Forced prison labor in the “Land of the Free”: Rooted in Racism and Economic Exploitation: Spotlight

Despite producing billions of dollars in value for the benefit of prisons and the private sector, incarcerated workers have almost no labor rights and are paid very little—if they are paid at all—for menial, exploitative, and at times dangerous work that fails to prepare them for life beyond incarceration. These dynamics are particularly extreme in the South, which incarcerates people—primarily Black men—at the highest rates in the world and is more likely than other regions to force incarcerated people to work for nothing at all. Because Southern state and local governments raise less tax revenue per capita than other regions (Das 2022), they rely more heavily on free or underpaid labor to operate costly prisons and produce goods and services on which the public sector depends. This reliance on free and underpaid labor is consistent with the racist and anti-worker Southern economic development model that has predominated in states across the region since Reconstruction (Childers 2024). Prison labor not only masks the true costs of mass incarceration but also locks states into inhumane, regressive, and inefficient forms of revenue generation while deepening racial inequities and imposing high fiscal and social costs on local economies.

Nationwide, nearly two million people are confined in state and federal prisons, county jails, juvenile and immigrant detention centers, and other confinement facilities (Sawyer and Wagner 2024). Of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers, most of them by force (ACLU and GHRC 2022). Most of these workers (about 80%) are employed in facility maintenance and operations, such as janitorial duties, food preparation, grounds maintenance, and laundry—tasks that keep the institutions that imprison them running. Of the other roughly 20%, about 17% work for government-run businesses, where they might staff DMV call centers or wash laundry for public hospitals, or on public projects, where they might be tasked with hazardous spill cleanup or firefighting duties in state-owned forests. The other 3% work for private-sector employers, where they earn meager wages producing goods and services for industries across the U.S. economy (Bronars 2024).

Incarcerated labor is rooted in slavery and bears an especially striking resemblance in the South

The incarceration and extraction of labor from prisoners in the South is directly rooted in legacies of slavery. Though the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in the United States, it also legalized slavery as a punishment for a crime. After this exception was in place, Southern states quickly implemented Black codes, laws that criminalized many mundane activities of formerly enslaved Black men and women and subjected many of them once again to unpaid, forced labor under the convict leasing system. Through this system, employers bid on and “leased” overwhelmingly Black incarcerated workers and subjected them to brutal conditions, often working them to death (Kim 2020).

The 13th Amendment loophole also led to forced labor in the form of debt peonage, in which Black people found guilty—often of fabricated crimes—were forced to work without pay to pay off criminal fines and court fees. In other cases, Black workers who became indebted—through sharecropping (in which white landowners rented farmland to Black workers and hoarded the profits while forcing tenant farmers into debt they often could not repay) or other means—were forced to work without pay under threat of violence or convict leasing. Convict leasing allowed states to criminalize Black people for trivial “offenses” (such as loitering, breaking curfew, or failing to show proof of employment) and lease them to work without pay for private employers. Though convict leasing as an official practice ended in the early 20th century, forced (and often unpaid) labor under threat of punishment continues in prisons across the country. These dynamics are particularly extreme in the South, where incarceration rates are the highest (see Table 1), prison wages are lowest (see Figure C), and forced labor arrangements bear the most striking resemblances to past forms of convict leasing and debt peonage.

One example of incarcerated people working for private employers is the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), under which they either work directly for the company or are employed by the prison and contracted out. Despite representing a small share of the country’s incarcerated workforce, these workers contribute to large profits for private businesses by producing goods and services for the suppliers of major brands across our economy, often for consumers who are unaware that they were produced with prison labor. Though these jobs tend to pay higher wages than non-industry jobs—jobs that support prison operations—up to 80% of workers’ wages are deducted in room and board, taxes, and victim compensation, and employers regularly exploit the minimal labor standards that do exist with impunity (ACLU and GHRC 2022).

These programs not only exploit imprisoned workers but can be harmful to local economies and businesses. By employing a captive labor force, these private employers enjoy significant cost savings which enable them to offer artificially low-cost products, undercutting local competitors that do not employ prison labor. In some cases, the employment of incarcerated workers in PIECP jobs has resulted in job losses for free workers in the local economy (Sloan 2010).

Southern states incarcerate people at the highest rates in the world

The United States is infamous for exorbitant incarceration rates. If each U.S. state were a country, 30 states and the U.S. as a nation would have some of the highest incarceration rates internationally.1 For example, for every 100,000 people in the United States, 614 are incarcerated (see Figure A). This is more than four times higher than the country from which we gained our independence—United Kingdom (146)—and nearly seven times higher than our northern neighbor—Canada (88).

