Inside America’s prisons: latter-day slavery
Mike Phipps reviews Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery, by Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli, And Aiyuba Thomas, published by OR Books.
In February 2016, President Obama signed a bill that banned goods made by certain prisoners and other workers who toil under conditions of forced labour overseas – but not in the US, which holds 20% of the world’s prison population.
Later that year on September 9th, as if in response, the biggest prison strike ever broke out, in large part as a protest against domestic “prison slavery.” Masterminded by the Free Alabama Movement, it was observed in 24 states. An estimated 57,000 prisoners participated in as many as 46 facilities.
Alabama
Alabama is worthy of special mention: conditions in its prisons, where the death rate is four times the national average, are arguably the worst in the country. The state is facing a Department of Justice lawsuit over the “violent, cruel and unconstitutional” condition of its prisons. Typically two hundred men might sleep in one dormitory, where fights, stabbings, rats and cockroaches are a daily fact of life. The general lawlessness is exacerbated by the shortage of guards. Serious malpractices include parole being systematically denied, inhumanely long sentences for nonviolent offences and widespread sexual abuse. In this particular state, it was difficult for the authors to find any evidence that “meaningful work” was even a consideration in the administration of the state’s prisons.
The authors explore Alabama’s history of ‘convict leasing’ – forced penal labour that effectively substituted for slavery after the Civil War, which laid the basis for the levels of inhumane treatment today. As possibly the worst state in terms of its treatment of prisoners by just about every yardstick, there is a lot about Alabama in this book.
Across the US, forced labour continues as before, and wages have not budged. Men and women still face punishment, including beatings, lockdowns, sexual assault, loss of family visitation rights, elimination of good time credit, and solitary confinement for refusing to work.
Mass incarceration
Mass incarceration in the US began with the Rockefeller Drug Laws (mandating 15 year minimum terms for the possession of four ounces of narcotics—the same as for second-degree murder) two years after Governor Rockefeller had drowned the Attica prison uprising in a bloody massacre. Soon tough-on-crime policies would be rolled out nationally.
At the height of mass incarceration, more than two million people had effectively been pulled out of the labour market and incapacitated, while most of them were doing work that would generate a great deal of income if performed by free-world workers. In any other context, this would be classified as wage theft on a grand scale. According to one national estimate, the disparity between the local minimum wage and the penny wages paid in prison amounts to $14 billion annually.
Conditions of work
Donna Fairchild, a native Texan who worked as a manager in a manufacturing plant before she was incarcerated, describes in the book what it meant to be assigned to work in the fields:
“We worked year round, during the coldest and the hottest. There was one time we were harvesting cabbage in February and some rows were even flooded and it was 31 degrees [Fahrenheit, so below zero C… Everyone was wet from the knees down, and I remember thinking that they don’t really care what happens to me. I felt like I could have died and they would not have cared.”
Meanwhile in the summer, there is no air-conditioning in most of the prisons, and a dozen or more fatalities were attributed to the heatwaves of 2023. Outside in the fields, conditions can be much worse:
“We were out there in 104 degrees weather… We were made to pull weeds down a row, and the ground would be hard and dry from the sun. And we would have to stand up and bend over at the waist to pick weeds, because you weren’t allowed to squat. If we were picking corn, and you’ve missed an ear of corn, or stand up for too long, that’s a disciplinary case too– it’s a refusal to work. You get an incomplete work assignment, and you go to disciplinary court inside of prison. Punishments for one infraction can range from no phone calls home for 30 days or no outside rec. For three refusals to work, I lost my contact visits for four months, 45 days of no commissary purchases or rec.”
The pressure to keep going comes from other inmates, fearful of being singled out by the guards. It leads to fights among prisoners, which the guards often encourage. As in true slave labour, violence is used to drive productivity. Prisoners report being made to move huge boulders from the bottom to the top of a hill – then back again. Some would deliberately injure themselves – badly – to escape these torments.
During the pandemic, prisoners were making hand sanitizer – which they were not allowed to use themselves. The hazardous nature of prison labour under ‘normal’ circumstances means inmates are forced to handle toxic materials, not regulated by federal occupational safety standards – fumes from which also impact on the health of guards.
Other prisoners are pressurised to sacrifice health and safety to make quotas to earn a little more. Rarely does work done in prison lead to a job in the outside world on release.
A labour movement issue
Prison work is a labour movement issue too. It undercuts outside rates of pay and allows companies to make vast profits. In the past, strong unions opposed some forms of prison work. Today, in a world of privatised prisons and precarious jobs outside, that’s more difficult, with companies using prison work as a union-busting tactic.
Hourly pay in many prisons varies from 15 to 65 cents, the same as it was 30 years ago. Exiting prison with little more than a bus ticket and $40, means ex-prisoners go straight back to the ‘street’, with harmful consequences for their own safety and that of the general public.
Even getting a symbolic change in the law to abolish this latter-day slavery is an uphill battle against lawmakers who are scared of looking ‘soft on crime’. Yet, as with the restoration of ex-prisoners’ voting rights, there have been some significant victories – including in Alabama. That’s thanks in no small part to the prisoners’ rights movement and the use of strike action by prison labourers, notwithstanding the fierce repression meted out to its organisers.
Quite a lot of this book is about that movement. It’s a story that needs to be shared widely, not least because it displays the underlying humanity of the prisoners, despite all the efforts the system makes to brutalise them. It’s also a significant contribution to the contemporary debate on prison abolitionism.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
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