Government

American Prisoners Are Striking To End Their Own Enslavement And It’s Time To Pay Attention

No punishment justifies the government forcing people to work without pay.

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I’ll never forget the first time I ever toured a jail. There were many things that bothered me about it, but perhaps the most disturbing was when the tour guide, a corrections officer, told our group that it should not bother us that inmates get paid less than a dollar per hour for their labor around the jail because the jail provides them with all the necessities of life. They aren’t paying rent, she noted with a chuckle.

I almost fell over. We have a word for forcing people to work without pay — enslavement — and nothing a person could do in their life justifies enslaving them. This idea that mass incarceration is a seamless extension of Jim Crow and slavery isn’t a new one, but I think the action of locking people up tends to be more front-of-mind than the secondary effect, that the government, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, forces a population of largely black and brown people to work for the institution that incarcerates them (and sometimes for contracted for-profit corporations) essentially without pay.

Ending prison slavery is the second of 10 demands of the nationwide prison strike that started yesterday and will continue through September 10, on the anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. Prisoners around the country are stopping work, going on hunger strike, and using what very little power they have to protest deplorable conditions around the country.

In addition to being morally reprehensible, this has a massive effect on any rehabilitative function that prison might claim to have. The corrections officer that told my group that, of course, inmates don’t have to pay rent, ignored the fact that many people in prison are contributors, if not the sole providers, in their families. While they are incarcerated, their inability to earn any real wages for the work that they do means their families may face homelessness. Even if their family is able to get by without them, anything extra often goes to their incarcerated family member’s books, sucking even more wealth from the family and the community the person came from. They are released months or years later with not a cent to their name. Many end up in homeless shelters and struggled to find jobs. Of course they do! We literally suck every last resource — mental, emotional, and financial — out of the people we incarcerate before we give them their “liberty.”

This form of modern enslavement even extends to people in jail, who mostly are incarcerated pre-trial because they cannot afford to pay bail. They have yet to be convicted of a crime, but they are still placed in a violent hellhole without natural light or sufficient exercise for months at a time waiting for their day in court, not because of what they have been convicted of but because they are poor. If they had a job, it’s unlikely to be waiting for them once they get out if they spent any time at all in jail. Anything they want to make their time in jail a smidgen less horrific — whether it’s slightly upgraded underwear or socks, or deodorant, or even just a phone call to the outside world — costs money. Yet the government gets away with forcing them to work for literal pennies.

Human beings deserve better, and anyone who works on behalf of “justice” should demand it.

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Shane Ferro is a law student and a former professional blogger. She is (obviously) a bleeding-heart public interest kid.

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