“Inmate or free, it doesn’t matter. They are firefighters.” – Tracy Snyder, CDCR correctional captain (cnn.com).
Except, when it comes to fair wages and jobs as “free” men, it does matter. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) Conservation Camp Program, aka fire camps, have relied on volunteer inmate firefighters to support local, state, and federal government agencies when responding to emergencies such as fires, floods, and other natural or manmade disasters for just over a century. All camps are minimum-security facilities—inmates must have “minimum-custody” status or lowest classification status based on good behavior and conformity to prison rules; however, regardless of minimum-custody status, some convictions are automatically disqualifying, e.g., sexual offenses, arson, and any history of escape with force or violence—and staffed by correctional employees. According to CDCR’s website, the Conservation Camp Program was created by CDCR to “provide able-bodied inmates the opportunity to work on meaningful projects throughout the state” (California (Fire) Camps, cdcr.ca.gov). Inmates receive the same entry-level training as CAL FIRE’s—California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—seasonal employees (firefighters), and their work has the same “meaningful” impact on ecological spaces and communities threatened or affected by California’s extreme weather events except their heroic work is paid substantially less; they experience certain injuries at a higher rate (they are more than four times as likely, per capita, to experience cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures, compared with professional firefighters working on the same fires, and they were also more than eight times as likely to be injured after inhaling smoke and particulates compared with other firefighters); and they can’t find employment in this line of work upon release.
The volunteer inmate firefighters make between $2.90 and $5.12 a day, and an additional $1 per hour when actively fighting fires (Chapman, cnn.com). To shed light on the pay disparity, let’s say an inmate is making the maximum wage of $5.12 a day plus an additional $1 per hour for actively fighting fires at a rate of 24 hours a day (bringing their daily wage to $29.12) and 365 days a year. The total annual income for an inmate firefighter would be $10,628.80 (but remember, that’s if they work around the clock all year long). Of course this figure is ludicrous—no person could work at that rate, especially fighting fires—but ludicrousness aside, an annual income of under $11,000 for an inmate who faces the same threats and challenges as a civilian firefighter who makes nearly $74,000 a year plus benefits (extrapolate that to a rate of 24 hours a day and 365 days a year to get an accurate picture of pay differential). Inmate firefighters not only fulfill the requirements needed to volunteer for the fire camps in the first place, but they also receive the same training and fight on the front lines along with civilians. Their job—including the level of knowledge, skill, commitment, and risk—mirror those of their “free” counterparts, however, they are denied the dignity of their labor and post-release employment opportunities trumpeted by CDCR to motivate inmates to volunteer in the first place. California’s conservation fire camp program is touted as a reformative program for inmates with limited job skills that’ll help them find work and succeed post-release but local fire departments continue to deny ex-felons the same job outside prison bars that they dutifully carried out behind bars.
Ramon Leija was one such inmate who volunteered to work at a juvenile fire camp nearly a decade ago when he was still only a teenager. Leija was incarcerated at a juvenile detention center at the age of 17 and served a three-year felony sentence for armed robbery. While locked up, Leija joined a fire camp team. As reported in a May 2019 article by California University, Riverside, where Lejia was about to graduate with a double major in education and political science, “saving the forest and people’s homes empowered him, gave him self-confidence, and tremendous satisfaction” (Martinez, news.ucr.edu). However, neither Leija’s sense of empowerment nor his on-the-job firefighting experience as an inmate firefighter translated to a firefighting job in the real world. Leija passed introductory fire technology courses at community colleges, twice completed an EMT training course, and received a national EMT certification (he passed on his first try), and he was still denied employment. “In California, individuals convicted of felonies cannot obtain EMT licenses until they have been out of prison for 10 years, according to the California EMS Authority. But despite local fire departments refusing to hire him, Leija says they do let him contribute as a volunteer [italics my own for emphasis] firefighter completing the same tasks. ‘It’s interesting that I’m able to do everything alongside the paid firefighters right now, from treating patients on the scene and also putting out fires and extricating patients from vehicles,’ he says. ‘But when it comes to applying, I’m not offered the positions.’” California’s legislation barring ex-felons from employment opportunities post-release is homogenous to legislation across the nation at both federal and state levels that continue to disenfranchise individuals who’ve already paid their debts to society. Allowing Leija to “volunteer” his skills but not pay him for his work—we’re not even talking about equal pay but no pay!—is slavery thinly veiled as benevolent outreach. Auspicious promises of success post-release to entice incarcerated individuals into the prison labor market is a form of coercion and performative slavery, and the loophole in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution substantiated and ingrained convict labor as a legacy of slavery in the United States of America.
Extracting and exploiting labor from a subjugated class is slavery. Paying incarcerated individuals pennies on the dollar to benefit private industry and/or the federal, state, or local government— California officials estimate that inmates like Leija and others save the state more than 90 million per year—in which they’re housed is slavery, and we must call it by it’s true name. The first step in liberation is naming the lies that obscure the truth. Linguistics matter, especially when it comes to disappearing an entire community from the American landscape. As a nation, we’ve lied to black people. We are gaslighting an entire community by reinventing ways to continue the subjugation of slavery; the only thing that’s changed is the language we use to impute and relegate black communities to second-class citizenship: first, they were slaves, and now, they are criminals.
