Incarcerated people work for cents on the dollar or for free to make goods you use.
Brittany White, 37, was arrested for marijuana trafficking in Alabama in 2009. She went to trial to contest the charges — after all, just a year prior the United States president had admitted, cheekily, that inhaling was “the point.”
She was sentenced to 20 years. But her sentence was meted out in portions, based on good behavior, and she, posing no discernable public safety risk for selling a plant increasingly legal in states all across the U.S., was allowed to work on the outside.
She got a job at a Burger King.
But the state of Alabama took a significant portion of her paltry minimum wage. “They charged me $25 a week for transportation,” she tells Truthdig. “And they take away 40% of your check. It’s egregious to be making minimum wage, and then to have so much taken away by the state.”
Minimum wage in Alabama is $7.25.
Still, White considers herself lucky. Even her paltry earnings were better than nothing. She was able to purchase soap from the commissary. The prison-provided soap is full of lye, she says, which you definitely do not want near your private parts.
Many stuck behind bars are forced to work for cents per hour, or for nothing. While corporate culprits are commonly blamed for exploiting the labor of incarcerated people, it’s actually primarily states and the federal government who take advantage, and make the public unwittingly complicit.
Got a car? Your license plate was likely made by inmates. In New York, inmates make the trash cans. High school desks are often made on the inside; so are glasses for Medicare patients.
Many stuck behind bars are forced to work for cents per hour, or for nothing, for corporations, states and the federal government.
Companies like CorCraft in New York manage labor in the state’s prisons. They’re funded by the state’s budget, and boast they’re New York state’s preferred choice for “office chairs, desks, panel systems, classroom furniture, cleaning, vehicle, and personal care supplies, and more.”
“Summer Sizzles with Classroom Furniture from Corcraft,” their website declares.
They also claim to help in “the department’s overall mission to prepare incarcerated individuals for release through skill development, work ethic, respect and responsibility.”
The people behind the “sizzling” furniture beg to differ.
In the 12 years he was incarcerated in New York state, Dyjuan Tatro was forced to work a variety of jobs, from making desks to license plates. “At the end, I didn’t have a resume,” he tells Truthdig. “I didn’t get one thing to help me be successful on the outside from the prison. No resume, no job experience… Just $40 and a bus ticket — from 12 years of prison labor, I couldn’t use any of it to get a meaningfully paying job.”
Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, an organization devoted to eradicating unjust prison practices, goes further. “It’s slavery,” she tells Truthdig.
The 13th Amendment, which ended slavery, left an important exception: it’s still legal to garnish wages, or more commonly, refuse to pay incarcerated people for forced labor. “As a result, incarcerated people live in slavery-like conditions,” Tylek adds.
Of course, there are nuances. For example, trading community service, like, say, picking up trash, in exchange for not serving time, is one example of a noncarceral approach. But incarceration changes the equation. Tylek notes that it’s not just about the miniscule (or nonexistent) wages. It’s compelling people to work, with the alternative being a stint in solitary and other punishments, like refusing to let them see relatives, consequences that are meted out by guards. She also notes that they have to work in dangerous trades they may not be trained for, including industrial-sized laundries or ovens.
Despite what someone did or did not do, to end up behind bars, coercing them into performing free labor is wrong, Tylek notes. “I like to ask people the question, ‘Under what circumstances is slavery OK?” she tells Truthdig.
“If you can’t answer that question, the answer is, slavery is never OK.”
If we’re gonna have prisons at all …
It makes a great deal of sense to offer prisoners pay for doing things to maintain the prison: cleaning the floors, washing the uniforms, leading the singing circle or whatever. That sets them up as members of a self-supporting unit, where you can actually be rewarded for doing things that benefit the other people around you. Then when they get out, they’re accustomed to being a person who makes things better for those around them.
But it doesn’t make sense to put the prisoners out into the non-prison world as competition for free workers, and then claw back their wages. That sets prisoners up as underclass members of general society which is exactly the condition that leads to a lot of people becoming criminals in the first place. And then when they get out, they’ve already been “out” as slaves of McDonald’s, so that’s how they and the world are accustomed to relating to each other.
That sets prisoners up as underclass members of general society which is exactly the condition that leads to a lot of people becoming criminals in the first place
That’s the unspoken point. The system is already so drunk on the exploitation of slave labor to the point that all involved actively seek to encourage recidivism. They want all of us for any reason they can shit out.
Don’t forget that the same prison companies that do this are publicly traded. Recidivism isn’t just profitable, it’s in the interest of shareholders.
Recidivism is a feature of the current system, not a bug. The prison system is not interested in reforming anyone into respectable members of society; they’re only interested in making as much of a buck off of as many inmates as possible, preferably those of the right color. Society is rigged against anyone with a criminal record by design, on all kinds of different levels, to keep anyone previously convicted as an underclass member of society.