But the rankings of Southern states are particularly extreme; 13 of the 16 Southern states (and D.C.) have much higher incarceration rates than the U.S. average (614). Louisiana (1,067) and Mississippi (1,020) top the list with rates that exceed 1,000 incarcerated people for every 100,000 people in the state, followed closely by Arkansas (912) and Oklahoma (905) (Widra 2024).

Black people are more likely to be incarcerated, especially in the South, and are overrepresented in low-paid prison jobs

The racial and gender composition of the incarcerated population—and thus the incarcerated worker population—does not match the population at large. For example, while about 12% of the U.S. is Black,2 32% of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are Black. Men, Hispanic people, and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people also make up a larger share of the imprisoned population compared with their share of the overall population (see Figure B).

Black people are overrepresented in state prisons nationwide, but especially in the South. Of the 12 states where more than half the state prison population is Black, nine of these states are in the South (The Sentencing Project 2022). The incarcerated population in the South is primarily and disproportionately Black. In six of the 12 Southern states with higher-than-average incarceration rates and in the District of Columbia, more prisoners are Black than any other racial or ethnic group, and, in every Southern state and D.C., Black people are overrepresented in prisons and jails relative to their share of the state population (see Table 1).

At the same time, white people are underrepresented in prisons in every Southern state and D.C. (see Table 1). Within state and federal prisons, Black men are more likely to be assigned work in lower-paid or unpaid agriculture and prison maintenance jobs, while white men are assigned higher-paid, more sought-after jobs (Crittenden, Koons-Witt, and Kaminski 2016). Though we do not have prison work data for women at the state level, incarcerated women report similar dynamics with respect to race—white women are assigned more desirable jobs—in addition to experiencing gender-based discrimination in vocational training opportunities and sexual abuse from corrections officers who control their work assignments (ACLU and GHRC 2022).

While women make up a relatively small share of the incarcerated population, they are the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population (Sawyer 2018). Women are also more likely than men to be incarcerated in local jails, which are less prepared than prisons to offer health care and other services. Nearly half of incarcerated women are held in local jails, among which 60% have not been convicted of a crime and are being held while they await trial, often because they cannot afford bail (Kajstura and Sawyer 2024).

Incarcerated workers are underpaid, unprotected, and underprepared for re-entry

Across the United States, incarcerated workers are paid between 13 and 52 cents an hour on average in the most commonly held jobs. In seven Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas—almost all work by prisoners remains unpaid. Most incarcerated workers in Louisiana are paid next to nothing—between two and four cents an hour (see Figure C). What little wages they do earn are deducted in taxes, garnished to pay court-imposed fines, legal fees, and restitution, and used to cover the costs of their own confinement (so-called “pay-to-stay” fees often make up the majority of these deductions). In many states, incarcerated people are charged by the day for their mattress and food, as well as service fees for medical copays, email and phone calls, and commissary items (ACLU and GHRC 2022; Eisen 2023).

Though incarcerated people work long hours and perform labor-intensive and even deadly work for the benefit of government at all levels, they are excluded from the rights and protections afforded to most workers—including overtime pay, protection from discrimination, and the right to collectively bargain over wages and workplace conditions. These workers are also denied the ability to earn toward future social safety net benefits like Social Security, Medicare, and disability insurance, and they do not qualify for refundable tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit while employed in prison. Because they are paid so little and receive no benefits, they are not able to save money in preparation for life after prison and are forced to depend financially on family and friends outside—who are often themselves financially insecure (ACLU and GHRC 2022).

The extremely low wages incarcerated workers are paid make them vulnerable to economic exploitation in the dangerous, difficult jobs they are often forced to accept and, in some cases, drives them to willingly put themselves in harm’s way. For example, the Louisiana State Penitentiary (more commonly known as Angola), continues to host a Prison Rodeo, in which incarcerated people can earn cash prizes that far exceed their negligible wages for participating in dangerous events involving angry bulls. In one event, “Convict Poker,” four incarcerated “cowboys” play poker in the middle of the ring while a bull attempts to gore the players (Stroh 2024). The funds from ticket sales are supposed to benefit the incarcerated population but have been mismanaged and diverted to other uses (O’Donoghue 2017).

Prison labor is advertised as a rehabilitative program, and most incarcerated workers rank skills learning as important. Yet, most of these jobs do not teach marketable skills or involve relevant vocational training. Only a third of people in state prisons report having participated in any job training, and only 43% reported having participated in educational programming. The most cited reasons for not participating were not being offered the chance to participate, being denied, or being waitlisted due to insufficient investment in the programming (Wang 2022). Beyond the myriad structural barriers to gainful employment that returning citizens face—including lawful employment discrimination,3 inability to qualify for housing or cash assistance or financial aid, difficulty getting a driver’s license, among many others (USCCR 2019)—most prison jobs do little to prepare incarcerated workers for life beyond prison. A whopping 60% of formerly incarcerated workers are jobless (Wang and Bertram 2022).

