Prisons:
Americas New System of Slavery
by Rania
Khalek
There
is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations
are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those
of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally
stripped of their political, economic and social rights and
ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned
from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and
forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization
renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden
from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances
or change their plight.
They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind
bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day
slaves of the 21st century.
Incarceration
Nation
Its
no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than
any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the worlds
population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the worlds
prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison
or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars.
That doesnt include the tens of thousands of detained
undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting
sentencing, or juveniles caught up in the school-to-prison
pipeline. Perhaps its reassuring to some that the US
still holds the number one title in at least one arena, but
needless to say the hyper-incarceration plaguing America has
had a damaging effect on society at large.
According
to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR),
US prison rates are not just excessive in comparison to the
rest of the world, they are also substantially higher than
our own longstanding history. The study finds that incarceration
rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners
per 100,000 people. After 1980, the inmate population began
to grow much more rapidly than the overall population and
the rate climbed from about 220 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683
in 2000, and 753 in 2008.
The costs
of this incarceration industry are far from evenly distributed,
with the impact of excessive incarceration falling predominantly
on African-American communities. Although black people make
up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account
for 40 percent of US prisoners. According to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics(BJS), black males are incarcerated at a
rate more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that
of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at approximately
three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic
females.
Michelle
Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow that more
black menare in jail, on probation, or on parole than were
enslaved in 1850. Higher rates of black drug arrests do not
reflect higher rates of black drug offenses. In fact, whites
and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at
roughly comparable rates.
Incentivizing
Incarceration
Clearly,
the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism,
but it gets worse. As it turns out, private companies have
a cheap, easy labor market, and it isnt in China, Indonesia,
Haiti, or Mexico. Its right here in the land of the
free, where large corporations increasingly employ prisoners
as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor.
In the
eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy
in the eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the
prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who
are not only cheap but easily controlled. Companies are free
to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick
days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They
dont need to worry about unions or demands for vacation
time or raises. Inmate workers are full-time and never late
or absent because of family problems.
If they
refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and
lose canteen privileges along with good time credit
that reduces their sentences. To top it off, the federal government
subsidizes the use of inmate labor by private companies through
lucrative tax write-offs. Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit(WOTC),
private-sector employers earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every
work release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring risky
target groups and they can earn back up to 40 percent
of the wages they pay annually to target group workers.
Study
after studydemonstrates the wastefulness of Americas
prison-industrial complex, in both taxpayer dollars and innocent
lives, yet rolling back imprisonment rates is proving to be
more challenging than ever. Meanwhile, the use of private
prisons and now privately contracted inmate labor has created
a system that does not exactly incentivize leaner sentencing.
The disturbing
implications of such a system mean that skyrocketing imprisonment
for the possession of miniscule amounts of marijuana and the
the expansion of severe mandatory sentencing laws regardless
of the conviction, are policies that have to potential to
increase corporate profits. As are thethree strikes
laws that require courts to hand down mandatory and
extended sentences to people who have been convicted of felonies
on three or more separate occasions. People have literally
been sentenced to life for minor crimes like shoplifting.
The
Reinvention of Slavery
The exploitation
of prison labor is by no means a new phenomenon. Jaron Browne,
an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights
(POWER), maps out how the exploitation of prison labor in
America is rooted in slavery. The abolition of slavery dealt
a devastating economic blow to the South following the loss
of free labor after the Civil War. So in the late 19th century,
an extensive prison system was created in the South in order
to maintain the racial and economic relationship of slavery,
a mechanism responsible for re-enslaving black workers. Browne
describes Louisianas famous Angola Prison to illustrate
the intentional transformation from slave to inmate:
In
1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the
state of Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters
became cell units. Now expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola
plantation is tilled by prisoners working the landa
chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.
The abolition
of slavery quickly gave rise to the Black Codes and Convict
Leasing, which together worked wonders at perpetuating African
American servitude by exploiting a loophole in the 13th Amendmentto
the US Constitution, which reads:
Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment
for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject
to their jurisdiction.