The modern prison industrial complex has created a false dichotomy between what it means to be a “good” black citizen, i.e., someone that doesn’t break the law, and a “bad” black citizen, i.e., someone that does break the law (and the consequences of such) when, in fact, the idea of extending “goodness”—in the eyes of white hegemonic structures—to a black person in a racist society is a placebo of white supremacy. Slavery is not only a punishment for crime/s that have largely been written by white men (and targeted toward black communities), but its ominous presence—that at any moment they can be deprived of the freedom they must actively earn by navigating a justice system that works against them (as opposed to the freedom bestowed upon and enjoyed passively by white people simply for being born white) and returned to the shackles of their ancestors’ past—hangs like a heavy shadow. Slavery occupies both the tangible presence of brutal physical labor and the phantom presence of it. (And this essay doesn’t even address the number of black American deaths due to racial profiling.)
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War to verify, extend and make legally binding the principles of president Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed all slaves in rebellious, i.e., southern secessionist, states. The language of the 13th Amendment effectively abolishes slavery but with a chasm that admits and permits slavery in one very specific circumstance: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted [italics my own for emphasis], shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” I propose a new amendment to the United States Constitution that would remove the exception clause in the 13th Amendment and declare slavery, in all of its forms, nonexistent:
The exception clause in the thirteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed:
“except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”;
The thirteenth article of amendment to the Constitution will remain, but the operative language of the article shall read as originally written minus the exception clause:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
It is my assumption that removing the exception clause in the 13th Amendment will imply that slavery and involuntary servitude cannot and will not be legally permissible not only as a punishment for a crime but as a subsequent result of conviction, i.e., equal pay for equal work will be a concomitant action and protection of the law as it pertains to any form of labor performed in a penal setting. Criminal status will not be a legally binding standard for compensation discrimination. My goal in this essay is not to end prison programs, e.g., education, vocation, or labor—and “labor” as a program is also problematic—but that any and all “labor” programs inmates participate in are paid equally and aren’t compulsory.
American slavery began as a system of indentured servitude that was a progenitor to and is tantamount to the ethos of modern prison labor, i.e., (exploitation of) labor as means of earning or (re)gaining freedom. When the first Africans arrived in British Colonial America, they held the legal status of “servant,” but as forced labor became both an economic boon and norm in the region, and as racial prejudice became more socially ingrained, slavery as an institution evolved as an indelible hereditary status tied to race. And over the next two centuries, American slavery not only originated but reinforced and propagated racial prejudice. And as these racial prejudices morphed over the centuries—from slavery, to black codes, to Jim Crow, to dog whistle politics—the only thing that has remained the same was the objective derogation of black lives.
Slavery and the racial prejudices it ingrained on an entire nation entrenched white supremacy and racialized terror, and the racialized terror of present is driven by “law and order” rhetoric that has a long history in US politics (and that has carried many presidential candidates, including our current president, Donald Trump, to the White House). There’s a direct relationship between slavery and the criminal profiling, sentencing, incarceration and compulsory labor of black Americans. “Julia Azari, a Marquette University professor of political science, said the phrase [“law and order”] is ‘often a way to talk about race without talking about race. But its 1960s meaning also meant all people who were challenging the social order [i.e., black people; Nixon used “law and order” rhetoric to quell white anxiety about crime and urban unrest]. As we’ve moved away from the era when politicians were making obvious racial appeals, the appeals have become more coded. The question becomes whose order, for whom does the law work […]’” (McArdle, washingtonpost.com).
Slavery and the Constitution: Racism as American Creed
According to “The 1619 Project” published by the New York Times in August of 2019, the country’s true birth date is not July 4, 1776 as is unanimously believed and celebrated but actually 157 years earlier in 1619. In August of 1619, a Portuguese ship, the Sao Joao Bautista, that was originally headed to Mexico, arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia. En route to Mexico, the Sao Joao Bautista was seized by two English pirate ships, and the 20 to 30 enslaved Africans in the cargo were rerouted to Point Comfort, a port near Jamestown, Virginia, which the Virginia Company of London had established 12 years earlier. (The Puritans wouldn’t land on Plymouth Rock for another year.) These 20 to 30 slaves were the first on record to be brought to the English colony of Virginia, and their arrival commenced a brutal system of chattel slavery that would last for nearly 250 years and see the kidnapping and subjugation of 12.5 million Africans. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery—white colonists bought and sold both white and black servants for centuries, but race-based slavery is a younger phenomenon and as lifelong bondage of enslaved Africans became more financially viable, the indentured servitude of whites was abandoned (https://www.montpelier.org/learn/slavery-constitution-lasting-legacy)—that was commercialized, racialized, and inherited. Enslaved people were not seen as people, they were property. Property that translated into commodities to be bought, sold, and exploited. The sale of these 20 to 30 enslaved Africans set the course for what would become slavery in the United States.
“Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day” (Silverstein, pg. 4).
The enslavement of Africans proved itself so lucrative that law and legal precedent began to leave governments leeway for prioritizing economy over ethics. America claims to be a nation founded on the democratic principle that “all men are created equal,” but in the same breath, actively dehumanized and commoditized an entire population of black people. As long as you were white and a man, you were guaranteed the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution.
While the word “slavery” or “slave” does not appear in the original constitution, Article I, Section II, Paragraph III outlines the apportionment (or colloquially, the three-fifths) clause: “those bound to service,” i.e., enslaved Africans, represented three-fifths of a person in order to boost representation in Congress and the Electoral College for slave states. Lest you get the wrong idea, the extension of assigning slaves a value of three-fifths was not a representation of the framers’ humanity. The South pushed for their slaves to be counted fully in order to have more impact in Congress.
Article I, Section IX, Paragraph 1 outlines the slave import limitation clause (“the Migration or Importation of such Persons”, i.e., slaves) prohibiting Congress from regulating the international slave trade until 1808 (which Congress did; however, the framers realized the domestic economy would require it: allowing the market to be flooded with new enslaved Africans would hurt domestic slave trade).
Article IV, Section II, Paragraph III outlines the fugitive slave clause, guaranteed nationally, that any “person held to service or labor,” i.e., again, enslaved Africans, who flees to another state—regardless if the slave flees to a state that has already abolished slavery—must be returned to the party the labor is due. The fugitive slave clause was an active protection—on a federal level, nonetheless—of people as property. So while it may be argued that the Constitution does not explicitly codify and support slavery, slavery was framed as the default scenario, and abolition the outlier. Furthermore, it’s quite the legal paradox that the nexus of the language concerning black people and slavery—in the Constitution and locally—relegated black people to the position of property, literally dehumanizing them save for the act of committing a (perceived) crime.
Slaves were, for all intents and purposes, outside the purview of standard law, but irrespective of this, laws, i.e., slave codes, were designed and implemented to punish (and not protect) slaves. Slave codes varied from state to state, but in general, slaves were restricted from a myriad of activities: contracting; owning property; striking a white person; being away from their owner’s property without permission; assembling without a white person present; owning a firearm; marrying; reading, or writing. If a slave was disobedient, they didn’t face trial, they faced punishment that was both arbitrary and cruel, e.g., whipping, burning, hanging, mutilation, rape (rape was not necessarily a form of acute punishment; slavers were regularly raped by their owners). The humanization of black people suddenly manifested when they were perceived as committing a crime and eligible for punishment. We kidnapped black bodies from the shores of Africa and introduced them to America first as property and then as property plus criminal. We cannot “restore” freedom, liberty, and equality to black people—because they’ve never had it—we must actively engender and affirm their rights.
Another significant piece of our racialized past are the myths about the physiological differences between white and black bodies (that were used to justify slavery) that are still alive today. The illusory research conducted by physicians (who were also slaveholders) promulgated such differences as black people having large sex organs and small skulls—translating to promiscuity and low IQ—higher tolerance for heat, immunity to some illnesses and susceptibility to others, being impervious to pain, and having weak lungs (that could be bolstered by hard work). Thomas Jefferson, one of the writers of our Constitution, was one such distinguished white man who believed in and wrote, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” about the lack of lung capacity “nature has made” in black people (Villarosa, pg. 57).
Not only were such bogus physical differences attributed to black bodies, but psychological ones, too. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern physician and professor of “diseases of the Negro,” hypothesized that enslaved people ran away from their enslavers because they were prone to drapetomania, a serious mental illness. It was Cartwright’s belief that slaves contracted the disease when their slaveholders treated them as equals, and he recommended whipping slaves as a preventative measure. “Cartwright’s hopelessly unscientific diagnosis is of more than just historical interest. It is a vivid illustration of how definitions of normal and abnormal behavior are shaped by the values of the society that makes them. ‘The culture influences what you consider pathology,’ says Dr. Poussaint [a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School]. ‘Cartwright saw slavery as normative. So when slaves deviated from the norm, he called them mentally ill. The business of deciding what’s normal and what’s psychopathology gets influenced by culture and politics. It’s not hard science’” (Eakin, nytimes.com). Bigoted pseudoscience helped shape the formation of our law.
Slavery and the Industrial Revolution: The Birth of American Capitalism
To fully appreciate and realize the extent to which the exploitation of a captive labor force was the progenitor and gatekeeper of a capitalist economy in the United States, we must start with slavery. Slavery catalyzed, incentivized, and preserved the conservation, growth, and concentration of wealth in white America. Capitalism is the rope that has tethered generations of people, especially black people, to a system that profits from their subjugation economically, socially, and politically. And slavery within the prison industrial complex shortens that rope. While black Americans have arguably suffered the most at the hands of a brutal capitalistic society, capitalism has made a captive labor force out of all of us, save the 1%. Ending exploitative labor practices within prison walls is a statement toward our unwillingness to capitulate to a system that allows a small few to benefit from the brutalization of the masses.
