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FORCED LABOR VS. FORCED IDLENESS  
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Tyler Bowman
March 27, 2024
Dollars & Sense
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_ One of the most important battles of criminal justice today should
be changing incarcerated laborers’ classification to legal workers.
This would provide the same rights and benefits as non-inmate labor
and allow prisoners to earn a “livable wage." _

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You go to work. The company you work for generates revenue from your
labors. You come home. Now, in this scenario imagine that you only get
paid a few dollars for that day’s labor, or perhaps only a handful
of pennies. Maybe you are paid nothing at all, and to top it all off
you’re not actually going home after work, at least not today. In a
tiny nutshell, that is the current state of our nation’s prison
labor and wages. A nation whose rate of incarceration is higher than
that of any other country in the world. The entire world! Exploitative
and predatory state and federal laws ensure that this pool of cheap
labor—incarcerated human beings—continues to exist at the cost of
inmates, their families, and even society as a whole.

A criminal justice system in which money and punishment are
intertwined is naturally teeming with moral pitfalls. In the United
States, ever since the earliest modern prisons of the 1800s, when
prison administrators started to use inmate labor to reduce the cost
of running prisons, blood was in the water and the sharks swarmed.
U.S. lawmakers have now had generations to perfect the narrative that
prisoners performing labor as punishment is conducive to their
rehabilitation. The name of the game: keep prisoners busy while
simultaneously generating revenue, a process that is detrimental to
all but those profiting, for the state, or for outside companies.
Unfortunately, history has shown us that the effects of this
revenue-focused culture has resulted in questionable living and
working conditions, a lack of adequate skills training, and an
unbelievable amount of disregard for rehabilitation.

My Own Labors

I’ve been incarcerated since 2015. I’ve held a variety of jobs in
prison since 2017, with some work assignments being more personally
fulfilling than others, but each with similar issues at their core. My
prisoner résumé includes separating and counting dirty
clothes—yes, unfortunately boxers, too—in the warehouse where I
also helped prepare the clean clothes to be passed out. I’ve worked
in the kitchen where I started out as a cook whose biggest
responsibility was to not clump the grits and make sure to add enough
sugar to the oatmeal.

I moved up the ladder, so to speak, with my next job when I became a
maintenance worker. In that assignment I was actually taught the
basics of a few trades such as HVAC and electrical, and even learned a
good bit about welding. As far as a prison work assignment goes, I’d
say it’s one of the better ones to prepare an inmate to return back
to society, though it’s of those situations where you get out what
you put in, which is how I think all prison jobs should be designed.
My last job I worked as the guy who keeps the commissary stocked,
ordering junk food and hygiene items. It was my favorite job and I
didn’t want to lose it, but I got promoted to medium custody and
transferred to another facility, which offers more recreational
options. Because I’m new, I’m now at the bottom of the list for
any job.

So those are just some of the regular duties that prisoners are tasked
with doing. But no matter which job you’re assigned to, except under
certain circumstances, in North Carolina a laborer gets paid only $1 a
day. This law can be found in North Carolina General Statute 148-18
entitled, “Wages, Allowances, and Loans,” which reads:

...no prisoner so paid shall receive more than one dollar ($1.00) per
day, unless the Secretary determines that the work assignment requires
special skills or training. Upon approval of the Secretary, inmates
working in job assignments requiring special skills or training may be
paid up to five dollars ($5.00) per day.

To some members of the public that may sound absolutely ridiculous,
while others may believe that we shouldn’t be getting paid anything
at all, and I’d be willing to bet that that’s the more popular
opinion. For those in the latter group, you’ll be happy to know that
there are at least six states where prisoners are paid nothing at all
for their labors. And even though nationally prisoners produce roughly
$2 billion annually in goods, and around $9 billion annually in
services, according to a recent American Civil Liberties Union
estimate, the nationwide average for prisoner wages maxes out at 52
cents per hour.

For those of you who are in the former group, you’ll be happy to
hear that as recently as November 2022, Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee,
and Vermont approved ballot measures that will change their state
constitutions to officially prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude
as punishment, a right that should have been protected under the 13th
Amendment if not for the single line: “except as punishment for
crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This
profound loophole allowed our prison system to become perverted by
money and resulted in a long history of cheap prison labor.

