Prison labor is a central part of the United States prison system as it exists today. An exploration of the issue brings to light the perverse economic incentives that propel the carceral complex. Private corporations are incentivized to lobby for policies that maximize prison populations in order to sustain a business model that is only profitable because they can exploit artificially deflated labor costs. Over 4,100 corporations profit from mass incarceration in the United States. These corporations include private prisons, which hold valuable government contracts featuring minimum bed guarantees and a fixed price per-prisoner, private companies that stock overpriced commissaries and provide telephone services, and private companies using prison labor in their supply chains.
Cheap prison labor is a powerful labor market incentive against criminal justice reform. The built-in, low-cost workforce benefits the prison industry, which relies on undercompensated labor to keep operating costs low and sell cheap goods to government agencies and private companies. Companies that source prison-produced goods, or themselves subcontract labor from prisons, also benefit from low labor costs.
This post follows on from our post exploring the use of prison labor during the Covid-19 pandemic. It details the current forms that prison labor can take and, using what little public data is available, highlights some of the companies using prison labor in the United States.
Overview of Current Forms of Prison Labor in the United States
Today, there are three main kinds of prison labor: in-house work, the production of goods for sale, and work release programs. However, similar forms of exploitation can also be found in rehabilitation programs and immigration detention centers.
In-house prison labor
In-house work is the most common and involves work within correctional facilities, including assignments in food service, cleaning, laundry, groundskeeping, maintenance, and custodial services.
Prison industries for production of goods for external sale
Around 63,000 inmates produce goods for external sale. Some of these goods are destined for government agencies, and some for the private market. Prison industries jobs range from farm work and manufacturing to call center and distribution services. Every state, except for Alaska, has a state-governed prison industries initiative, and the federal government runs a separate program, Federal Prison Industries (trading as UNICOR).
Work release
States also operate work release programs, which provide inmate labor to private companies at offsite locations. Inmates eligible for these programs are usually designated as minimum-risk offenders who are nearing the end of their sentence and require program support to transition them back into the community. Many inmates in work release programs work at poultry plants and other agricultural facilities under hazardous conditions. In Oklahoma and Mississippi, this kind of work is not restricted to inmates. Oklahoma uses defendants sent to rehabilitation programs to process chickens at a private facility for no pay, a practice that the ACLU of Oklahoma is challenging in a class-action. Mississippi has ‘restitution programs’ where it sends people to work off debts owed to the state by acting as a temp agency for a number of industries.
Immigrants in detention
Like pre-trial defendants, civil detainees cannot be forced to work under the Thirteenth Amendment loophole allowing slavery “as a punishment for crime,” as they have not been convicted of a crime. However, federal immigration detention centers rely on the labor of civil immigrant detainees to lower their operating costs. The large prison corporations running the centers – like CoreCivic and GEO Group – are currently facing lawsuits, alleging that they employ deprivation schemes, where detained immigrants are forced to choose between living without basic necessities or working for sub-minimum wages, and then are threatened with punishment for refusing to work.
Public Information on Prison Labor Supply Chains
Due to the lack of transparency in corporate supply chains and the inaccessibility of state revenue data, it is generally difficult to trace the goods and services produced by prison labor.
The exception to this are goods produced through the federal Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), for which data on prison labor projects is publicly available. While the Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935 prohibited the sale of inmate-produced goods in interstate or foreign commerce, private corporations can establish joint ventures with corrections agencies to produce goods certified under PIECP, which are exempt from these restrictions.
PIECP certification requires that state correctional agencies meet certain criteria -- including that inmate laborers receive local “prevailing wages” -- but PIECP programs nationwide ignore or openly violate these requirements. For example, Florida’s Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE) has devised hundreds of hours of “training programs,” in which workers are paid depressed wages. And even when workers are paid the prevailing wage, PIECP allows prison industry programs to deduct up to 80% of inmates’ total earnings for taxes, room and board, and restitution.
Findings
National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), PIECP’s technical assistance provider, publishes quarterly statistical reports about the program. We reviewed NCIA reports that list every PIECP private sector project from the fourth quarter of 2019 in which incarcerated workers participated. During this period, PIECP projects employed 5,070 inmates operating out of 219 work centers nationally.
The majority of projects from 2019 took the form of state correctional industries selling goods. For example, Georgia Correctional Industries employed 236 inmates in seven projects producing goods including signage and furniture, as well as providing moving services. And in Florida, PRIDE employed 390 inmates in 10 projects to produce dental products, eyeglasses, cleaning supplies, and food products.
While some correctional industries can only sell to state-affiliated organizations, including universities, others, like the Minnesota Department of Corrections’ MINNCOR, sell products to private companies through very lucrative contracts. In 2018, MINNCOR allegedly had a contract with Anagram, the largest balloon manufacturer in the US, worth nearly $9 million. The next year, 111 inmates continued to produce “decorated party balloons” for MINNCOR, according to NCIA’s database. Large contracts such as this, coupled with correctional industries wages of between $0.50 and $2.00 per hour, allowed MINNCOR to make a profit of over $13 million in 2019.
MINNCOR’s partnership with Anagram demonstrates another important fact about PIECP, and prison labor supply chains more broadly. Although PIECP certification has more stringent reporting and transparency requirements, the NCIA’s quarterly reports still only list project names rather than corporate partners. These project names often contain veiled or completely obscured references to their corporate partners, such as writing “MINNCOR” rather than explicitly naming Anagram.
Major corporations also distance themselves from being implicated in prison labor by engaging in subcontracts with companies who then contract with the prison itself. For example, the NCIA database tells us that Plastech, a Minnesota-based plastics company, leased 26 inmate workers from Minnesota prisons in 2019. What the database doesn’t tell us is that Plastech is a major supplier for Fujitsu, a leading global information and communication technology company. By operating through subcontractors, many corporations using prison labor can shield themselves from identification, escaping public scrutiny while reaping the economic savings offered by cheap prison labor.
In the table below, we’ve compiled a list of all of the corporate partners we could identify from NCIA’s 2019 fourth quarter report. Incarcerated workers helped produce goods in a wide range of industries, from wire harnesses made by SemahTronix, Kauffman Engineering, Electrex Inc., and Onshore Resources, to agricultural products made by Dickinson Frozen Foods, Landus Cooperative, Great Plains Manufacturing, and Moly Manufacturing, to clothing made by The Graphic Edge, Impact Design, Jelt, Prison Blues, Craig Industries, and Badlands Quilting.
Even though PIECP projects represent only a small fraction of the prison labor industry, the sheer variety of companies engaged in PIECP ventures hints at the pervasive corporate presence lurking in the shadows of mass incarceration. But by bringing at least some of the corporations who profit from cheap prison labor into the public eye, we hope to encourage reforms to the prison labor system to protect the rights of inmates and remove some of the perverse incentives this cheap labor supply currently creates.
The table above shows PICEP’s corporate partners identified from NCIA’s 2019 fourth quarter report. These companies are only a fraction of the many private companies relying on the labor of people in US prisons.
Cindy Wu and Prue Brady are Legal Interns at Corporate Accountability Lab.
Read Part I of this blog series here.