Having prisoners do work for the prison gives incentive to pay them less, which gives government incentive to put more people in prison, which gives government incentive to make things illegal that shouldn’t be illegal. None of that should be allowed. They should be allowed to do work at whatever rate they are able to get work for(likely remote work), and should receive 100% of their compensation like any other employee, with a certain amount taken out for the cost of housing and food.
Just because it’s legal, doesn’t make it right.
I never understood why prisoners get paid so little. They are usually there because they don’t have financial stability in the first place. Wouldn’t a bit of savings help put them on better footing so not to turn back to crime?
But who would make cheap license plates then. Who would pay for the profits of the private prison owners or all the predatory companies providing “services” for the prisons and prisoners. I would bet, that most people in Alabama prisons are not white, so you really think Alabama law makers give a rats ass about their prospecs after prison?
I was a corrections officer in a very liberal state with a lot of evergreen trees. It is all just $$$$ related. There is a distinct lack of wrap-around services for the incarcerated simply to keep the door revolving.
Sure, they’ll come up with these silly “action plans” and “goals to reduce x” x being recidivism, prison violence, PREA, etc. What that turns into is them moving the goalposts so it looks like they’re doing something when reality is they want to keep bodies in cells.
Examples of this include changes to what counts as recidivism. Got out of prison, but went back in on a different kind of charge? Not recidivism, according to my state. Gotta be the exact same charge to count. In some cases even a change in the degree of the charge exempts them from recidivism stats.
Regarding violence, they simply made sure to label one inmate in every altercation the aggressor. In doing so they cut prison violence stats in half, since every beating barring multiman fights are now a fighter and victim, not two fighters. Voila, looks good on paper, the prison industrial complex keeps churning.
Prison rape is apparently solved by spray painting a helpline by all the payphones that doesn’t do shit except make you look like a snitch for telling about being raped because they bungle every investigation so often that it’s impossible to report anything with any kind of anonymity, inmate or not.
Tl;dr it’s fucked, it’s not changing, private or state ran doesn’t matter.
So do you think that better halfway houses/better post-incarceration services would make a dent in our prison population? And I’m guessing that it shouldn’t be a private as that makes perverse incentives all the worse.
Are there issues at public prisons with the revolving door at the same scale as private ones? Why do state run prisons have perverse incentives if they’re not there to make a profit? I have a hunch that it’s about being funded like schools are (I don’t know how prisons are funded)
A lot of the violence seems to be a culture that’s hard to change. Is sexual assault training lacking in prisons? Do they not hire the right specialists to deal with these cases? Do you see any practices that might reduce violence in prisons or after prison?
I want to know how things can change if there’s the political capital to do so. I really appreciate your comment too!
I’ll go down your questions in order.
Yes. Better housing is a must, however I think the biggest impact could be made by pushing laws that gives incentive towards hiring people with a record. We need to break down the largest barrier which typically tends to return individuals back to crime and that’s establishing a good income.
What would likely help more than halfway houses would honestly be apartment vouchers for first/last/deposit in a regulated apartment rental system. Halfway houses are usually plagued by innumerable issues like being built in poorer neighborhoods farther away from where any good work can be found. They get NIMBY’d and there’s too much “take it or leave it” attitude. You got bunked up next to someone with schizophrenia that screams at all hours? Well sucks to be you, take it or leave it ex con. Once decent housing and income become more readily available, suddenly people aren’t turning to selling fentanyl or stealing shit to put food on the table.
Yes, other than how well compensated the staff are, they’re mostly the same shit present found in a different wrapping paper. While profit isn’t supposed to be the motive, they certainly rub shoulders with Correctional industries (likely called different things in different states, but mine called it this.) which sells things like those ambiguous looking office chairs you find in state offices that sell for 800-1200 dollars all built by incarcerated making 1.37 an hour (might be a bit more now, but that was near top dollar in 2021 when I quit.) The other part of it is that once you get to the level internally to make change as an admin, you’re usually too deep in the kool-aid and the primary focus for everyone is “rising tide raises all boats” so every administrator is incentivised to spend as little as possible on anything that benefits the incarcerated or the staff (which, by and large would likely lead to better treatment of individuals, as it just so happens miserable staff take out their bullshit on the easily accessible population in their care.) Not that spending on staff would eliminate these issues, but it couldn’t hurt. Nevertheless, spend the least amount possible and schmooze your way into the next position. Nepotism is a huge issue as well, and they will create loopholes for their chosen applicants to secure positions they otherwise wouldn’t be qualified for.
