of Democratic voters support Mr Bloomberg. Recent polls suggest that former Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the party's leading candidates.