Southern states use various guises to extract labor from prisoners

About 2% of incarcerated workers are employed through “work-release programs” or “restitution centers,” in which they are sent to a lower-security confinement facility in exchange for low-paid work outside the facility at public and private sector employers. Though this work accounts for only a small share of prison labor nationwide, the state of Alabama relies heavily on the practice. More than 500 businesses—including major fast-food franchises, hotel chains, and auto suppliers—leased incarcerated workers in the past five years alone, and the wages garnished from their paychecks has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 (McDowell and Mason 2024).

In Mississippi, restitution centers known as “work camps” connect incarcerated workers who owe court-ordered debts to private employers in fast food service, meatpacking, construction, and other dangerous, low-wage jobs. Those who refuse to work, encourage others to refuse to work, participate in work stoppages, or get fired face punishment by correction officials up to and including incarceration in a traditional prison (Wolfe and Liu 2020). Mississippi—which is the only state that still uses restitution centers this way—incarcerates hundreds of people a year indefinitely until their debts are repaid (ACLU and GHRC 2022).

And in Oklahoma, a 2017 investigation found that courts across the state and in neighboring states were sending people to work camps under the guise of drug and alcohol rehabilitation services (as an alternative to prison) for non-violent offenders with substance use disorders. Participants in the “Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery” (CAAIR) program in Oklahoma, some of whom have not yet been convicted of a crime, were assigned to dangerous full-time work for little or no pay at slaughterhouses owned by billion-dollar corporations like Simmons Foods in Alabama, Arkansas, and North Carolina. Workers who experienced mental health crises were kicked out of the program, and those injured on the job were sent to prison and received no workers’ compensation (Harris and Walter 2017). Four class-action lawsuits were filed against CAAIR and another program along the Arkansas-Oklahoma border alleging violations of state labor law, human trafficking, and violations of the 13th Amendment ban on forced labor, and multiple state agencies opened investigations. After the Oklahoma case, investigative reporters identified at least 300 rehabilitation facilities across 44 states that force participants to work without pay. Yet, labor law enforcement has been limited, and many work-based rehab programs continue to withhold workers’ pay (Walter 2020).

Incarcerated workers are also tasked with cultivating and harvesting the crops that are eaten within the prison or even producing agricultural products for sale in the private sector. Though agricultural employment accounts for only 2.2% of prison labor nationwide, Southern states utilize prison labor in agriculture at higher rates—in Arkansas, 17% of work assignments are in agriculture. In Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas, over 10,000 incarcerated workers, most of whom are Black, are assigned to agricultural work under threat of punishment on penal plantations or prison farms growing some of the same crops on the same land where enslaved people toiled 150 years ago. In five of these states, incarcerated workers are paid nothing at all for this work, which generates millions of dollars in revenue for the state every year (ACLU and GHRC 2022).

The public sector relies on captive labor for revenue—but at a high cost

Federal, state, and local governments are the primary beneficiaries of unpaid or underpaid prison labor. Incarcerated workers keep the prisons that confine them running, maintain local infrastructure, respond to state emergencies and natural disasters, and produce goods and services used by state institutions. Incarcerated workers produce food and agricultural products for state-owned facilities and agencies, manufacture license plates and office furniture, and produce other goods. They also provide services such as automotive repair on state-owned vehicles, hazardous materials removal, local firefighting and emergency medical response, and even state-level disaster response. In short, in many states, incarcerated workers are essential to core government functions.

Southern lawmakers are not shy about their dependence on low-cost incarcerated labor to maintain a functioning economy or about prioritizing mass incarceration over investments in the health and well-being of their residents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alabama used $400 million in federal relief funds to fund the construction of a billion-dollar prison—the most expensive prison ever built in the U.S.—when it could have invested that money in low-income Alabamians’ health and economic security (Eisen 2021; Whitmire 2023). The cost of the Alabama prison is equivalent to the entire annual budget of the state’s Department of Mental Health (EJI 2023). Meanwhile, Arkansas allocated $75 million of its 2021 budget surplus—which was enabled by American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grants—to add 500 beds to a state prison, and Kentucky allocated $30 million in ARPA funds to increase the per diems paid to county jails that incarcerate state prisoners (Quant 2022). The American Civil Liberties Union has urged the Treasury Department to investigate the illegal use of COVID relief funds to build or expand prisons in nine states, including Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma (ACLU 2023).

