37 STATES ALLOW CORPORATIONS TO GET RICH OFF PRISON LABOR [View all]

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One out of every 100 American adults is behind bars. That’s more than 2.4 million people who have been taken out of the workforce and had their rights legally stripped away. That’s a lot of potential exploitable workers for a corporation to use.

The United States has a long history of forcing its prison population to work as part of their punishment, although by no means is it the only country to do so. The 13th Amendment, passed in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude for everyone but prisoners. In 1871, Virginia declared prisoners “slaves of the state.” In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners couldn’t form unions or make work demands [source]. This all led up to the 1980s and 90s where under both a republican president and a democrat, the prison population skyrocketed. Locking up people for lengthy minimum sentences is truly one of the last remaining bipartisan agreements.

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But with any easily disenfranchised group (and prisoners might be the most disenfranchised in the country, almost by definition), the opportunity for exploitation and abuse is extremely high. The probability of abuse becomes even higher for a group of people typically perceived as “deserving” of it. Prisoners fit that bill nicely.


Given the substantial profits that could be made by moving your labor away from legally protected workers and over to legally unprotected prisoners, it was only a matter of time before states and corporations got busy hashing out the exact business details:

At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more.

All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month. [source]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

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