Capitalism and its creation of and stranglehold on racism are inseparable from a vision of an equitable future for black Americans. Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment, for every 100,000 people incarcerated in this country, 380 are white, 966 are latino, and 2,207 are black (US incarceration rates by race and ethnicity, 2010, prisonpolicy.org). By glossing over systemic issues like the rise of the prison industrial complex and the disparity within that system in which black Americans are incarcerated, we continue to ignore and make servile the most at-risk among us. The chasm in incarceration rates is tied to the socioeconomic chasm between black and white America. and the two are self-reinforcing. Yes, we need to drastically change or abolish our electoral college, and yes, we need to get money out of politics, and yes, we need constraints on presidential power. But we also need to appropriate power to the marginalized. “The poor require more equality—and the higher incomes they would obtain through redistributive measures—before they can enjoy the liberties valued by conservatives. Middle-income people would neither gain or lose significantly from redistribution, with one exception: they would lose the freedom to become millionaires, but this has long been an illusory freedom for all but a few” (Gans, nytimes.com).
We use the refrain and mindset of ‘this is a capitalist society’ to exculpate predatory and exploitative private industrial practices from taking on the responsibility of the brutal economic costs and inequality of adhering to a low-road capitalistic system that prioritizes price over quality over people. We’ve consigned ourselves to the idea of capitalism as being the de facto economic system rather than a choice we made. And we made that choice on the backs and in the hands of African American slaves. And we continue to make that choice when we force incarcerated individuals into involuntary servitude as a precipitate of the punishment for a crime.
“Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled [as compared to other capitalist nations] have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabma, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism” (Desmond, pg. 32). Desmond goes on to say that the cotton economy boom and the density of wealth in the Mississippi Valley after the Civil War were the fruits of slavery: “What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above” (Desmond, pg. 32). Slavery is the thread that sews the quilt of not only American capitalism but our morals and values. We consistently devalue human lives every time a decision is made to increase profits.
Enslaved workers were often punished with whippings when cotton hauls came up light. The idea of incentivizing productivity through punishment is a principle of American economy that originated and flourished in the cotton fields of the south. And because a cotton field’s yield decreased after a few seasons of planting due to soil depletion, new farmland was sought and inventions like the cotton gin were created to keep up with supply and demand. The US stole land from Native Americans and sold it to white settlers and with the white settlers came their slaves and an ever-increasing need for more slaves. “Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting […] A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling, the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation” (Desmond, 33). Production surged, slave labor camps spread, the North built textile mills, and so began the alliance between the North and South: an alliance built on slave labor.
The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the ‘nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.’ Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. ‘The beating heart of this new system,’ [historian Sven] Beckert writes, ‘was slavery’ (Desmond, 34).
Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Prison Industrial Complex
“Forced labor was undeniably productive. An enslaved person in an antebellum cotton field picked around 75% more cotton per hour than a free farmer. Similarly, Texas prison farms into the 1960s produced a higher yield than farms worked by free laborers in the surround area. The reason is simple: People work harder when driven by torture” (Bauer, pg. 19).
With an economy reeling from the aftermath of the Civil War and the additional blow of former slaves now being emancipated, southern states knew their pre-Civil War economic structures were now in jeopardy of erasure. The loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed slavery as punishment for those convicted of crimes created the perfect pretense for the still deeply racist South to enact polices, e.g., Black Codes, that ascribed second-class citizenship to black Americans and had the dual benefit of returning them to plantations through criminal convictions and reviving the South’s economic might. Black Americans could be imprisoned for such “crimes” as vagrancy. Upon arrest and conviction, newly freed black people were sent to prison and then leased to plantations through convict leasing. Slavery by another name. “Like prison systems throughout the South, Texas’s grew directly out of slavery. After the Civil War the state’s economy was in disarray, and cotton and sugar planters found themselves without hands they could force to work. Fortunately for them, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, left a loophole. It said that ‘neither slavery not indentured servitude’ shall exists in the United States ‘except as punishment for a crime.’ As long as black men were convicted of crimes, Texas could lease all of its prisoners to private cotton and sugar plantations and companies running labor camps and coal mines, and building railroads” (Bauer, pg. 19). White supremacy supplanted slavery with criminalization. Black people existing outside the hegemonic structures of white power was analogous to the economic future of American growth.
After slavery and before Jim Crow, the convict lease system was born, and not surprisingly, it targeted black men. An iteration of slavery but with another name. We extended the bondage of black people by putting them behind bars and returning them to backbreaking labor. However, unlike slavery, employers had only a small capital investment in convict laborers and little incentive to treat them well. Convict laborers were treated horribly, and if death were to occur, the convict laborer could easily be replaced: “[…] one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: ‘ Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor […] but these convicts: we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another’” (Bauer, pg. 130). Simply speaking, black individuals were not people, they were bodies, cogs in the nascent machine of prison labor. Slavery was an economic system as much as convict labor was and prison labor is now. The government turned freed slaves into property again with the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment and continued to exploit and profit from their labor. Thus, the mythology of the black criminal was born. Selling the public on the dangers of black men was the perfect political dog and pony show that politicians used decade after decade—including our current president, Donald Trump—and built on top of the bigoted pseudoscience of slavery to gain support among (racist) blue-collar workers.
