prison labor campaign

The Prison Organizing campaign aims to empower incarcerated people by fighting to improve their material conditions and by aiding their efforts to self-organize. We are willing to do whatever we can to contribute to the struggle to dismantle the carceral state and to end the oppression and exploitation of Virginia’s racialized surplus population.

FAQ

What’s the current legal status of incarcerated workers?
- In Ruffin v. Commonwealth (1871), the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a prisoner “has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him,” and therefore the legal status of an incarcerated worker is defined as “slave of the state”
- § 40.1-28.9.(B)(7) of the Code of Virginia excludes “any person confined in any penal or corrective institution of the State” from the legal classification of “Employee”
- § 53.1-60 and § 53.1-131 of the Code of Virginia allow prison directors to receive all wages earned by incarcerated workers, and the director deducts approximately 90% of the incarcerated workers’ wages
- Section 16VAC25-60-10 of the Administrative Regulations Manual released by the Virginia Occupational Safety and Health Program (VOSH) excludes prisoners from “public employee” status: “prisoners confined in jails controlled by any political subdivision of the Commonwealth and prisoners in institutions controlled by the Department of Corrections are not public employees unless employed by a public employer in a work-release program pursuant to §§53.1-60 or 53.1-131 of the Code of Virginia.”

Why does this matter?
- Incarcerated workers in Virginia are paid between $0.27 and $0.80 an hour.
- Workers’ compensation: incarcerated workers who get injured or become ill as a direct result of their job are not owed cash benefits. Injured workers are not compensated for the labor hours they miss as a result of their injury
- Work conditions
  - OSHA
    - Because incarcerated workers are not considered public employees, the Virginia branch of OSHA states that “if they register a complaint with VOSH regarding a hazardous condition(s) at their workplace, this will not result in an inspection.”
    - The VOSH Regional Director has the option to notify the prison’s warden of an incarcerated worker’s complaint, and if the Regional Director decides to do so, the warden has 10 working days from the time of receipt of the letter to carry out his own inspection. If the warden does not respond to the VOSH after this time has elapsed, the VOSH Regional Director has the option to initiate a VOSH inspection.
    - A FOIA request revealed dozens of reported incarcerated worker injuries each year, and there’s no telling just how many injuries go unreported in workplaces that aren’t governed by standard OSHA regulations
  - Temperature
    - Data received in a FOIA request indicates that workplace temperatures can reach up to 93.9 degrees in the summer. OSHA guidelines recommend a maximum workplace temperature of 76 degrees.
- Sick leave is not provided to incarcerated workers. Illness can lead to termination.

Isn’t this simply fair punishment for their crimes?
- The current system of prison slavery was created during the Reconstruction Era as a replacement for recently-abolished chattel slavery. Black people who had just received their freedom were criminalized by the “Black Codes” and once again enslaved — this time through the criminal justice system. Taking down Confederate monuments and renaming buildings is a necessary step in undoing historical injustice, but isn’t it more important to abolish the modern iteration of slavery?
- America’s incarceration rate is the highest in the world, and Virginia’s is even higher. Although it’s well established that white people and black people use drugs at very similar rates — and the white population is far larger than the black population — 74% of those imprisoned for drug possession are black. This unequal treatment helps explain why Virginia’s population is 19% black but its prison population is almost 60% black. The majority of Americans who remain enslaved today are black.
- Class also plays a massive role in mass incarceration and prison slavery. A boy born into an extremely poor family is 40 times more likely to end up in prison than a boy born into an extremely wealthy family. This makes prison slavery even more cruel; the economically desperate commit crimes, end up in jail, and then leave jail just as economically desperate as they were before, which often leads them to return to crime.
- Federal law prohibits wage garnishment from exceeding 25% of disposable income, but deductions from incarcerated workers’ wages often exceed 90%
- Paying slave wages to incarcerated workers kills blue-collar jobs to workers outside of prisons. That’s why one of the guiding principles of the Florida branch of the AFL-CIO is “to abolish the competition of convict labor with the labor of free workers”
- Prison slavery is a violation of Article Four of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was agreed to by the United States: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

But don’t incarcerated workers gain valuable skills and experience?
- Incarcerated people don’t need vague, wishy-washy skills like “the concept of teamwork,” they need savings. Studies have found that the amount of savings an incarcerated person has upon release has a significant impact on their likelihood of reoffending. In fact, “increasing a returning citizen’s access to cash reduced the first-day recidivism to zero, with no increase in crime later.”
- If incarcerated workers were considered employees, they’d receive unemployment benefits upon release, which research suggests would drastically decrease recidivism rates
- Being incarcerated is extremely expensive. A recent report found that the total amount of debt owed by formerly-incarcerated Americans as a result of various fines and fees is more than $50 billion. Allowing incarcerated workers to retain their savings would go a long way in helping them manage that overwhelming debt burden
- The monopoly that commissaries have over food, hygiene products, and other basic necessities has allowed them to become a $1.6 billion industry. If incarcerated workers were allowed to retain their wages, they could afford commissary goods without sinking deeper into debt

Why do incarcerated people work for slave-wages?
- Many — though not all — believe it’s better than nothing. Uncompensated labor without legal protections could be more appealing than zero compensation, no skills-training, and no breaks from the monotony of the prison routine
- But the fact that Virginia doesn’t physically coerce incarcerated people into working like other states do shouldn’t obscure the desperation and lack of alternatives that drive participation in these programs. Workers should be treated like workers, no matter the context.

Would abolishing slavery kill the prison jobs programs?
- Virginia Correctional Enterprises (VCE) is a jobs and work-skills program established and operated by the Commonwealth, well-known for producing furniture for Virginia’s public institutions. In the year ending June 30, 2007 — the last year for which data is readily accessible — VCE made a gross profit of $13,440,835, with sales revenue of $48,736,411. Gross profit as a percent of total sales was 27.6%. That doesn’t seem like an agency that’s just barely scraping by.
- Private-sector furniture workers make approximately $15 to $16 an hour. Incarcerated furniture workers make $0.55 to $0.80 an hour. If for-profit corporations are able to stay in business while paying their workers wages that are up to 28 times higher than the wages paid by VCE, there’s no reason why an increase to minimum wage should shutter prison jobs programs
- The public institutions that are legally required to procure their furniture from incarcerated workers already pay full market price, so it’s not like colleges and government offices are financially benefiting from prison slavery

What do the incarcerated workers want?
- Incarcerated workers throughout the country went on strike in the summer of 2018, demanding (among other things) “an immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.”
- Incarcerated activists and criminal justice reform organizations throughout Virginia have called for the abolition of prison slavery

So what should we do?
- Strike § 40.1-28.9.(B)(7) from the Code of Virginia, eliminating the exclusion of incarcerated workers from employment status. As “employees” rather than “slaves” of the state, they would be paid the prevailing minimum wage of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and would also be accorded all of the labor rights afforded to workers by state and federal law.
- Strike the language in § 53.1-60 and § 53.1-131. of the Code of Virginia which allows prison directors to receive all wages earned by incarcerated workers and to deduct the vast majority of incarcerated workers’ wages
- There’s precedent for this. In 2018, Colorado passed an amendment to their state constitution which “prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime and thereby prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude in all circumstances”

Further Reading

A history of prison labor, in The Atlantic

Op-Ed in the New York Times calling for abolition of prison slavery

Chattel slavery and prison slavery, in Slate