As crazy as this may sound, prison labor is actually a two-sided coin.
For those who do hold jobs, they’re being exploited because of how
little they’re paid for their labors. But for prisoners who want
jobs, there are not nearly enough to go around. The majority of the
prison population is actually unassigned. You might ask why, if
prisoners are paid so little, would they wish to have a job
assignment? Many of the men I am incarcerated with rely heavily on
that single dollar a day. For them, it’s the difference between
going to bed with an empty, growling stomach, or having a cup of ramen
soup and a pack of crackers holding you over until you can fall
asleep.

These days, after a rapid rise in inflation due to economic factors
and a pandemic, the value of a dollar has more significance,
especially to those who are incarcerated. And for those in North
Carolina, a dollar is about all you’re going to get, at least for
the day. I’ve watched with my own eyes as food in the canteen has
jumped in price anywhere from 20% to 50%, and in some cases more, to
where it was no longer feasible to carry that product. Something about
the price of a pickle being higher than my daily wage leaves a bitter
taste in my mouth, pun intended. (For the curious, a single pickle
currently costs $1.14 at the canteen, before tax.) A dollar may not be
much, but in a system that primarily collects people from poverty
stricken and less-educated communities, it’s all some people have in
here.

Work, or Else

Money has dictated the state of the U.S. prison system since its
inception. In order for our current system to succeed under its own
standards, it must not only maintain an adequate population, but also
ensure that those who are incarcerated perform labor. In order to
achieve this goal, laws are in place that essentially force prisoners
to work under the threat of punishment. North Carolina General
Statutes Section 148-26, “State policy on employment of
prisoners,” reads:

a) It is declared to be public policy of the state of North Carolina
that all able-bodied prison inmates shall be required to perform
diligently all work assignments provided for them. The failure of any
inmate to perform such a work assignment may result in disciplinary
action. Work assignments and employment shall be for the public
benefit to reduce the cost of maintaining the inmate population while
enabling inmates to acquire or retain skills and work habits needed to
secure honest employment after their release.

To me it’s quite the conundrum how our prison system is able to
justify forcing prisoners to work when the people who run prisons will
barely lift a finger when it comes to educating those very same
prisoners. Why not “force” the incarcerated to gain an education
as well? Education in prisons is factually proven to reduce
recidivism. Is it because that would then lessen the quantity of their
cheap labor pool? Our current system uses these people, myself
included, forcing them to use their bodies and not their minds. To
simply do, and not think.

The aforementioned statute also went on to state that work assignments
are to equip prisoners with what would be considered transferable
skills. While there are indeed some jobs that meet this requirement,
most are actually redundant and menial in nature. For the majority of
inmate laborers, few skills are learned during their incarceration
that are relevant to the real-world labor market.

I understand that most of the jobs provided in prison are all
necessary and important for running the facility and keeping it
functioning efficiently. We do need janitors to keep the prison clean,
people to cook food and wash dishes, fold and pass out clothes, along
with other essential duties. But it’s the fact that we’re paid so
little, given barely any responsibilities, and asked to find
fulfillment in jobs that are beneath many prisoners’ potential and
capabilities, that degrades us as humans.

Not Protected

Nonworkers by law, prison laborers are not entitled to the rights and
protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Among many protections,
this act assures that legal workers receive a lawful minimum wage and
can expect to work during reasonable hours. With a national average
pay of only 52 cents an hour, I’d say that prisoners are far from
receiving a respectable minimum wage. Compared to the federal minimum
wage of $7.25 an hour—which in today’s labor market, one where
salaries are dictated more by the employees than the companies, few
people are working for that little—prisoners get paid the slightest
fraction of the pay of their unincarcerated counterparts.

In our society the quality of work, as well as the level of
appreciation an employer has for an employee, is frequently translated
into how much they are paid. Prison is designed as a dehumanizing
environment, but it doesn’t have to be. Why not reward and show
appreciation to prisoners who work hard, and show a genuine interest
in preparing for their return into society? Let’s pay them
respectable wages, and teach them relevant skills and financial
literacy, so that they might actually have a chance of success upon
release. Isn’t that outcome—their success—for the betterment of
the community as well?

The scary reality is that the United States has allowed the prison
industry to grow in such a way that we’ve become dependent upon it
economically. Think about all the people employed by or dependent on
the criminal justice system, think about the private prisons, the
financial and telecommunications service companies such as JPay and
GTL, that would be drastically impacted by a significant reduction in
the prison population. In 2020, there were over two million people
incarcerated. Why so many? Are Americans just that bad of people, or
are our laws and justice system flawed?