The effects of slavery and convict leasing were not isolated to black people (although they suffered the brunt of it). Slavery and convict leasing (and soon, prison labor) pulled down wages for every worker. Matthew Desmond’s argument that the birth of capitalism happened before the Industrial Revolution, and that the tenets (of capitalism)—private ownership of production; competition; wage labor; profits—were drafted and employed on plantations and resonate with laborers across the board. The principles and practices developed by plantation owners during slavery to heighten productivity and the ensuing profits stifled wages for white workers. “Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners. This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made ‘all nonslavery appear as freedom,’ as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse” (Desmond, pg. 36).
Just like slavery drove down the wages of the white working class, so does modern prison labor. To cut costs and increase profits, some corporations either move factories abroad or to prisons. For example, instead of paying unionized machinists $30 an hour, corporations can utilize prison labor for a fraction of a fraction of the cost for the same labor: incarcerated people make anywhere from $.14 to $.63, on average (all states and federal prison wages combined), per hour (prisonpolicy.org). Additionally, private businesses save further by not having to provide benefits (health insurance, unemployment, workers’ compensation) or paid vacation/personal/sick days. Likewise, correctional industries such as New York’s Corcraft, which is run by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), employs incarcerated individuals and averages around $48 million in annual sales (Nicholas, Gothamist). According to an article in The Gothamist, in the fiscal year 2015-2016, the average Corcraft inmate wage was $.65 an hour (inmates can earn as low as $.16 an hour and as much as $1.14 an hour, depending on productivity). “Besides the desks and the soap dispensers, Corcraft manufactures a wide-range of institutional products, such as state license plates, soap, street signs, janitorial supplies, metal crowd-control barricades used by the NYPD, wooden benches used throughout the state court system, and office furniture […] State law requires local governments to purchase commodities from Corcraft if it has a product that satisfies the form, function and utility required. The law, in effect, gives Corcraft monopoly-like power over the state-wide municipal institution market because the law exempts Corcraft from another state law mandating competitive bidding.” (For SUNY Cortland’s statement on “preferred sources” visit https://www2.cortland.edu/offices/purchasing-office/preferred-sources.dot). New York provides incarcerated individuals with the “opportunity” to manufacture products as part of the “department’s overall mission to prepare offenders for release through skill development, work ethic, respect and responsibility” (corcraft.org) and not, let’s suppose, as a means to make a profit.
On top of low wages, prisoners are not allowed to form unions, and they aren’t protected by federal or state minimum-wage laws, nor do they have a right to workers’ compensation if they are injured on the job. David Fathi, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Prison Project, said in The Gothamist, “Given the lack of legal protection and the vast power differential between prisoners and their employers, there is a real potential for exploitation and abuse.” Herein lies the problem: prison labor in and of itself isn’t necessarily “wrong” but compulsory and exploitative labor practices, such as we see in prisons, is. Angola, for instance, a maximum-security state prison in Louisiana, can force inmates to work and legally, it can be uncompensated (Benns, theatlantic.com). And in conversation with my father, who used to be the plant superintendent for a local prison that oversaw several inmate “employees” at any given time, he told me that inmates are forced into prison programs, “work” being one of them (education and vocation were other choices). Furthermore, given the fact the ratio of programs offered (work, education, vocation, etc.) to inmate population is high, we’re basically creating a microcosm of social and economic castes within prison systems. Low wages and compulsory labor is a descendant of slave labor.
Prison (and Prison Labor) as Economic Security
We see specters of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause today in prisons across the country. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow all prisoners to vote (Mississippi, Alaska, and Alabama allow some prisoners to vote, depending on their convictions). While other states have introduced legislation (and failed) to allow prisoners to vote, and some others have succeeded in allowing ex-felons to vote once they leave prison, an overwhelming number of Americans have lost their right to vote due to criminal convictions—nearly 6.1 million people in total, and almost 40% of that 6.1 million are black equating to roughly 2.44 million—prison gerrymandering—the practice of counting incarcerated people as residents of the town they are confined—continues to create significant problems for our democracy. “Because prisons are disproportionately built in rural areas but most incarcerated people call urban areas home, counting prisoners in the wrong place results in a systemic transfer of population and political clout from urban to rural areas (Prison Gerrymandering Project, prisonersofthecensus.org).” As of February 2020, the Virginia House of Delegates was expected to vote on SJ18, an amendment to the state constitution, reforming the state’s redistricting process. If the House of Delegates passes the amendment, Virginia will be the eighth state to end prison gerrymandering (Bertram, prisonersofthecensus.org). Robert Saleem Holbrook, writing for The Appeal, in March of 2020 said, “I was released from prison two years ago, and I’m a permanent resident of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. But to this day, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives improperly counts me as a resident of SCI Greene—located in Franklin—because I was held there at the time of the 2010 census” (Holbrook, theappeal.org). Prison-based gerrymandering of Black and Latinx people helps maintain the political power of rural communities that are predominantly white and often hostile to their rights and needs not insofar as they’re being incarcerated but as human beings.
