The Economics of Slavery and Prison Labor
Much has already been written about the relationship between chattel slavery and the US prison system, but several recent statements regarding cheap prison labor have more clearly defined it.
From Daniel Selby, writing in The Innocence Project in 2021, essential reading about one particularly egregious example of carceral racism and exploitation:
How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended
Three people share their stories of strength and perseverance through decades of wrongful incarceration at Angola prison.
When the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery was formally abolished throughout the United States — “except as punishment for crime.” In reality, the policy only abolished chattel slavery — the form of slavery in which a person is considered the property of another.
Our clients, especially those wrongly imprisoned in the South, spent years working in prisons for mere cents per hour, while those beyond prison walls profited from their work. Some call these conditions “modern-day slavery,” but those who lived through it will tell you there’s nothing modern about it.
Those five words, “except as punishment for a crime,” carved out an exception that enabled incarcerated people to be used as free and forced labor and paved the way for mass incarceration, particularly of Black Americans, that we still see to this day.
Today, prisoners in most states are paid a nominal wage (in the range of cents per hour) for their work; however, a few states, including Texas, Georgia, and Florida, do not pay prisoners at all, and private companies save millions of dollars each year by contracting prison labor.
But nowhere is the evolution of slavery into mass incarceration more clearly seen than in places like Parchman Farm in Mississippi and Louisiana’s Angola farm, from which eight Innocence Project clients have been freed so far. …
Angola, named for the country where most of its slaves came from, was one of those plantations. After the abolition of chattel slavery, Angola relied on the labor of prisoners leased from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. However, in 1898, the convict leasing system was banned. The state of Louisiana then purchased the 8,000-acre plantation in 1901, establishing the Louisiana State Penitentiary on the grounds and taking control over the prisoners previously leased to the plantation.
Today, the prison spans 18,000 acres — most of it farmland — and its slavery-era name is still in use. About 5,300 people are incarcerated at Angola, and approximately 1,800 people work there, many of whom live with their families on the prison grounds, which include schools, a golf course, tennis courts, and a pool for their use.
People incarcerated at Angola are paid a few cents an hour to work the same fields, picking cotton, corn, and more, from the same land slaves were forced to work 200 years ago. Some incarcerated people are even tasked with fishing, cooking, and doing repair work for the “free men” — as people imprisoned at Angola call the prison staff.
Angola is, essentially, a place where slavery never ended.
Malcolm, Henry, and Calvin all spent time in the fields of Angola after being wrongly convicted in separate crimes that occurred within years of each other.
Like 75% of people incarcerated at Angola, they are Black — another vestige of slavery still visible at the prison, which is the country’s largest. And, like 70% of Angola’s population, all three men were sentenced to life in prison.
Louisiana has one of the highest rates of exonerations in the country with 64 people having been exonerated in the state to date; however, this figure reflects only the wrongful convictions we know about and that have resulted in exonerations. And though Malcolm, Henry, and Calvin are all free today, their experiences of wrongful conviction still weigh heavily on them.
The practice of paying prisoners pennies (or not at all) for their labor might at first be seen as a regrettable but unnecessary exploitation by greedy corporations and governments. However, in moments of questionably wise honesty, these modern slavedrivers have argued that not only is such exploitation beneficial, it is necessary: they cannot afford to pay even minimum wage workers for equivalent labor. One such slavedriver is Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn, who argued that the less-than-cheap supply of labor was necessary to keep Arizona’s cities afloat:
Sen. David Gowan asked Shinn about the nature of the work the prisoners do at the Florence West prison. In Arizona, all people in state prisons are forced to work 40 hours a week with exceptions for prisoners with health care conditions and other conflicting programming schedules. Some prisoners earn just 10 cents an hour for their work.
“These are low-level worker inmates that work in the communities around the county itself, I would imagine?" Gowan asked.
“Yes. The department does more than just incarcerate folks,” Shinn replied. “There are services that this department provides to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can't be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents.”
Defending the choice to keep state and private prisons open despite dwindling populations, Shinn told the legislators “while it doesn't necessarily serve the department in the best interest to have these places open, we have to do it to support Arizona.”