The current strategy of our prison system is to extract as much
revenue as possible (usually for outside, private, for-profit
companies) and to save the state and federal governments as much as
possible. To achieve this, convicts are routinely leased or farmed out
to other agencies such as the Department of Transportation.
Fundamentally, we as a society need to be making a conscious effort to
change this philosophy that thrives from borderline slave labor. Let
us invest in our prisons and invest in our prisoners in ways that will
ultimately reduce prison populations, reduce prison violence, and
reduce the heavy burden placed on taxpayers to maintain the backwards
prison culture of today. Incarcerated people who work should be
treated as lawful employees. But, because we are not, we are not
afforded any of the same benefits as those who are. This is yet
another violation of prisoners’ rights that perpetuates recidivism.

Incentives and Privileges, Not Benefits

North Carolina’s sentencing guidelines require that people who’ve
been convicted of a crime must do at least the minimum amount of time
they were sentenced to. This practice is known as mandatory minimums.
When sentenced in North Carolina, there are ranges, based on
aggravating and mitigating variables, that have a minimum and a
maximum amount of time for that sentence to be completed. For example:
You commit a crime and are sentenced to five to seven years, you are
doing every minute of that five years, and that’s if you’re on
your best behavior. If you’re not, you’ll do anywhere after five,
up to seven years. If you do all of your potential sentence, that’s
that we refer to as “maxing out” your bid. Getting in trouble, or
not participating in work or education assignments, is a good way to
max out.

In what is often referred to as “the old days,” or “under the
old law,” a prisoner used to be able to work their way out the door,
meaning if they held a job and stayed out of trouble, they could earn
their freedom sooner and go home. With the implementation of mandatory
minimums back in the 1990s, this is no longer the case. An inmate can
go his entire sentence without getting into trouble, but he will not
go home any sooner than his minimum. Doesn’t sound very motivating,
does it? Many people and organizations, such as Families Against
Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), oppose this.

One of the strategies that the state uses to incentivize prisoners to
go along with their work assignments and to stay out of trouble is to
grant what’s referred to as “earned time.” These are credited
days that are applied to a prisoner’s sentence in order to help get
them to their minimums. Losing your job means no longer earning these
credits, or at least significantly less, while getting into trouble
allows administration to take away the earned time that a prisoner has
already gained.

More important than these paltry incentives are the few privileges
that we’re allotted, which, at least to me and most fellow prisoners
that I know, encourage us to “walk the line.” These include: phone
calls, visits, canteen, tablets, and recreation time, to name a
handful. Step out of line and you’re subject to lose some, if not
all, of these. So, instead of actual worker benefits such as Social
Security and Medicare, we’re stuck with minor rewards to keep us in
line.

Federal Prison Industries (FPI) is a federally-owned corporation that
“employs” federal prisoners to make goods for sale to the federal
government. Most prison systems at the state level have equivalents;
North Carolina’s is called Correction Enterprises and uses state
prisoners to perform similar tasks of producing goods for sale to the
state’s government. Because inmates get paid so little and are not
classified as actual employees (although I noticed in the North
Carolina statutes that prisoner-laborers were sometimes referred to as
“employees”), in most cases, inmate labor does not constitute
covered employment. What this translates to is real-world advantages
for these federal and state corporations, such as not having to pay
their share of any FICA taxes, which is a conscious and strategic
effort on their part to keep operating costs low. Not funding their
share of inmates’ eventual use of Social Security and Medicare
allows these prison industries to enjoy the existence of a steady
supply of cheap labor, and keep their workers disadvantaged, both
inside prison and after their release, further fueling the cycle.

Imagine you’re a prisoner and you’ve worked 20 years at various
jobs throughout your sentence. You worked hard, did what’s expected,
earned your pennies, earned your credit-days, then finally, finally,
are released back out into society. You’re much older than you were
going in, and you do have all those years of work experience. But, in
the real world how much weight do those menial tasks, or in some cases
actual skilled labor, hold with an employer? The harsh reality hits
you. You’ve done nothing that’s prepared you for the real-world
labor market.

That’s not even the worst part. The real kick in the teeth comes
when you eventually go and apply for Social Security, only to realize
you did not receive a single quarterly credit during all of those
years of labor. And then you learn that your pay was always so low,
intentionally, in order to prevent you from reaching the minimum
annual wage limit required. Not only are you not receiving any
benefits from your years of incarcerated labor, but those same
benefits could have gone to your spouse, children, or parents if you
were to die. I’m not talking just Social Security here, either, but
Medicare and disability benefits as well. Benefits that many prisoners
might assume they’re earning while performing incarcerated labor.
This assumption is wrong.