Mass incarceration and the prison-based gerrymandering that it grew and allowed to flourish adds to the systematic and systemic oppression of Black and Latinx communities. Not only does it rip black people from their homes and communities, but it buses them to rural areas, where they are, once again, policed by largely white corrections employees. Prisons are a boon for deindustrialized rural communities in need of jobs. Paul Street, writing an article for Dissent in 2001 called “Color Blind,” illuminates the horrifying spectacle of small towns pining for the construction of correctional facilities to restore economic security and growth for locals. Street points to a Chicago Tribune article, “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons,” that quotes Hoopeston, Illinois’s mayor—who was negotiating with state officials for a new maximum-security prison—as saying, “You don’t like to think about incarceration […] but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston. We’ve been plagued by plant closings” (Street, dissentmagazine.com) Surely the mayor’s reluctance to host a prison isn’t an extension of empathy toward the incarcerated individuals but more toward the tainting of a small white town by welcoming “bad” people, i.e., black people, into it (economy over morality). Street goes on to say that nowhere in the article is it mentioned that the composition of the keepers is predominantly white and the composition of the kept is predominantly black. “As everyone knows but few like to discuss, the mostly white residents of those towns are building their economic ‘dreams’ on the transport and lockdown on unfree African-Americans from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods […]” (Street, dissentmagazine.com).
(I can attest to this fact because I used to be one of them. Growing up in Cayuga County, New York, I grew up with prisons as part of the landscape. Prisons were and are as relevant and innocuous as cows, cornfields, and churches. At the age of twenty-one, the only context a prison provided was…jobs. If you wanted a decent life, i.e., a stable and “good” income, you hoped to score a job at a prison. My cultural knowledge dutifully and implicitly engrained the dehumanization of an entire class of people: convicts, and by extension, black people.)
Millions of men, women, and children are confined in this country and most of those confining spaces are disappeared into the landscape of our everyday lives. We drive past the vast concrete walls of jails and prisons all the time and never think twice about the lives of the people who live behind them. During a recent quarterly birthday “party” among (SUNY Cortland) Memorial Library faculty and staff, the coronavirus and its effects across the state and across SUNY was the hot topic of discussion. One of the librarians was excited to share with the group that New York would be manufacturing its own hand sanitizer, and I’m assuming the reaction she hoped to elicit was one of communal relief that at least we’d be safe. And, not surprisingly, everyone seemed to come to that conclusion. I decided to add that the hand sanitizer would be made by inmates working for Corcraft, NYS’s largest correctional industry. I told them that inmates get paid pennies on the dollar and that even beyond the dismal pay, inmates couldn’t use hand sanitizer because of the alcohol content (and the risk of them extracting the alcohol from the gel and…getting drunk). So while we’re reassured hand sanitizer would be made available to us, the inmates working hard to make it for us wouldn’t themselves be able to benefit from their own labor. The insular logic of her comment was not surprising: in American culture, most people, including myself, tend to be individualistic, especially in times of uncertainty and peril. The cognitive dissonance of wanting NYS’s mass produced hand sanitizer while also recognizing that it’s being made by the forgotten souls swallowed up by the prison industrial complex is hard to sit with. It reminded me of a passage in Angela Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete?”:
On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid of the realities they produce. After all, no one wants to go to prison. Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment. We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers,’ to use a term popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, ‘criminals’ and ‘evildoers’ are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. [Angela Davis, a black woman, appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive List and was described by President Richard Nixon as a “dangerous terrorist”; she spent a year in jail for felony crimes she was eventually acquitted of.] The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism, and increasingly, global capitalism (Davis, location 120 in Kindle).
Convict labor is all but invisible to us. We’ve so successfully compartmentalized prisons and the lives of prisoners as removed from our physical and mental landscape that we’ve given permission to ourselves to forget that they exist and that they’re human. We’re exploiting their labor for mass public benefit while silently and collectively ignoring the reality that due to the unsanitary nature of prison conditions combined with the physical impossibility of social distancing, they face a higher probability of sickness and death (and that doesn’t even speak to the mental and emotional toll of being imprisoned plus being imprisoned during a pandemic). Their plight is totally disregarded. The importance of inmates to the American psyche is solely in relation to how they, as a work force, can be utilized to benefit us. Whether we care to admit it or not, politics and capitalism are inextricably intertwined. Our entire political foundation is built upon the exploitation of labor and productivity, and arguably, slavery was the genesis of capitalist exploitation.
