Slavery is alive and well in the United States. Two-thirds of US prisoners, 800,000 men and women, have jobs in federal and state prisons. While 80% of prisoners work to maintain the prison in terms of maintenance, a growing portion of prisoners hold jobs for private companies. Estimates that that these prisoners are producing at least $11 billion annually for the US government and receiving little to nothing in return.
Non-industry workers can earn between 13 cents to 52 cents per hour. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas are not required to pay these workers. “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor,” Warren Yeager, a former Gulf county, Florida, commissioner said to the Florida Times-Union. In other words, states have become reliant on free labor from prisoners and actively put this into their budgets.
What some do not understand is that private companies are also employing prisoners. McDonald’s, Burger King, Golden Corral, Walmart, Wendy’s, IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, and Target are among hundreds of private companies that have active agreements with state governments to farm out their prisoners. The private companies pay the prisons directly, bypassing the people who are forced to work long hours with no protections.
These workers have a far lower rate at being released on parole. The state believes they are safe enough to work among the public, but refuse to offer them an opportunity to leave. Only non-violent offenders are offered these jobs and most are swindled into accepting the positions to obtain favorable housing.
Alabama, for example, allows non-violent prisoners to work in the private sector for pennies. Yet, the state takes away 40% of their pay before taxes, charges them fees for transportation, laundry, and any extras they find. Alabama now earns more than $450 million annually on the backs of these workers. It comes at no surprise that the parole rate in Alabama plummeted to 8% in 2023.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that over 75% of workers are unable to take off work, and if they do, they risk being sentenced to solitary confinement and prevented from visitations with their families. About 70% of these workers said they cannot even afford to call home or purchase soap. They are denied all rights and treated as sub-humans. “The United States has a long, problematic history of using incarcerated workers as a source of cheap labor and to subsidize the costs of our bloated prison system,” said Turner, a principal human rights researcher with the ACLU’s Human Rights Program.
“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” notes a study study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the US prison complex of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
Private prisons, in general, operate as businesses as they are guaranteed a fee per inmate, which US taxpayers pay. The majority of people are African American and Hispanic, but we hear silence from communities demanding reparations and failing to acknowledge that modern-day slavery is alive and well in the US. The private sector is creating jobs for the prison industry on behalf of the US government and this is one of the reasons that we see a decline in available jobs. The business is extremely lucrative because they profit on holding the inmates as well as forcing them to work.
So, these human beings were deemed stable enough to work unsupervised with the public. Yet, those same decision-makers turn around at sentencing and tell these workers that they are simply too dangerous to return home. This is why the United States, home of the free, hosts the largest prison population in the world. It always comes down to greed and money.