The Black
Codes were a set of laws that criminalized legal activity
for African Americans and provided a pretext for the arrest
and mass imprisonment of newly freed blacks, which caused
the percentage of African Americans in prison to surpass whites
for the first time. Convict leasing involved leasing out prisoners
to private companies that paid the state a certain fee in
return. Convicts worked for the companies during the day outside
the prison and returned to their cells at night. The system
provided revenue for the state and profits for plantation
owners and wasnt abolished until the 1930s.
Unfortunately,
convict leasing was quickly replaced with equally despicable
state-run chain gangs. Once again, stories of vicious abuse
created enough public anger to abolish chain gangs by the
1950s. Nevertheless, the systems of prisoner exploitation
never actually disappeared.
Todays
corporations can lease factories in prisons, as well as lease
prisoners out to their factories. In many cases, private corporations
are running prisons-for-profit, further incentivizing their
stake in locking people up. The government is profiting as
well, by running prison factories that operate as multibillion-dollar
industries in every state, and throughout the federal prison
system, where prisoners are contracted out to major corporationsby
the state.
In the
most extreme cases, we are even witnessing the reemergence
of the chain gang. In Arizona, the self-proclaimed toughest
sheriff in America, Joe Arpaio, requires his Maricopa
County inmates to enroll in chain gangs to perform various
community services or face lockdown with three other inmates
in an 8-by-12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. In June of this
year, Arpaio started a female-only chain gangmade up of women
convicted of driving under the influence. In a press release
he boasted that the inmates would be wearing pink T-shirts
emblazoned with messages about drinking and driving.
The modern-day
version of convict leasing was recently spotted in Georgia,
where Governor Nathan Deal proposed sending unemployed probationers
to work in Georgias fields as a solution to a perceived
labor shortage following the passage of the countrys
most draconian anti-immigrant law. But his plan backfiredwhen
some of the probationers began walking off their jobs because
the fieldwork was too strenuous.
There
has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors
prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous
reliance on prisons to manage any and all of societys
problems. According to the Wall Street Journalmore than a
third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who cant or
wont pay to be jailed. They found that judges signed
off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010
in nine counties. It appears that any act that can be criminalized
in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly
end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive
workforce.
Who
Profits?
Prior
to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using
prison labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing
scandals. But in 1979, Congress began a process of deregulation
to restore private sector involvement in prison industries
to its former status, provided certain conditions of the labor
market were met. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states
have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private
enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.
Federal
prisoners receive more generous wages that range from $0.23
to $1.25 per hour, and are employed by Unicor, a wholly owned
government corporation established by Congress in 1934. Its
principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which
Unicor derives approximately 53 percent of its sales. Some
21,836 inmates work in Unicor programs. Subsequently, the
nations prison industry prison labor programs
producing goods or services sold to other government agencies
or to the private sector now employs more people than
any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates
about $2.4 billion in revenue annually. Noah Zatz of UCLA
law schoolestimates that:
Well
over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are
working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United
States. Perhaps some of them built your desk chair: office
furniture, especially in state universities and the federal
government, is a major prison labor product. Inmates also
take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body
armor for the U.S. military, and manufacture prison chic fashion
accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license
plates.
Some of
the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in
the expansion of the prison labor market, including but not
limited to IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless,
Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard,
Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom,
TWA, Nordstroms, Revlon, Macys, Pierre Cardin,
Target Stores, and many more. Between 1980 and 1994 alone,
profitswent up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Since the
prison labor force has likely grown since then, it is safe
to assume that the profits accrued from the use of prison
labor have reached even higher levels.
In an
article for Mother Jones, Caroline Winter details a number
of mega-corporations that have profited off of inmates:
In
the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female
South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for
Victorias Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California
prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they
were ordered to replace Made in Honduras labels
on garments with Made in the USA.
According
to Winter, the defense industry is a large part of the equation
as well:
Unicor,
says that in addition to soldiers uniforms, bedding,
shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have produced
missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles
during the Gulf War) and wiring harnesses for
jets and tanks. In 1997, according to Prison Legal News,
Boeing subcontractorMicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane
components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages
of $30 on the outside.