Conclusion
White people relied on spurious pro-slavery rhetoric to advocate not only for the legitimacy but the benefits of slavery for black people: labor (that was graciously provided by white slaveholders) would instill a sense of discipline and decency to temper the barbaric nature of “the negro,” and as a race, they should be thankful for the opportunity and elevation that comes from white pupilage. In his essay, “A Presumption of Guilt” (in the anthology “Policing the Black Man”), Bryan Stevenson shares an 1857 quote from Mississippi governor William McWillie arguing for the advantages of slavery for not only the white man but “the negro,” too:
“[T]he institution of slavery, per se, is as justifiable as the relation of husband and wife, parent and child, or any other civil institution of the State [that draws on patriarchal paternalism], and is most necessary to the well-being of the negro, being the only form of government or pupilage which can raise him from barbarism, or make him useful to himself or others; and I have no doubt but that the institution, thus far in our country, has resulted in the happiness and elevation of both races; that is, the negro and the white man. In no period of the world’s history have three million of the negro race been so elevated in the scale of being, or so much civilized or Christianized, as those in the United States, as slaves. They are better clothed, betted fed, better housed, and more cared for in sickness and in health, than has ever fallen to the lot of any similar number of the negro race in any age or nation; and as a Christian people, I feel that it is the duty of the South to keep them in their present position, at any cost and at every peril, even independently of the questions of interest and security” (Stevenson, page 7).
Similar parallels are made to justify compulsory and exploitative prison labor: correctional industries allow individual salvation through hard work, and prisoners should be thankful for “something to do” besides loitering—akin to the Black Codes that targeted, criminalized, convicted and then leased convicts after slavery and prior to the prison industrial complex—in their cells for the duration of their sentence, i.e., gratitude for productive opportunities (that will keep them busy while on the inside and teach them something useful for when they’re eventually on the outside). Somehow labor—and not true social and/or rehabilitative programs—is the benchmark for reformation and redemption, i.e., value to society at large (economic, social, political, cultural) through the commodification of labor.
Originally, I was intending to frame the removal of the exception clause in the 13th Amendment as a way to make an argument for a push toward prison abolition. It was my assumption and belief—especially after watching Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th” on Netflix about the relationship between the criminalization of black people and the prison boom in the United States from the 1970s on—that prison labor was the comprehensive driving force behind the prison industrial complex. I thought removing the exception clause would both eliminate prison labor and also lead to substantially reducing prison populations, but through copious hours spent researching and reading, I realize my argument would have been a straw man (loquacious, and articulate, and well-intentioned, but a straw man nonetheless). The hyperbolic sensationalism of the subject material in documentaries like 13th delude their audience into pigeonholing singular aspects of complex systems as attainable means of targeting and destroying a form of oppression when in reality it’s only a part of the solution to a problem. Don’t get me wrong, 13th is an urgent and necessary documentary that reveals the depths and breadth of racism but to claim convict labor is the largest underlying factor for the growth of our modern prison industrial complex would be doing a grave injustice to the very subject it implores you to understand.
Only about 7% of the prison population are employed by private companies through the federal PIECP (Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program) program or state-owned correctional facilities. According to prison policy initiative, less than 1% of people in prison (about 5,000 people) are employed by private companies and 6% are employed by state-owned correctional industries (Sawyer and Wagner, prisonpolicy.org). I’m embarrassed to admit that my disillusionment came at the simple cost of being wrong, and for two reasons: firstly, the theory I supported and was actively writing about was misguided (and therefore, I had to face the fact that I participate in the confirmation bias I point out in others), and secondly, if convict labor alone won’t dismantle mass incarceration, what will?
Nevertheless, we, as a nation, need to put an end to the exploitation of prison labor and removing the exception clause in the 13th amendment will lead us there. 7% is nothing to scoff at: change has to start somewhere. And, to be honest, it’s much more practical than thinking with one swift move we can topple the prison industrial complex. The first step toward ending exploitative labor practices within prison walls (and beyond) is to stop the devaluing of labor. (Arguably the first step could be ending racism, but that’s an essay for another day.) Compensating inmates with fair wages which would subsequently raise the cost of imprisonment might be a good thing: it could force states to reduce their prison populations and leading that initiative would require reexamining who we lock up and what we lock them up for. “The end of mass incarceration will also help the economy and reduce inequality — some estimates claim that the practice of imprisoning millions of Americans has increased the country’s poverty rate by 20 percent, even before taking into account the wage competition from cheap prison labor. So paying prisoners the minimum wage shouldn’t be seen as an act of charity. It will take pressure off of working-class American laborers, encourage governments to reduce mass incarceration and move the country back toward valuing free labor” (Smith, chicagotribune.com).