Violence is part of the culture. Hard to get away from it at all, even if you’re trying to. It’s impossible to prevent violence, but I will say that the immediate response does help mitigate the level of damage most times. Sexual assault training is the same in prison as it is everywhere in my state. You fill out a 3-5 question form that basically amounts to “Ya rape anyone?” “Been accused of raping anyone?” “Any plans to rape someone?” “If yes, please explain”. Followed by a PowerPoint you watch yearly online. That’s it. No. They do not hire the right people for the jobs needed most of the time. Not 100% the states fault simply because people don’t really like working in prison most of the time, and those that do usually aren’t qualified. They hire investigators from Gap loss prevention and Casino security, and expect them to be able to sus out organized gang crime. They hire fresh grads who really need real world experience before being slapped into a sex offender treatment program to sit there and listen to guys get off recalling their crimes. The people who do have experience know better.
I don’t really know what practices aside from common sense and just a smidgen of empathy might fix. Given that when you force two grown adults in a 6x12’ cell that don’t get along, and when they explain this the common response is “fight, fuck, or get along.” Which leads to things like This I was there that day, and this is the living unit I worked in at the time(different shift) but still. They absolutely had every tool available to prevent this, every warning possible. Goldsby literally told them what was happening prior to him going off, and even asked them to just look up Mungers crimes (any not half stupid officer knows how to do this, we have access to police records, statements, court reports, etc.) It would have taken 5 minutes to see Goldsby did in fact have a sister, who was in fact raped by his cell mate.
I don’t know what the solution is, but if any swamp needs to be drained, it’s state prison system administration.
Could it possibly be, just possibly, that there is a step between paying prisoners far less than minimum wage and making prison like a hotel?
Again: They’re in prison for a reason. Why are they allowed to make money in first place? All of their salary should 100% go towards paying the expenses of their jail time to relieve the taxpayers.
Many of them are there because they’ve committed crimes of poverty (stealing necessities, passing bad checks for necessities, “trespassing” due to homelessness). Or because they did something that everyone does (like smoke weed) but only poor and/or people of color are incarcerated for. Poor people are much more likely to be arrested and being arrested makes people more likely to be poor:
People who enter the criminal justice system are overwhelmingly poor. Two-thirds detained in jails report annual incomes under $12,000 prior to arrest. Incarceration contributes to poverty by creating employment barriers; reducing earnings and decreasing economic security through criminal debt, fees and fines; making access to public benefits difficult or impossible; and disrupting communities where formerly incarcerated people reside.
the choice always comes down to “do you want less crime?” or “do you want the same amount of crime but to punish people who aren’t white by continuing slavery?”
because the solution to the first is to stop doing the second
and you can argue about it, but unfortunately all scientific studies support that conclusion. So the question actually is “do you want less crime, as borne out by reality or do you want the same amount of crime but fantasize it is helping society somehow to punish people who are overwhelmingly not white with slavery?”
Just FYI, don’t post the full article in the post body when sharing on Lemmy. That’s how you get C&D letters sent to your instance admins for copyright infringement. Just post a snippet of the relevant text to stay within fair use.
If an admin tells me to do so I will, but you don’t need to backseat my posting, I will not make people open the article to read it if they don’t want to, I’m gonna assume you’re not a lawyer or an admin for that matter, just a fan of cooooooooopyright, like oh no, I totally believe in intellectual property, such a cool concept and I’m sure the people at TruthDig are big mad their work is reaching a wider audience
It’s one thing to freeboot an article in a world where journalism is already dying due to lack of funding.
It’s another thing to have a shit attitude on top of it.
I will not make people open the article to read it if they don’t want to
Then don’t post it in the first place?
I’m sure the people at TruthDig are big mad their work is reaching a wider audience
Literally the opposite effect is happening when you do this. Fewer people will click the link, resulting in less traffic to the site.
I can’t believe people are up voting that I’m not a fan of some aspects of IP law, but it has its place and isn’t all bad. It protects GPL software projects, for one.
You are opening up the instance to legal trouble.
I bet you like buying X brand of something knowing what to expect. Guess what, trademark law makes that possible. Not all IP law is bad.
Then an admin or mod will tell me to stop doing it, you are just a fan of IP not an admin or a mod, if it becomes a problem I’m sure I’ll hear about it from them directly
Simple.
We weren’t bombed out from WW2 and back then, we had factories. More than anyone else in fact. America’s ‘golden age’ had nothing to do with American exceptionalism (lols) and everything to do with no competition (but we still ran Keynesian capitalism, the New Deal, back then, so about a 10x bigger piece of the pie went to workers, affording them the American Dream, aka the middle class).
Add to that, the Marshall plan, which paid for Europe’s reconstruction but attached to that money came the demand to end colonialism (at least overtly). So America was pretty liberal at the helm for a minute there.
