The American carceral system is more of a corporate predator than a just corrections facility. It takes advantage of humans for monetary gain and is structured around modern slavery. Ever heard the phrase history repeats itself? Well the probability of having products in your home made by slave labor is much more likely than one may think. Where is this slave labor coming from? State and federal prisons.
On Monday, the AP News published a two-year expo on a secret workforce in America: U.S. prisoners. The article discusses how prisoners across the nation are forced into agricultural labor that provides for corporations such as Walmart, Target, Costco, Whole Foods and more. The AP News found that hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from the selling of these products can be traced back to the work done by convicts that get cents-if anything at all- for their labor. What’s more is if prisoners refuse to work, they get punished-often they’ll get robbed of their parole or sent to solitary confinement. Treated as less-than-humans, prisoners often aren’t subject to any health or safety protections on the job either and they aren’t allowed to unionize.
Correctional facilities have been able to find loopholes in the law that allow authorities to sneakily push this form of modern slavery. The Marshall Project highlighted the Ashurst-Sumners Act-a 1935 federal law that prevents the shipping of prisoner-made goods within the open market-and how an exception to this law was agricultural goods. It’s important to note that agricultural labor makes up only a percentage of overall convict labor. The Marshall Project also notes that incarcerated people are subject to daily maintenance work, prison industries and convict leasing with an overall average income of 52 cents an hour.
For these food products filling up all major supermarkets, prisons will ship them through a complex web of networks to disguise where they originally came from. This reveals a vast hypocrisy amongst corporations like Target that claim in their store policies that they refused goods made from forced labor.
In Target’s very own Supply Chain and Human Rights Policies, they state, “Moreover, our vendors and their suppliers are prohibited from using forced or underage labor to produce their goods for Target in accordance with the requirements of Target’s Standards of Vendor Engagement.” Yet, Target was one the first named corporations in AP News’ findings.
Still, this whole practice is very much uncomfortably legal and this is because of a clause in the 13th Amendment which “abolished” slavery-unless it’s being used as criminal punishment. Following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation which deemed all enslaved people free, there were still confederate and white supremacist sentiments weaseling their way through federal policy. The South felt they had ‘lost’ a whole workforce due to the proclamation and the idea of slavery still existing as capital punishment left them salivating. Over time this nation has used false promises, mass incarceration, discrimination, poverty, and unjust parole systems to keep the never ending revolving door of imprisonment going.
Forced prison labor is happening across the country on both state and federal levels. If you still don’t think history repeats itself, one of the central examples of this labor network that AP News uses is at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which sits on top of an old southern plantation-on the same soil slaves picked cotton on over 150 years ago. Prisoners here are forced to work in inhumane, unsanitary, life-threatening conditions while being monitored by guards commonly circling around on horses.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Willie Ingram, a wrongfully convicted man who was released in 2021, to AP News on prisoners refusing to comply. Ingram was 73 years old when he was released and recalled 51 years of picking cotton, okra and more at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Even though forced prison labor has been around since the “end” of slavery, Congress and state governments are finally starting to recognize efforts to fight against this. Thousands of human beings held in Alabama prisons went on strike starting September 26, 2023. They were protesting against the terrible conditions they’re forced to live in, overcrowding, abuse, a drug epidemic, poor parole systems and more. Vera notes that since 2016, the Alabama Department of Corrections has been under federal investigation.
On the first national Juneteenth holiday in 2021, lawmakers marked the day by pushing for an ‘abolition amendment’ to the 13th Amendment. “At the moment that we are celebrating, if you will, the 13th Amendment and the end of slavery and its eventual announcement … we should at the same time recognize that the 13th Amendment was flawed,” said one of the lawmakers involved, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, according to the AP News. “It enabled states to arrest people for any reason, convict them and put them back into slavery.”
Correctional officers in the AP News report did note that not all jobs in the prison are forced labor and that work for convicts can be beneficial due to it giving them a sense of purpose and real world experience.
While this can definitely be true in circumstances, what I’m wondering is: In a carceral state, since we’re giving people dictatorship over other people’s lives, shouldn’t a justice system be built on equitable, non-partisan foundations instead of greed and slavery? If prisoners are providing millions of dollars to billionaire companies; if billions of dollars are getting poured into state and federal correctional facilities, why can’t any of this money go to the well being of prisoners and their loved ones left behind? Why are they still living-in many states-in cruel conditions? Why can’t prison wages be increased? Why can’t their families or children see any of the money they’re making for corporate America and government organizations? Why are they left with nothing? Why do prisons want to keep a certain class of people stuck in the system? Why aren’t these jobs available to non-incarcerated people looking for work? This is a huge human rights crisis happening right now on our own soil and I personally haven’t seen any Instagram posts or Tik Toks speaking on helping our incarcerated population-I guess it’s not trendy enough…
What people commonly seem to forget is that prisoners are people too and a great percentage of them aren’t bad. Life is different for everyone, and it isn’t right to see someone as less-than-human because they are/were incarcerated. There’s a demonic link between the “end” of slavery, mass incarceration and the open trade market that needs to be explored more. Yet none of what’s going on now is being emphasized in mainstream media. Why is that? Are we too distracted by other social justice movements? Are we too lazy to do our own research that we just follow trends? Are the head honchos of corporate America trying to keep this under wraps? Or do we just not care enough? If you’re not personally linked to someone incarcerated, it’s pretty easy to overlook or be ignorant about what happens in prison systems. This is one of the greatest domestic issues I believe our country has to fix and the best way for us as American citizens to make change is doing our homework, calling out those in charge and voting.
“Our people have already been in chains and enslaved because of money,” said Georgia Rep. Nikema Williams said to AP News after helping reintroduce the abolition amendment. “We have to make sure that we are truly moving forward and not using money as a crutch of why we’re continuing to perpetuate sins of our nation’s founding and our nation’s history.”
