Slavery by Another Name

Exploitation of Prisoners Hides the True Cost of Incarceration

This week I’d like to start with a poem I wrote during a workshop with my students.

Abolition

They abolished slavery

“Except as a punishment for crime

whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”

4 million people were enslaved in 1860

5 million are “under supervision” today

2 million human beings in prison right now

We’ve lost our way 

When giving someone life

Means taking it away

When children trying to survive to adulthood

Get tried as adults

When the answer to someone going through a hard time

Is to serve hard time

They abolished slavery

“Except as a punishment for crime”

It’s time to abolish that too

Prison is exploitative. That seems like a pretty obvious statement, but there are many, many hidden ways the exploitation happens. I don’t have time to cover the entire history of incarceration here, but Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow (affiliate link) provides a well-researched account of the racist impact of our system of mass incarceration and the direct throughline from slavery to Jim Crow segregation and racist laws to the absurd over-policing and over-incarceration of black people that continues today. To provide an incomplete list, prisoners are currently exploited through:

1. Forced labor both for private companies, and for the prisons themselves. This is often unpaid or incredibly underpaid and is the most direct

2. Being overcharged for commissary purchases, phone calls, and other forms of communication with people outside the prison (through private prison communication monopolies)

3. Having to pay excessive court fees and fines, with more fines being added all the time on top of already harsh sentences.

First, a two-year long Associated Press (AP) investigation found that prison labor “tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.” Prisoners lack many of the basic rights guaranteed to workers across the U.S., and can be “sent to solitary confinement” if they refuse to work. As I alluded to in the poem above, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares slavery illegal “except as a punishment for crime”. Fortunately, as the AP reports “That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.” This is a small, but important step in the right direction, but it will take a lot of fighting and organizing to actually make a change.

The AP report highlights the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, “a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.” Clint Smith described his visit to this prison in his 2022 book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (affiliate link). Louisiana is already known for having the highest incarceration rate in the country, and according to Prison Policy Initiative

Louisiana has an incarceration rate of 1,094 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than any democratic country on earth.

This includes a massive racial disparity in incarceration rates, with 58% of residents being white while making up 34% of their prison population and 32% of residents being black while making up 66% of the prison population. Smith attended a tour of the Angola Prison where the tour guide didn’t deny the horrific history of the prison, including the torture and murder that happened there, but did his best to emphasize reform and improvement (which Smith pointed out were not the result of a caring prison administration, but of a variety of lawsuits and state legislation forcing them to change). One black prisoner that Smith talked to spoke about the moment he knew things hadn’t really changed from the 1800s when he was sent out in the fields and forced to pick cotton with a prison guard as his overseer. The AP also reported that one prisoner, Willie Ingram, picked cotton and okra in terrible conditions of extreme heat:

Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.

“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.

Prisoners face unsafe working conditions with little recourse. It’s difficult if not impossible for them to bring lawsuits against employers and they face little protection on the job. In a glaring example of the hypocrisy of both government regulations and corporate maneuvering:

The AP found that U.S. prison labor is in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years. For instance, the U.S. has blocked shipments of cotton coming from China, a top manufacturer of popular clothing brands, because it was produced by forced or prison labor. But crops harvested by U.S. prisoners have entered the supply chains of companies that export to China.

While prison labor seeps into the supply chains of some companies through third-party suppliers without them knowing, others buy direct. Mammoth commodity traders that are essential to feeding the globe like Cargill, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, Archer Daniels Midland and Consolidated Grain and Barge – which together post annual revenues of more than $400 billion – have in recent years scooped up millions of dollars’ worth of soy, corn and wheat straight from prisons, which compete with local farmers.

U.S. prison labor is linked to many of the world’s biggest companies, and while work for private corporations is only a small part of the labor that exploited prisoners are required to do (prisoners often are required to work for the prison itself for little to no pay to reduce costs of incarceration), it is connected to hundreds of millions of dollars of products.