Oil companies
have been known to exploit prison labor as well. Following
the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11
workers and irreparably damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations
to come, BP elected to hireLouisiana prison inmates to clean
up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate
of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American
men. Coastal residents desperate for work, whose livelihoods
had been destroyed by BPs negligence, were outraged
at BPs use of free prison labor.
In the
Nationarticle that exposed BPs hiring of inmates, Abe
Louise Young details how BP tried to cover up its use of prisoners
by changing the inmates clothing to give the illusion
of civilian workers. But nine out of 10 residents of Grand
Isle, Louisiana are white, while the cleanup workers were
almost exclusively black, so BPs ruse fooled very few
people.
Private
companies have long understood that prison labor can be as
profitable as sweatshop workers in third-world countries with
the added benefit of staying closer to home. Take Escod Industries,
which in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico
and instead moved to South Carolina, because the wages of
American prisoners undercut those of de-unionized Mexican
sweatshop workers. The move was fueled by the state, which
gave a $250,000 equipment subsidy to Escod along
with industrial space at below-market rent. Other examples
includeOhios Honda supplier, which pays its prison workers
$2 an hour for the same work for which the UAW has fought
for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour; Konica, which has
hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50 cents
an hour; and Oregon, where private companies can lease
prisoners at a bargain price of $3 a day.
Even politicians
have been known to tap into prison labor for their own personal
use. In 1994, a contractor for GOP congressional candidate
Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and
remind voters he was pro-death penalty. He won his campaign
claiming he had no knowledge of the scandal. Perhaps this
is why Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a billearlier
this year to require all low-security prisoners to work 50
hours a week. After all, creating a national prison labor
force has been a goal of his since he went to Congress in
1995.
In an
unsettling turn of events lawmakers have begun ditching public
employees in favor of free prison labor. The New York Times
recently reported that states are enlisting prison labor to
close budget gaps to offset cuts in federal financing and
dwindling tax revenue. At a time of record unemployment, inmates
are being hired to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep
campsites and perform many other services done before the
recession by private contractors or government employees.
In Wisconsin, prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once
held by unionized workers, as a result of Governor Scott Walkers
contentious anti-union law.
Why
You Should Care
Those
who argue in favor of prison labor claim it is a useful tool
for rehabilitation and preparation for post-jail employment.
But this has only been shown to be true in cases where prisoners
are exposed to meaningful employment, where they learn new
skills, not the labor-intensive, menial and often dangerous
work they are being tasked with. While little if any evidence
exists to suggests that the current prison labor system decreases
recidivism or leads to better employment prospects outside
of prison, there are a number of solutions that have been
proven to be useful.
According
to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, having a history
of incarceration itself impedes subsequent economic success.
Pew foundthat past incarceration reduced subsequent wages
by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks and reduced
yearly earnings by 40 percent. The study suggests that the
best approach is for state and federal authorities to invest
in programs that reconnect inmates to the labor market, as
well as provide training and job placement services around
the time of release. Most importantly, Pew says that in the
long term, America must move toward alternative sentencing
programs for low-level and nonviolent offenders, and issuing
penalties that are actually proportionate with real public
safety concerns.
The exploitation
of any workforce is detrimental to all workers. Cheap and
free labor pushes down wages for everyone. Just as American
workers cannot compete with sweatshop labor, the same goes
for prison labor. Many jobs that come into prison are taken
from free citizens. The American labor movement must demand
that prison labor be allowed the right to unionize, the right
to a fair and living wage, and the right to a safe and healthy
work environment. That is what prisoners are demanding, but
they can only do so much from inside a prison cell.
As unemployment
on the outside increases, so too will crime and incarceration
rates, and our 21st-century version of corporate slavery will
continue to expand unless we do something about it.
Rania
Khalek is a progressive activist. Check out her blog Missing
Pieces or follow her on Twitter @Rania_ak. You can contact
her at raniakhalek@gmail.com.
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