COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCSC) - Whether a driver takes what the Department of Motor Vehicles gives them or wants a more unique style, every license plate registered in South Carolina starts at the same place: behind the barbed wire fence of the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

At the maximum-security prison’s tag plant and sign shop, around 30 inmates work daily from early in the morning until the afternoon, stamping every tag issued in the state to its aluminum plate, with several hundred designs available.

“It’s labor-intensive, and we try to keep it that way,” South Carolina Department of Corrections Director Joel Anderson said.

The facility has been doing so since before Anderson arrived in the early 1990s, and it currently cranks out about 800,000 license plates a year, pl

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