Companies reap financial windfalls off backs of prisoners

By Bryan 18X Crawford -Contributing Writer- | Last updated: Jul 23, 2019 - 12:10:04 AM

In this April 15, 2014 photo, inmates harvest turnips at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La. Inmates at the penitentiary are getting state licenses in landscaping and horticulture. The goal is a better shot at employment after release and to use their skills on prison grounds, which are about the size of Manhattan Island. So even inmates not in the program are put to work. AP Photo:Gerald Herbert

Prison labor is an easy enough concept to understand. For inmates, those assigned tasks depend on where they are locked up, the infraction they were convicted of and whether the charges were state or federal. In most instances, that person during their stay in jail or prison, be given work to do as part of their sentence.

However, the nuanced complexities lie in the way the prison system is structured with respect to labor. Prison labor has created an environment of exploitation that prisoners, prisoners-rights advocates and those that seek to dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex have fought aggressively against.

So, what is the truth about prison labor, and how layered and deeply flawed is this system? The answer is one that dates all the way back to slavery and Jim Crow.

“Mass incarceration stems from slavery and evolved out of slavery. However, even though slavery and mass incarceration are separate systems, they’re still very interconnected,” Dr. talitha LeFlouria, associate Professor in African and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia, and author of “Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South,” told The Final Call.

“I think from a contemporary perspective, prison labor remains an exploitative system, and it’s really a double-edged sword. Incarcerated people really want to work to pass the time, but they don’t want to be exploited and paid a nickel an hour. People are not compensated according to their worth and the value of their labor.”

This is where the intersection of prison labor being akin to modern day slavery meets. In the more than 400 years that Black people were enslaved in the United States, their labor, along with their blood, sweat, tears, and oftentimes, their lives, reaped no value for themselves. Putting Black people in this position, keeping them there by design, and keeping 100 percent of the profit related to their work in the cotton fields and farms owned by White men is the very essence of the foundation of America.

“The people who are actually making the money are the prisons and the people who are contracting with them, not the people who are doing the work. And it’s always been that way,” Dr. LeFlouria said. “I don’t see any improvement and I see the Prison Industrial Complex coming up with more ways to profit off the labor of Black and Brown bodies in prison.”

Today, much like the days of slavery, many prisoners are forced to endure long workdays, have no rights or worker protections, can be leased to companies (convict leasing), all while receiving low wages for their labor.

However, prisoners who work in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas, aren’t paid for their labor at all. And with Black people making up roughly 33 percent of the U.S. prison population, many of them who do work, particularly in the Southern states, endure these conditions on a daily basis.

“Prisons such as Angola in Louisiana and Parchman Farm in Mississippi cruelly imitate the conditions of slavery; replete with a majority Black agricultural workforce being supervised by armed White men on horseback,” James Kilgore, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who served six years in a California prison for his involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army in the late 60s, said in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail. “They generally grow crops for consumption by government entities, including prisons,” he said.

“I see prison labor as slave labor that still exists in the United States,” wrote Kevin Rashid Johnson, co-founder of the New African Black Panther Party and who is serving a life sentence for murder, in a 2018 op-ed for The Guardian newspaper. “Though I’ve always refused to engage in this modern slavery myself, I’ve witnessed plenty of examples of it. The most extreme were in Texas and Florida, where prisoners are forced to work in the fields for free, entirely unremunerated,” he continued.

“They are cajoled into chain gangs and taken out to the fields where they are made to grow all the food that inmates eat: squash, greens, peas, okra. They are given primitive hand-held tools like wooden sticks and hoes and forced to till the soil, plant and harvest cotton. They are watched over all day by guards on horseback carrying shotguns … Prisoners who do not agree to such abject slavery are put in solitary confinement.”

Picturing these words harkens back to a time when Black people were forced to work, “from can see to can’t see,” while being watched over by White men who held the power of their life or death in their hands.

“Racial animus is always present,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “The state that now incarcerates me, Virginia, has a general population that is 19 percent African American, but 58 percent of its prison population is Black. A few years ago I was held in Florida prisons at a time when current and former guards were found to be card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

While the total percentage of the working U.S. prison population—whether their work is related to daily prison operations or leased out—remains small in comparison to the number of incarcerated people in this country, the number of corporations vying to capitalize off what is, by all accounts the cheapest labor pool in the country, continues to grow.

According to the Centre for Research on Globalization, as many as 37 states have made contracting prison labor by private corporations legal to operate inside their state prisons. The Centre for Research on Globalization wrote, “Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets.”

Still, while problems with respect to prison labor exist, some take the position that the bigger issue is related to the ease in which people get funneled into the prison, the purpose these institutions truly serve, and not the narrative of rampant exploitation for profit under the guise of modern day slavery.

“Oftentimes you’ll hear, particularly from the side of those concerned about and opposed to imprisonment, that the reason we have the Prison Industrial Complex and mass incarceration in this country is because this is capitalism’s way to exploit prisoners’ labor. But when you actually look at the political economy of imprisonment in this country, that’s actually not the case,” Mohamed Shehk, media and communications director of Critical Resistance, a national organization working to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex, told The Final Call. “Imprisonment does exist to uphold capitalism, and there’s certainly billions of dollars that gets funneled through this system, but it’s not as simple as saying that corporations and capitalism wants to exploit prisoners because it’s cheap labor.”

Mr. Shehk said that the best way to fight against the Prison Industrial Complex is to understand what drives it.

“As far as we understand slavery to be a racialized system of control, the PIC certainly shares that characteristic and is certainly a racialized system of control. But insofar as slavery being a mechanism to kickstart capitalism off the backs and labor enslaved Black people, the PIC is using prisons as a safeguard for capitalism to continue being able to function by warehousing surplus populations, but not necessarily to exploit profit. This is the big picture view,” Mr. Shehk explained. “I think we can point to specific instances where corporations are profiting off of prisoners labor, but that is not the overall dynamic for what’s driving the system,” he added.

“People in prison are members of the marginalized sector of the working class, not some exotic criminal subculture,” Mr. Kilgore said.

Mr. Shehk stated that the primary reason so many people are incarcerated in America is because entire communities have been deemed disposable. This means that prison essentially serves as a means of population control, where decisions were made to make certain groups of people not only excluded from society, but the job market as well. And the role of prisons is to warehouse people and keep them idle, but in many instances, these same people are also tasked to perform job duties.

All of this adds to the complexities related to incarceration and prison labor that are present in the U.S. today. And while a study conducted by Pew Research Center found that incarceration rates have been steadily declining since 2007, the fact remains that large numbers of people, particularly Black and Brown, remain locked up in U.S. prisons and those made to work. are still enduring conditions that remain exploitative and oppressive in nature.

The Final Call