“Without the ability to have these folks at far flung places like Apache, like Globe, like Fort Grant, even like Florence West, communities wouldn't have access to these resources or services, and literally would have to spend more to be able to provide that to their constituents,” Shinn said.
This is just one example of a politician who was willing to say what most of them are thinking. But his honesty about Arizona’s reliance on the prison-industrial complex extends to other states as well: an entire town in California is lamenting the proposed closure of a prison around which it built its entire economy:
In Susanville, at the edge of a valley hemmed in by the Sierra Nevada in remote northeast California, there are nearly as many people living inside the walls of the town’s two state prisons, roughly 7,000 people, as outside. About half of the adults work at the prisons — the soon-to-be shuttered minimal security California Correctional Center and a maximum security facility, High Desert, which will remain open.
When the California Correctional Center was built in the 1960s, many people in Susanville, which cherishes its small-town way of life — “we’re not rural, we’re frontier,” said one resident — relied on jobs at the nearby sawmills and on cattle ranches. Those jobs eventually disappeared, and now almost every aspect of the town’s economy and civic life, from real estate to local schools, depends on the prison. Over the years, the inmate population has counted toward political representation, and factored into the amount of money the town received from federal pandemic relief funds and state money to fix roads.
The story of Susanville is not unlike that of countless rural communities in America that in the back half of the last century welcomed correctional facilities to replace dying industries at a time when the country was undergoing a prison-building boom. But now, California and other states are moving to reduce inmate populations and close prisons amid a national movement to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
“It will affect the whole town,” said Mendy Schuster, Susanville’s mayor, whose husband works as a corrections officer. “I don’t want to imagine what it would be like.”
With so much at stake, Susanville is fighting back, trying to halt the closure through legal means, rather than seeking out new industries to replace the prison. Last year, the town filed a lawsuit against the state that is still pending, arguing that officials violated environmental codes in deciding to close the prison and did not give local officials any prior notice.
“I don’t want to imagine what it would be like.” This statement, in response to the consequences of reducing racial disparities in California’s prison system, might be a more ill-advised yet honest betrayal of the mayor’s feelings about slavery and its economic benefits than the one offered by Shinn.
Even the Vice President has sung the praises of forced, underpaid labor:
This era of Harris’s tenure as attorney general escaped the recent close re-examination of some of the higher-profile cases in her prosecutorial past. During her brief presidential run, a memo from the tail end of this battle resurfaced; in late 2014, lawyers from her office claimed that nonviolent offenders needed to stay incarcerated, lest they lose bodies for fire camps in the wildfire-plagued state, as Jackie Kucinich of the Daily Beast reported.
Harris was quick to disavow the memo, claiming she had no knowledge of it and telling BuzzFeed News she was “shocked” by the argument. But it squares firmly with the sort of arguments her office was putting forward for multiple years preceding it. Harris, meanwhile, was known to run an extremely centralized attorney general’s office, with few things coming in or going out without her express sign-off. With a ruling handed down from the country’s highest court, this was one of the highest-profile cases she managed in her role as attorney general. An extremely high-stakes case involving a decarceration order she spent years resisting is unlikely to have escaped her awareness.
Of course, Harris has been criticized on multiple occasions for fighting to keep people, including innocent ones, in prison. In the case of Daniel Larsen, an ex-felon sentenced to 27 years to life under California’s “three strikes” law, Harris argued “that even if Danny was innocent, his conviction should not be reversed because he waited too long to file his petition,” according to the California Innocence Project, which took Larsen’s case. And while her trenchant opposition to decarceration of the state’s prisons does align with those stories, her role in attempting to subvert the authority of the country’s highest legal body, for the sole purpose of preventing the release of a number of low-risk prisoners, has gone largely unchallenged.
Her role in blocking the Supreme Court’s prison reduction order is deeply troubling on multiple counts. First, with the increased salience of criminal justice reform in the Black Lives Matter era, a forceful opponent of decarceration on the ticket hardly conveys that the Democratic Party is on the side of racial justice. Second, placing someone with a history of defying the Supreme Court on the Democratic ticket would significantly undermine Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s pledge to return to the pre-Trump era of governance, where the three branches of government are seen as coequal and the courts are respected.