But then came Nixon and the conservatives in the late 60s, Henry Kissinger going on about there being an “excess of democracy” (seriously when I first found out about this in 9th grade it made me sick to my stomach) was saying the quiet part out loud. The rich wanted to scale back the New Deal and return to laissez-faire. Enter Milton Freidman. Cue up Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher - all peas in a pod. Citizens United. Regulatory Capture. Which brings us to today. Profit over people, wealth caused sociopathy (seriously, the paranoia, greed, and inability to form relationships with any real depth unmoors the psyche from society, thus, empathy atrophies and moral/emotional growth cease. “Money is the root of all evil”. Hoarding money, withholding help, in the face of suffering will slowly chip away at you, until yr just as evil as well) and legislatures that are disgustingly cheap to buy. We’re seeing the world remade into a giant money extraction farm. And we are the tax chattle. All so the rich never have to work a day of their lives.
Side note; Reagan slogan campaigning was “Make America Great Again”. Yep, Trump stole it (prob w/o paying royalties). Trump would go on to mimic Ronnie in another way, by ignoring, thereby exacerbating, a pandemic. Trump with Covid. Reagan with AIDS. Imo Trump’s leadership thru Covid resulted in the unnecessary deaths of more Americans than any other thing, ever, of which I hold him responsible. Donald Trump is/was/has been the deadliest thing to Americans, ever. Putin got his money’s worth, ffs.
Just FYI, we actually still have the factories. We manufacture about 3 times more stuff here in the US today than we did in the 60s and 70s and about 6 to 7 times more than we were during WWII. We just do so with roughly 1/100th to 1/1000th the workforce, because we automated everything.
Some of those manufacturing jobs moved overseas, but many many more were simply automated out of existence.
Eisenhower, after leading the allies to Berlin in WW2 and then serving as president (used his general clout to get the national freeway system going) gave us the warning about the military-industrial complex. It was in entirely selfless, and he told no one about the content of the speech before delivering it live to the nation. Like that’s up there with Washington and Cincinnatus stepping down. He was in a unique position to know intimately what he was talking about and it appears we didn’t listen, which is super sad.
This is actually probably a big reason why. The USA has tons of high quality natural resources, and the prisons (formerly slavery) provide the free labor. Syphoning 20-30% of everyone else’s paycheck for the military presents an image of strength as well.
Well at least half of America is only liberal with their markets, some states moreso than others.
Some states are downright repressive/regressive when it comes to social policy.
The liberal, even the libertarian mindset is simple. Do whatever the fuck you want as long as it doesn’t hurt people now or leave a mess for future people. Pick your path and then mind your own business.
Trying to legislate society into someone’s personal ideology (re: fascism), religious code (re: theocracy) or anachronistic local traditions is oppression. No ones forcing anyone to get an abortion, no one HAS to buy a gun. Factors might compel one too, but that’s a different discussion. At the federal, and probably state level as well, trying to homogenize a plural society is a recipe for failure. We are too big and too varied - and that’s a GOOD thing. Pass whatever city ordinance you want; as long as it isn’t legislating hatred, fear or violence.
Simply put; people need to mind their own fucking business again. If someone wants to make their business fucking, then fucking let them and move on, holy shit. Who do these people think they are? They won’t believe a single thing said if it comes from a city, why would they think we’re gonna stop our menagie of drugged up costumed orgies? Like ladies for real, if you haven’t mixed a plan B into your morning cocaine anti hangover line, you just aren’t living. Don’t worry, there’s enough for everyone. Socialism ftw.
All things considered, since prisoners almost always get some form of compensation (albeit very little) it’s technically indentured servitude which is tantamount to slavery. My only quibble is that, however, and I find it just as reprehensible.
I’m not opposed to prison labour, but I think prisoners still ought to be paid minimum wage less tax, and this amount can be put in a sort of savings account for them to responsibly use “on the outside”, such as for rent, restitution, &c. Interest on the money can then be put towards a crime victims’ fund. That way, I think, everyone gets a fair shake and it’s not just a forced labour camp.
Hard disagreement there. Prison labor is used to suppress wages, so, any labor allowed should be mandatorily equal to the highest prevailing union wage, including benefits, to remove profit motive and harm to society.
More than this, since I believe the entire prison system should be reformed from a system of punishment into a system of rehabilitation, much of being in prison should focus on education, job training, and paid works programs.
Obviously, they’re criminals and not everyone would be able to participate, but the vast majority would and would massively benefit from such programs.
You’re probably right, but we also want prisoners to actually still get jobs and earn money, so it can’t cost more than hiring a regular working because then why would anyone bother.
I would support the State adding a few dollars to minimum wage and taking that as a commission or something to offset costs.
It doesn’t matter. Slavery - not “something tantamount to slavery”, not “technically slavery”, not “conditions similar to slavery”, but full on 100% legally recognized slavery - is legal under the 13th amendment for convicts.
The 13th amendment literally says that slavery is illegal, except for as punishment for a crime.
