Comprehensive report describes inhumane US prison labor system and how to improve it

According to this recently published 150-page joint report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, the 1.2 million incarcerated prisoners in the United States are the most exploited workforce in the country. For little or no pay, they perform vital services, producing “more than $2 billion a year in goods and commodities and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused.” However they have few rights or protections, and therefore are vulnerable to ill treatment. One reason is that the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery explicitly excludes incarcerated workers, and is at the root of the use of modern-day prison labor. According to the Captive Labor report, “states in the North and the South turned to incarcerated labor as a means of partially replacing chattel slavery and the free labor force slavery provided.” Since then, state corrections systems have expanded, along with state-sponsored incarcerated labor programs. Today, these programs support state prison industries, public works, private industry, agricultural production, and the maintenance of jails and prisons themselves. The report goes into great detail about each of these types of prison labor programs and the exploitation that occurs in each.

To comprehend and convey the current state of incarcerated labor in the US, the authors of the Captive Labor report utilized information from multiple sources, including interviews with key stakeholders; data on prison labor programs accessed via FOIA requests; interviews and in-depth primary investigations in three case-study US states; their analysis of research, policy, and legislation documentation; and Department of Justice data from the Survey of Prison Inmates, United States, 2016 (SPI) (ICPSR 37692). Released in 2021 by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, the SPI is a national survey of adult prisoners who were incarcerated in state or federal correctional facilities within the United States. It provides national statistics on multiple prisoner characteristics. The Captive Labor report’s authors drew from a sample of 23,921 SPI respondents, focusing on prisoner work assignment data, which revealed that more than 76 percent of prisoners reported that they are required to work. The report authors note that “prison systems have developed forms of coercion that strip away most or all choice, forcing incarcerated people to work exploitative jobs that they rarely choose for themselves.” Although the SPI data show more than 70 percent of respondents wanted to learn skills, they instead labored in dead-end jobs and acquired few marketable skills or training. This is in part because vocational work is being cut from prison budgets. More than 80 percent of the respondents reported working in jobs that served to maintain the prisons where they are incarcerated. This underscores how the primary beneficiaries of the labor of incarcerated workers are federal, state, and local governments that offset costs by forcing prisoners to maintain their prisons. These cost-savings gained by using prison labor, and by contracting labor to the private sector, according to the report’s authors, “prevent policy makers and the public from reckoning with the true fiscal costs of mass incarceration.” The report ends by providing eight key recommendations, starting with repealing federal and state constitutional clauses excluding incarcerated people from bans on slavery and forced labor.