The second form of exploitation on my list is prison price-fixing. A new report from The Appeal reveals commissary items are often priced up to 5 times higher inside prisons than out. Because of the exploitative working conditions in which prison laborers “can earn as little as 30 cents an hour”, these markups are even more exploitative, and end up putting a cost burden on relatives outside the prison system, spreading the social harm for the sake of private profit. This includes purchasing food to supplement poor quality prison meals, as well as being forced to purchase their own fans at a mark up while being held in prisons without air conditioning. In one example,

In Delaware, an 8-inch fan at Sussex Correctional Institution cost almost $40. In Georgia, where most prison labor is unpaid, a 10-inch electric fan was marked up more than 25 percent and cost about $32. In Mississippi, an 8-inch fan was sold for $29.95. Despite the brutal summer heat, most of the state’s prisons lack air conditioning in their housing units. Fan prices are just one of many high costs incarcerated people face in hot prisons. Last June, in Texas, the state and commissary vendor raised the price of water by 50 percent.

Often the products are necessities like soap and other hygiene products which are provided by prisons, but in insufficient quantities. Some states have made changes to reduce the impact of these price-gouging practices, but there is still a long way to go, and there are many other ways in which private companies extract profit from prisoners and their families, like charging excessive rates for phone calls.

The final mode of exploitation on my short list is court fees and fines. In 2021 Planet Money ran an episode called Fine and Punishment. In which they described the absurd level of fines that prisoners have imposed on them in an obscure and confusing bureaucratic process. One former inmate they interviewed had at least $13,508.55 in prison debt (and potentially up to $20,000). As the reporters describe, prisoners are charged court fees to generate money to pay for the punishment bureaucracy in a vicious cycle that leads to increasing fees for things like “maintaining the court’s website”. Other fees include

VAN WINKLE: A district attorney fee for $50, a medical expense fee for $10, the state treasurer's forensics fee, which I don't know why there's a forensic fee because it's not even a drug charge, which was $5.

CHILDS: There are charges for some child abuse fund.

VAN WINKLE: And it goes to, like, children that are being abused.

GONZALEZ: Even though you did not have a child abuse-related case.

VAN WINKLE: Right. Correct.

BOYLE: We've got sheriff fee, $5.

GONZALEZ: Here's Kayla again.

BOYLE: Law library fee, $6.

These fees add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars and are not part of the person’s punishment. The punishment is them being incarcerated!! Then the punishment bureaucracy goes to work to indebt prisoners as soon as they are released, adding to the list of barriers to rejoining society. They can even be rearrested for not paying the fees, basically recreating a system of debtors prisons to pay for the massive expansion of incarceration in the U.S. The whole podcast episode is worth listening to as it highlights the ways policies can be warped. As neoliberal state governments made it harder to raise taxes, but continued to expand the government through the police state, they had to pay for it somehow. So they turned to fines and fees, privatizing the cost of prison and imposing excessive monetary punishments.

As always, these exploitative conditions are the result of policy choices that have been built up over time and must be taken down over time. All three types of exploitation are connected in that they extract money from prisoners and their families, impose economic punishments on top of those actually mandated by law, and hide the true cost of the prison system to society. An abolitional framework recognizes that the system is so corrupt, discriminatory, and harmful, that the only path forward is to reduce and eventually eliminate our reliance on it. I’ve described several times how this is possible (here, here, here, and here), and we see much better ways of doing things in many other countries. A better world is possible, but requires critical examination and change to may of our policies.

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P.S. As I mentioned in my previous post, I now have a bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy through my page or one of the links above, I receive a small commission for the purchase. You can also find the same book through your local book store on their website and that store will instead receive a commission. You will then not be supporting Amazon which is a horribly exploitative company that uses its monopoly power to drive up prices across the market.

The books mentioned in this post are:

1. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander - currently available for $17.66 in paperback

2. How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith - currently available for $17.66 in paperback

3. From my previous post Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen - an excellent book related to the same topic, currently available for $18.59 in paperback