Brought to You by Prison Labor.
- Brandon Michael Chew
- Aug 17, 2020
- 3 min read
Convict Leasing (1911).
The prison population in the U.S. has increased over 500% in the past four decades, with the majority of those prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses (The Sentencing Project, 2017). There are more people incarcerated for drug offenses today, then there were people incarcerated for any crime in 1980.
Prisoners in the United States working prison jobs make wages averaging between $0.33 and $1.41 per day, and in states such as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, prisoners’ work goes unpaid (Sawyer, 2017).
What follows is a list of services that incarcerated people provide while being severely underpaid:
University Furniture
Public colleges and universities in the U.S. often obtain the furniture in their libraries, dorm rooms and other facilities through prison labor.
For example, the University of Virginia buys its office furniture from Virginia Correctional Enterprises, a company that employs prisoners in state prisons (Burke, 2020). The average wage for those working in Virginia's state prisons is between $0.55 and $0.80 per hour.
The University of Colorado purchases its furniture through the Colorado Department of Corrections; prisoners in the state can earn as little as $0.13 per hour (Hernandez, 2020; Sawyer, 2017).
Firefighters
In the state of California prisoners are often used as voluntary workers alongside professional firefighters as the state continues to deal with wildfires.
These prisoners make $1 per hour while working alongside professional firefighters who earn over $70,000 a year on average (Sibilla, 2018).
Once released, these prisoners are unable to continue working as firefighters due to the fact that California’s firefighters are required to become licensed emergency medical technicians, “a credential that can be denied to almost anyone with a criminal record,” (Sibilla, 2018).
Hand Sanitizer and Soap
In the state of New York some prisoners are bottling hand sanitizer 24 hours a day in three eight-hour shifts, to meet the demands imposed by the Coronavirus (Way, 2020).
Despite the fact that those within prisons are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 than those of the general public, prisoners are often restricted from using hand sanitizer as its alcohol content renders it as contraband (Michaels, 2020).
The prisoners in New York bottling hand sanitizer are making $2 per hour, while employed by the company Corcraft, a company that earns $48 million a year in profits by using prison labor (Way, 2020; Nicholas, 2017).
Police and Military Gear
Prisoners working for Federal Prison Industries, also known as UNICOR, work for menial wages constructing ballistic vests, work boots, and pistol holsters for correctional and law enforcement officers (unicor.gov).
Agriculture
In areas where migrant workers were used in agriculture industries, prison labor has increasingly been used as anti-immigration policies have decreased the number of migrant farmworkers (Evans, 2018).
There are over 30,000 incarcerated people in the United States working in farming or food-related positions in the United States, with many making less than $1 per day for their work (Snyder, 2017).
References:
N.A. (2017). Criminal Justice Facts. thesentencingproject.org. Retrieved from
Sawyer, W. (2017). How much do incarcerated people earn in each state? Prison Policy Initiative. Retrieved from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
Burke, L. (2020). Public Universities, Prison-Made Furniture. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from
Hernandez, E. (2020). CU to re-examine buying furniture made with prison labor after petition from students, faculty. Denver Post. Retrieved from
Sibilla, N. (2018). Inmates who volunteer to fight California’s largest fires denied access to jobs on release. USA Today. Retrieved from
Way, K. (2020). Cuomo’s Prison Workers Say They’re Not Actually Making Hand Sanitizer. VICE. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dma4k/cuomos-prison-workers-say-theyre-not-actually-making-hand-sanitizer
Michaels, S. (2020). New York State Has Prisoners Making Hand Sanitizer. It’s Unclear If Prisoners Can Use It. Mother Jones. Retrieved from https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/03/new-york-state-has-prisoners-making-hand-sanitizer-its-unclear-if-prisoners-can-use-it/
Nicholas, J.B. (2017). How NY Prison ‘Slave Labor’ Powers A $50 Million Manufacturing Enterprise. Gothamist. Retrieved from https://gothamist.com/news/how-ny-prison-slave-labor-powers-a-50-million-manufacturing-enterprise
Evans, S. (2018). Is Prison Labor the Future of Our Food System? FoodFirst. Retrieved from https://foodfirst.org/is-prison-labor-the-future-of-our-food-system/
Snyder, S. (2017). The Prison Industrial Complex and Agricultural Labor. HEAL Food Alliance. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZWdBH5zlKbV6K6subbGMm4nUMY3_ZZgJ/view
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