I’m loathe to appeal to the economic anxiety of convict labor “stealing” the jobs of blue-collar Americans as a means of fighting against factories behind fences instead of the moral implications of prison labor, and truth be told, I’m not sure economic anxieties take precedent over racial anxieties. According to an article in The Intercept by Mehdi Hasan, both pre-election surveys and exit poll data show that the election of Donald Trump had less to do with economic distress and more to do with “cultural anxiety and racial resentment” (Hasan, theintercept.com). Hasan used ample survey evidence to substantiate his claim that the “zombie argument” of economic anxiety being a prevailing factor in what gave us a Trump presidency was not only misguided but wrong. One such study Hasan pointed to was conducted by scientists at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 2018. The scientists wanted to know what caused “whites without college degrees” to give more support to Donald Trump than whites with college degrees. They polled 5,500 American adults, and this was their conclusion: “‘We find that racism and sexism attitudes were strongly associated with vote choice in 2016, even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and other standard factors. These factors were more important in 2016 than in 2012, suggesting that the explicitly racial and gendered rhetoric of the 2016 campaign served to activate these attitudes in the minds of many voters. Indeed, attitudes toward racism and sexism account for about two-thirds of the education gap in vote choices in 2016.” Another study by Stanford University political scientist Diana Mutz concluded that “in this election [the 2016 presidential election], education represented group status threat rather than being left behind economically. Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended—with whites discriminated against more than blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women—were most likely to support Trump.”
Racism and bigotry and class hierarchy—and misogyny, but that’s an argument for another day—are hegemonic structures of America’s social, political, and economic culture. To the white working class, the possibility of material equality in a bigoted country is scarier than the reality of poverty. Capitalism has hoodwinked the white working class into believing their whiteness will save them from everything they’ve been taught to fear about what it means to be a minority. Donald Trump was elected to office because he ran on a platform that preyed on these racial anxieties. If we can’t disrupt and dismantle racism and bigotry in those terms, we must raze them morally. When we turn a blind eye to the exploitative practices of convict labor, we’re tacitly accepting and sanctioning the continued devaluation of labor itself and upholding a class hierarchy that doesn’t behoove anyone except the ruling class, and while I’m not sure a captive labor force incentivizes mass incarceration, I won’t argue that it disincentives it.
Works Cited
“About Corcraft,” NYS Corcraft,
“Conservation (Fire) Camps,” California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
< https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/facility-locator/conservation-camps/>
“The Problem” Prison Policy Initiative: Prison Gerrymandering Project,
< https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/impact.html>
“US incarceration rates by race and ethnicity, 2010,” Prison Policy Initiative
Bauer, S. “American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment.” New York City, Penguin Press, 2018.
Benns, W. (2015) “American Slavery, Reinvented” in the Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com, online,
< https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/>
Bertram, W. (2020) “Virginia poised to become 8th state to end prison gerrymandering, as House votes on SJ18” in Prison Policy Initiative: Prison Gerrymandering Project, http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org, online,
< https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2020/02/19/virginia/>
Chapman, I. (2019) “Prison inmates are fighting California’s fires, but are often denied firefighting jobs after their release” in CNN, www.ccn.com, online,
< https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/31/us/prison-inmates-fight-california-fires-trnd/index.html>
Davis, A. “Are Prisons Obsolete?” Penguin Random House, 2013.
Eakin, E. (2000) “Bigotry as Mental Illness Or Just Another Norm” in the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com, online,
< https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/15/arts/bigotry-as-mental-illness-or-just-another-norm.html>
Desmond, M. “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine, date, pp. 30-40.
Gans, H. (1976) “Equality v. Liberty” in the New York Times, www.nytimes.com, online,
<https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/05/archives/equality-vs-liberty.html>
Hasan, M. (2018) “Time to Kill the Zombie Argument: Another Study Shows Trump Won Because of Racial Anxieties—Not Economic Distress” in the Intercept, http://www.theintercept.com, online,
< https://theintercept.com/2018/09/18/2016-election-race-class-trump/>
Holbrook, R.B. (2020) “My Vote Was Taken Away From My Community and Given to a District Where I was Incarcerated” in the Appeal, http://www.theappeal.org, online,
< https://theappeal.org/prison-based-gerrymandering-pennsylvania/>
Martinez, S.B. (2019) “From juvenile detention to college graduation: A felony conviction gave Ramón Leija the determination to turn his life around” in University of California Riverside News, news.ucr.edu,
< https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2019/05/28/juvenile-detention-college-graduation>
McArdle, T. (2018) “The ‘law and order’ campaign that won Richard Nixon the White House 50 years ago” in the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com, online,
Nicholas, JB. (2017) “How NY Prison ‘Slave Labor’ Powers A $50 Million Manufacturing Enterprise” in The Gothamist, http://www.gothamist.com, online,
Sawyer, W. and Wagner, P. (2020) “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020” in Prison Policy Initiative, http://www.prisonpolicy.org, online,
<https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html>
Silverstein, J. Editor’s Note, The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine, 2019, pp. 4.
Smith, N. (2017) “Paying minimum wage to inmates helps the working class” in the Chicago Tribune, www.chicagotribune.com, online
Stevenson, B. “A Presumption of Guilt” in Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, New York, Pantheon Books, pp. 3-30.
Street, P. (2001) “Color Blind” in Dissent magazine, http://www.dissentmagazine.org, online,
< https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/color-blind-prisons-and-the-new-america>
Villarosa, L. “Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery—and are still believe by doctors today.” The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine, date, pp. 56-57.
Sara Sampson's Portfolio 