Even if a felon is fully trained and fights fires while incarcerated in California, they are unable to seek employment as firefighters once released. This is nothing more than particularly dangerous slave labor (felons also cannot vote in many states without paying a fine, which amounts to a poll tax).
From an NPR segment: prison labor is undercounted statistically as well as underpaid, likely to hide the true extent of US economic reliance on exploitation:
Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. And today it's a multi-billion-dollar industry with incarcerated people doing everything from building office furniture and making military equipment to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.
But even so, this industry is not well-understood. Incarcerated workers are not included in official employment statistics. And there's just not a ton of economic research done on this topic, so it can be difficult to know just how substantial this sector of our economy actually is. …
GARCIA: It is hard to know exactly how big the prison labor industry is. There hasn't been a full nationwide census of prisons since 2005. But back then, it was estimated that there were nearly 1.5 million incarcerated people working, and that included 600,000 people in the manufacturing sector. At the time, that was more than 4% of all manufacturing jobs in the country. Today there is no central repository of information on prison labor, which means that it's just sort of left up to individual prison systems and state legislatures to decide how they count and regulate prison labor.
RAFIEYAN: For federal prisons, we have UNICOR, which is the name for the state-owned corporation that contracts incarcerated workers out to private companies. According to UNICOR'S most recent annual report, it employs more than 17,000 incarcerated workers doing everything from heavy manufacturing to computer-aided design. And it brings in more than $500 million of revenue annually.
The Guardian cites a staggering figure:
Incarcerated workers in the US produce at least $11bn in goods and services annually but receive just pennies an hour in wages for their prison jobs, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Nearly two-thirds of all prisoners in the US, which imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, have jobs in state and federal prisons. That figure amounts to roughly 800,000 people, researchers estimated in the report, which is based on extensive public records requests, questionnaires and interviews with incarcerated workers.
ACLU researchers say the findings outlined in Wednesday’s report raise concerns about the systemic exploitation of prisoners, who are compelled to work sometimes difficult and dangerous jobs without basic labor protections and little or no training while making close to nothing.
The undeniable conclusion: the carceral state is a large, predatory industry which is staffed with unwilling, mostly non-white individuals in for non-violent crimes, to keep afloat a sinking economic system and line the already-stuffed pockets of the upper class.
David Shinn did make an important point about constituents, cheap goods, and the American way of life which was reinforced by the Susanville outcry. Our increasingly tenuous way of life is dependent on cheap goods, cheap gas, and cheap food. To raise the pay of prisoners or close a prison without attendant social safety net measures, such as “New Deal”-type work programs, will negatively impact constituents in the short term, who will make their displeasure known by voting out “tough on crime” politicians; it is therefore in their best interests to maintain the flow of cheap goods and corrections officer positions. Look for an increase in this “tough on crime” rhetoric as the environment continues its death spiral and prices continue to skyrocket with no increase in wages. Witness the outcry over increased gas prices.
This process is already underway: the budgets for police and military are being increased precisely because elites are aware that the system is predicated on “law and order,” and the usual victims of colonial exploitation abroad will be the first to suffer from climate change and therefore less able to meaningfully contribute their own bodies to the cause. Rather than fix a broken system, we are set to feed it with more bodies to artificially extend its life for a few more decades at most. This time, more of the bodies will be American.
This is the true root of the “tough on crime” mindset: not a hatred of lawbreaking but a need to keep prisons filled with what essentially amounts to slave labor. “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the crime” might be more accurately translated as “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the unpaid, dangerous labor that will make us billions and allow us to keep our jobs and wealth a little while longer.”
Much like segregation still exists in privatized, economic form, the incarceration of all but the most violent and abusive prisoners constitutes the privatized, economic continuation of slavery. Therefore the US prison system, which results in massive increases in unnecessary arrests, disproportionately of people of color, and a dismal quality of life for its inmates, is a modern atrocity in another important way: it, like slavery, it is necessary to continue a way of life which should have ended a century ago—in this case, capitalism.
All such prisoners must be freed in order for our society to claim any semblance of justness or fairness, but they will not be, because their underpaid (or non-paid) labor is as necessary as the exploitation of poorer nations for the maintenance of an economic system which allows the wealthy to continue to live extravagantly, all while destroying the planet as they do so.