Black inmates line the fields of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Since 1880, the 8,000-acre slave plantation turned prison has housed thousands of inmates. Most of them now, serving life sentences. All of them subject to forcible employment.
Prisoners at Angola (named after the area in Africa where its original slave inhabitants came from) that are cleared by the prisons physician can be forced to work with punishment used as incentive to comply.
Prisoners can make as little as 2 cents an hour for their work in the fields, the kitchen, or the manufacturing warehouses but legally they do not have to be compensated.
Angola is just one instance of forced prison labor in the United States made possible by the thirteenth amendment of the US Constitution.
The thirteenth amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Basically, if you have been convicted of a crime the United States can subject you to “slavery” or “involuntary servitude”, which is exactly what the US government is doing.
In 1979, Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE). It provided private companies with incentives to contract prison labor.
According to the National Correctional Industries Association, PIE is “designed to place inmates in a realistic work environment, pay them the prevailing local wage for similar work, and enable them to acquire marketable skills to increase their potential for successful rehabilitation and meaningful employment on release.”
However, it has been shown statistically that that is not what is happening. States like Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas don’t pay their inmates at all. Prisoners around the country are subject to incredibly low wages, a dangerous environment and some are sent to solitary confinement if they refuse to work.
Along with the Congress backed PIE, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has played a central role in the United States prison system expansions.
ALEC’s website states them as, “a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives that drafts and shares model state-level legislation for distribution among state governments in the United States.”
Meaning that private corporations invest money into conservative state legislators to draft state level legislation and introduce said legislation to the courts.
ALEC has backed bills in favor of anti-immigration, voter ID, Stand Your Ground, Shoot to Kill laws, anti-greenhouse gas initiatives and the infamous “three strike” rule.
By allowing private corporations to invest into conservative legislators we are essentially allowing these corporations to make laws that only suit them and their interest.
For years’ members of ALEC were even sitting in on officials voting. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), was the chair of the crime task force within ALEC but had to step down after being caught “voting on the SB 1070 legislation in Arizona that would have put—that was designed to put more immigrants in detention facilities and jails for immigrants…”, says the Center for Media and Democracy.
With the help of the PIE and ALEC the private prison system expanded from only five private prisons in 1990 with a population of 2,000 inmates to a hundred private prisons with 62,000 inmates by the year 2000.
How does PIE, ALEC, private prisons, and inmate labor all have in common.
Well just about everything. By Congress creating PIE and ALEC being made up of state legislators and private corporations. The inmate work program became a gold mine that private corporations could profit off of as well as the private prison industry.
Inmate are the most efficient human workers an industry could ever want. They are always one the premises. They aren’t able to call in sick. Inmates can’t go anywhere on holidays or even take a day off. They are paid significantly less than their free citizen counterparts and have less overhead to deal with. Prisoners don’t need insurance and many work more than eight hours a day.
The list of private corporations under ALEC is vast. Some members of the Corporate Board are AT&T, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Companies Public Sector, Kraft Foods Inc. and State Farm Insurance Co. Members involved for profit range from 1 800 contacts to American Express, with things like Bank of America, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart in between.
Inmates make many different things for companies. Like in Angola the prisoners tend to the fields of cotton on compound, others work in the electrical manufacturing warehouse. In other prisons inmates are outsourced to factories. They make shoes, bedding, extension cords, chairs, desks, batteries, canoes, surge protectors, even firearm targets. The company Unicor hires inmates to be call representatives, and advertises it as, “the best kept secret in outsourcing.”