We’re utilizing our resources … [this work] would cost [the state] way more money if [it] had to do that through some of these private contractors.
– Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the use of unpaid prison labor for Hurricane Helene cleanup efforts.

Incarcerated workers produce an estimated over $2 billion each year in goods and services in state prison industries programs, and a conservative 2004 estimate put the cost savings of prison upkeep by incarcerated workers at about $9 billion. Of the 10 states with the highest net sales in correctional industries programs, four are in the South, totaling nearly $300 million in 2019 alone (ACLU and GHRC 2022). The billions of dollars in value produced by low-paid or unpaid incarcerated workers—especially in revenue-starved states in the South—mask the true costs of incarceration and make lawmakers reluctant to curb these exploitative practices.

However, researchers have recently attempted to begin to unmask these costs. A 2024 cost-benefit analysis of forced prison labor concluded that the benefits of abolishing forced prison labor far outweigh its costs. According to the study, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons and paying incarcerated workers fair wages would yield a net benefit of $20.3 billion per year nationwide.4 Put another way, every dollar spent on an incarcerated worker’s wages would translate to $2.40 in benefits to that worker, their loved ones, the government, and the broader economy. Of that $20.3 billion total, nearly half of the benefit of paying incarcerated workers fair wages ($10.8 billion) would flow to states in the South region alone. Beyond the fiscal benefits, the projected lower recidivism rates associated with this policy change would translate to billions of dollars saved in incarceration costs and a reduction in crime, not to mention the difficult to quantify but transformational economic and social benefits for incarcerated workers and their families (Bronars 2024).

Closing the forced prison labor loophole

In many states, advocates have sought to close the prison labor loophole in the U.S. Constitution by proposing or enacting amendments to their state constitutions that ban involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime (Alfonseca 2024). While these proposals are an important step toward broad acceptance of forced labor as unacceptable, recent developments in Alabama have shown the limitations of such amendments. Alabama was one of four states that banned forced prison labor in 2022. Still, a federal lawsuit arguing that forced prison labor in Alabama has been rendered unconstitutional was dismissed in mid-2024 under the logic that workers in Alabama’s prisons are performing “mandatory chores” rather than forced labor. The plaintiffs in the case plan to appeal the dismissal order (Smith 2024).

In December 2024, a Hyundai supplier that leased workers through work-release jobs ended its contract with the Alabama Department of Corrections over increasing legal challenges to the use of forced labor by incarcerated workers (Smith 2024). Mixed reactions to the decision among incarcerated workers and prison labor organizers illustrate the need for reforms that center incarcerated workers. While workers do not want to be compelled to work in difficult and dangerous jobs, jobs in the private sector tend to offer higher wages and offer a reprieve from life in prison. The solution is not eliminating prison labor but making it voluntary, regulated, and fairly compensated.

Treating incarcerated workers with dignity and respect is essential to a fair economic model

Prison labor as it exists today is rooted in the convict leasing system that replaced chattel slavery. It is also another regressive form of revenue generation, alongside regressive taxation and the disproportionate levying of fees and fines on poor Black and brown people, that punishes poor people—and especially poor people of color—in service of an exploitative economic policy architecture that prioritizes the wealthy and corporations over the public good (Childers 2024). Instead of increasing funding for public goods like education, housing, transportation, and the social safety net, Southern lawmakers are investing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to expand prisons or build new ones. In the past two years, prison populations have increased in the South more than in any other region (Kang-Brown and Zhang 2024).

There is another way. Treating incarcerated workers like other workers—making work voluntary, paying workers the minimum wage, affording them the same protections as other workers, and providing them with meaningful work and useful skills—would better prepare them to reintegrate into their communities and contribute meaningfully to the economy. More broadly, prison labor requires a reckoning with our reliance on captive labor as a substitute for progressive revenue generation in the South and across the country and with the view of incarcerated people as undeserving of the same economic and human rights as other workers.

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Notes

1. Countries that rank higher or alongside these 30 states are El Salvador at #1, Cuba at #11, Rwanda at #25, and Turkmenistan at #33.

2. This is the share of people who identify as Black alone, no other race.

3. There is no federal law prohibiting employment discrimination based on a criminal records, and many state statues or local ordinances restrict hiring people with criminal convictions and/or disqualify people with criminal records from eligibility for occupational or business licensing. Additionally, many public and private employers have policies against hiring people with criminal convictions. See Kleinman and Kajeepeta 2023. 

4. This is assuming a stable number of incarcerated workers employed 32.5 hours per week.

References

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Bronars, Stephen. 2024. A Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Impact of Ending Slavery and Involuntary Servitude as Criminal Punishment and Paying Incarcerated Workers Fair Wages. Edgeworth Economics, January 2024.

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