An article in the _South Carolina Law Review_ entitled “But
Don’t Tell Social Security” explains the situation perfectly:

Inmate Labor does not earn toward benefits for two reasons: first, it
is carved out of the statute defining covered employment, and second,
even when it may constitute covered employment (as with some Prison
Industry Enhancement Certification Program jobs), most inmates do not
earn sufficient income to surpass the statutory thresholds. I find it
unnecessary to withhold benefits that would aid people in poverty.
I’m even more confused, though, as to why our system refuses to
grant the bare minimum to human beings who are already disadvantaged
enough as it is, and who are statistically more likely to turn to
crime just to survive. A study by the Brookings Institution found that
the majority of ex-cons receive salaries at or below the minimum wage.
These benefits could be the difference between an ex-con returning to
prison or being a contributing member of society.

Imagine my own surprise while doing research for this article, when I
began to understand the true extent of how disadvantaged I’ll be
when I get out. I have three consecutive sentences; if I have to do
the mandatory minimums on each of those, I won’t be back out in
society until the year 2057, when I’m 64 years old. I, along with
many others, won’t qualify for Social Security or Medicare even
though it’s fair to say I will have worked, in some capacity, most
of my life. The discriminatory difference being that I performed my
labors behind bars, generating revenue—or cuttings costs—for what
could strongly be debated as my “employer.”

The Big Picture

One of the biggest, most important battles of criminal justice today
should be changing incarcerated laborers’ classification to legal
workers. This would provide the same rights and benefits as non-inmate
labor and allow prisoners to earn a “livable” wage. I’m aware
that this is a very tough sell politically, but I believe that only
highlights how uninformed the public is on this issue.

Pay prisoners a fair wage but charge them for their room and board.
Give them bills, garnish their pay, allow them responsibilities. The
culture of simply locking us up and throwing away the key is not a
sustainable system, the proof of this being how overcrowded and
understaffed our prison system is. We should be maximizing the chances
of a prisoner getting out and paying taxes from their job, not
burdening the state and its citizens with paying roughly $31,000 a
year per prisoner.

In 2017, a Louisiana sheriff was caught on camera lamenting new laws
that would release some nonviolent offenders early: “they’re
releasing some good ones that we use every day to wash cars, to change
oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that, where we save
money. Well, they’re going to let them out.”

There was an immediate and strong public outcry at these comments, one
being from an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, calling his words “disgusting” and that “what
he’s talking about is the economic exploitation of human beings.”

We as a society need to take more of an interest in the people many
are so readily willing to classify as “undesirables.” Inmate labor
needs to be acknowledged as important and valuable. Many prisoners
want to get out and make their lives better, but with so many
obstacles in place, it’s no wonder many of them return. For the most
part the system is designed for us to fail. We as a society have lost
sight as to the purpose of prison. Once these people have paid their
debts, they’re supposed to regain their place in society. This
isn’t the case. The punishment doesn’t end after a prisoner is
released.

Some politicians have recognized the injustices that only serve to
further the destabilization of prisoners and their families, and who
thankfully have the courage to fight for change. Reformist Senator
Cory Booker of New Jersey recently proposed federal legislation that
seeks to “end these unfair, abusive labor practices for incarcerated
people.” His bills are endorsed by a list of prominent civil and
human rights organizations that have a solid history of prison reform
involvement.

It’s my hope, along with millions of others, that this is just the
beginning of a wave of reformative legislation that will restore some
dignity to the incarcerated, and ultimately create a system in which
our returning citizens have a fair chance of succeeding. I ask that
society not write prisoners and ex-cons off. It’s my belief that if
you have the ability to do something, then you have the responsibility
to do something (I borrowed that from somewhere). My fellow prisoners
and I will work to do our part, we just need the politicians and the
public to do theirs.

_TYLER BOWMAN is an incarcerated writer serving three consecutive
sentences in North Carolina. He’s held a variety of jobs while in
prison including maintenance and canteen. His first novel, Legacy of
Stars, was published earlier this year and is available at
Amazon.com._

_Dollars & Sense is a non-profit, non-hierarchical, collectively-run
organization that publishes economic news and analysis, with the
mission of explaining essential economic concepts by placing them in
their real-world context. We publish a bi-monthly magazine, as well as
economics books that are used in college social science courses, study
groups and other educational settings.  Founded in 1974,
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publication of Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit
organization. From its beginning, the Economics Affairs Bureau has
been a worker-run, collectively managed organization. This
organizational structure fits with the mission to challenge orthodox
economics, to promote progressive economics, and to help build a
movement for a new economic system._

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