Two-thirds of people in US prisons are forced to work, ACLU report finds

Two out of three of the more than 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons in America are forced to work, according to a new review of prison labor published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“In most instances, the jobs these prisoners have look similar to those of millions of people working on the outside,” writes report author and ACLU human rights researcher Jennifer Turner. “But there are two crucial differences: Incarcerated workers are under the complete control of their employers, and they have been stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse.”

The report outlines how an exception in the 13th Amendment allows for people held in confinement due to a criminal conviction to be forced to work. The report estimates that as of 2020, there were more than 790,000 incarcerated people working in the United States.

“U.S. law also explicitly excludes incarcerated workers from the most universally recognized workplace protections,” Turner writes. “Incarcerated workers are not covered by minimum wage laws or overtime protection, are not afforded the right to unionize, and are denied workplace safety guarantees. Workers are assigned hazardous work in unsafe conditions without the standard training or protective gear provided in workplaces outside prisons.”

According to the report, most incarcerated people perform maintenance work, performing upkeep in the facilities in which they are confined. In Arizona, Turner said roughly 15,000 of 18,000 incarcerated workers have maintenance jobs.

Turner says many state governments also use incarcerated workers to prepare for and respond to natural disasters and other emergencies.

“We found at least 14 states, including Arizona, employ incarcerated workers as firefighters,” Turner said. “And in some states, incarcerated workers even respond to emergencies like highway wrecks, building fires and other types of fire related emergencies.”

She said the country’s dependency on incarcerated labor is even written into many state emergency plans, using incarcerated workers to clean up after natural disasters.

“You'll have the same location where everybody else has been evacuated, and the incarcerated people remain by preparing sandbags or preparing for an oncoming hurricane or other storms,” she said.

The report found incarcerated people are also frequently used for agricultural work.

“Not just necessarily growing produce and field labor, but they also involved in ranching, meat production, meat processing and poultry processing,” Turner said, “and some of that's much more lucrative actually than producing other types of crops.”

The report cites several instances of incarcerated people experiencing workplace injuries in Arizona, including documented injuries sustained at Hickman’s Family Farms.

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Arizona is an outlier with regard to the way it structures prisoner work agreements, according to the report. Unlike most other states, Arizona utilizes its quasi-private Arizona Correctional Industries to sell labor contracts to private companies.

“What’s troubling is that the labor contracts are incredibly lucrative for the Arizona Correctional Industries,” Turner said. “We have some data in the report about the value of some of these contracts and workers end up receiving only a fraction of that of the wages that the companies are paying.”

Some incarcerated people in Arizona earn as little as 15 cents an hour, according to the report.

The ACLU report calls for incarcerated workers to be treated fundamentally the same way as workers outside of prison.

“That means we guarantee them the same standard workplace protections, and that we should raise their wages,” Turner said. “Incarcerated workers need to support themselves and their families.”

Turner says the ACLU is also calling on Congress to amend the Constitution to repeal the labor exclusion clause for incarcerated people “to ensure that the work prisoners do is truly voluntary.”

The Arizona Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for a comment on the report findings sent Wednesday morning.

Have a news tip on Arizona prisons? Reach the reporter at jjenkins@arizonarepublic.com or at 812-243-5582. Follow him on Twitter @JimmyJenkins.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: ACLU report finds 2 out of 3 people in prison in US are forced to work