Throughout Abron Arrington’s decades-long incarceration in Colorado, he often found himself in solitary confinement—not because he was causing trouble, but simply because he refused to work. He didn’t see the point given he was paid 13 cents an hour and figured his time could be better spent learning physics.

Before Arrington was incarcerated in 1989, he was studying to get his aircraft mechanic license. But within weeks of returning home from the U.S. Air Force, at 22 years old, he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In 2019, he received clemency from Governor Jared Polis and was released after three decades behind bars.

“I was actually 30 years a slave,” Arrington, who is Black, told a crowd of people gathered in one of Colorado’s oldest Black churches on Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. “So, this is deeply personal to me.”

As part of an event celebrating Juneteenth, Arrington sat on a panel to discuss prison labor, which panelists referred to as the last frontier of slavery in the United States. While the 13th Amendment of 1865 formally abolished chattel slavery, it legally remained as a punishment for crime.

Michael Gibson-Light, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver and author of the book “OrangeCollar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison,” said during the panel that “slavery was not abolished” with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, “it just changed. It evolved, it transformed.” 

“Laws popped up that made it easier and easier for criminal legal institutions to continue to literally capture and extract the labor of the very same people whose labor was extracted under chattel slavery,” he added. “But now, the justifications were different. They had to do with law-breaking. They had to do with vagrancy. They had to do, eventually, with drug use.”

In 2018, after years of community organizing, Colorado sparked a national movement when voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment A, a ballot measure that deleted half a sentence from the state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Colorado was the first state to do so since the signing of the 13th Amendment. Since Colorado removed its language, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Alabama, and Tennessee have followed suit with similar constitutional amendments. Organizers in around a dozen more states are now pushing to get similar ballot measures in front of voters during the 2024 elections. 

“This is a fast-moving train,” said Kamau Allen, the lead Colorado organizer and the co-founder of the Abolish Slavery National Network.

But in some ways, Colorado’s Amendment A only abolished prison slavery on paper. That’s because the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) has continued to punish those who refuse to work. Since 2018, there have been at least 727 documented instances where an incarcerated person was disciplined for failing to work, according to a 9News investigation this past summer, with punishment ranging from changes in housing to loss of privileges and delayed parole.

Now, some of the same organizers who crafted Amendment A are hoping to strengthen the state’s anti-slavery law through litigation. A lawsuit filed against Polis and his Department of Corrections in state court last year contends that compulsory labor in prison under threat of punishment and coercion violates the amendment approved in 2018. The plaintiffs, two incarcerated men who say they were punished for refusing work assignments that increased the risk to their health during the pandemic, are seeking a permanent injunction requiring Colorado prisons to “cease requiring compulsory labor” and a court order “declaring unconstitutional the statutes and regulations that mandate incarcerated people must work against their will.” 

Advocates said the lawsuit—and their organizing efforts outside the court—are focused on banning forced labor, not whether incarcerated people have opportunities and incentives to work behind bars. They say they are not trying to get rid of prison work programs. 

“That’s never been the intent,” said Kym Ray, a community organizer with Together Colorado who helped draft Amendment A. “People do want to work, they want the opportunity to earn money.”

“The intent is to give people the choice,” she added.

Today, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion each year in goods and commodities, and over $9 billion in services for the maintenance of the very prisons that confine them—all while being paid pennies an hour or nothing at all, according to research conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. Their labor enables mass incarceration by offsetting the cost of the country’s ballooning prison system, which has grown by 500 percent over the last 50 years.

State and local governments rely heavily on incarcerated workers for various needs: highway and road work; cleaning governors and mayoral estates; maintenance of hiking trails; making furniture for state and government buildings, including for public universities; and even doing hospital laundry. Incarcerated workers also conduct vital public services during times of crisis, from fighting wildfires to making personal protective equipment throughout the pandemic.

“It’s a massive labor force that is completely hidden from view,” Gibson-Light told Bolts. “And that’s by design.”

In addition to off-setting costs for federal, state and local governments, approximately 4,100 companies in the U.S. have directly profited off of prison labor, a number that is likely an undercount—including large companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, IBM, Tyson Foods and Microsoft, according to a database created by the advocacy organization Worth Rises.

“A lot of people are making a lot of money off the system,” said Arrington, who has worked for the reentry nonprofit, Second Chance Center, since his release. “It is no different than it was 200 years ago.” 

Nationally, the minimum wage for incarcerated workers is anywhere from $0 to 35 cents an hour, according to an ACLU report. Some jobs can pay more than a dollar an hour, but those jobs are rare. The pay for people incarcerated in Colorado prisons ranges from 33 cents to more than $2 an hour for some jobs. At least nine states—Maine, Nevada, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida—pay incarcerated people nothing for almost all prison jobs. 

Gibson-Light says better wages alone don’t address the main problem with prison slavery: forced labor under threat of punishment.

“Had, in the 1800s, Abe Lincoln said, ‘Everyone who was enslaved in the Confederate States shall now be given three cents a day,’ the abolitionists of the time would not have been satisfied,” he said. “There’s a reason it’s the Emancipation Proclamation, not the compensation proclamation. It’s not a question about wages. The question is about freedom.”

Valerie Collins, an attorney with Towards Justice, the nonprofit worker’s rights law firm that is representing the incarcerated workers who sued in Colorado, told the crowd at the Juneteenth event that’s precisely why their case doesn’t make arguments about wages.

“In a lot of ways, that kind of muddies the water,” Collins said. “We did not bring wage claims …to keep the focus on the forced nature of the work itself, in the coercion that is used to extract that labor.”

That strategy differs from the one advocates took in 2020, when four incarcerated people filed a lawsuit against the state contending that the 10 cents an hour they were making amounted to “slave wages.” The men asked for minimum wage and to be considered state employees and receive worker benefits such as sick leave and medical benefits, but a state judge dismissed their claims.

The current lawsuit was filed on behalf of Harold Mortis and Richard Lilgerose, who are both incarcerated at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City. It alleges that the men were disciplined for refusing to work in the prison’s kitchen during the COVID-19 pandemic due to existing physical and mental health conditions. ​​A correctional officer threatened that Mortis would be removed from his incentive living program if he didn’t work in the kitchen, according to the lawsuit. When he refused, they removed two days of his earned time—extending his time in prison. Similarly, Lilgerose lost four days of earned time and was threatened with losing more privileges such as recreation time and visitation for refusing to work.

Colorado Department of Corrections policies state, “All eligible offenders are required to work unless assigned to an approved education or training program.” Consequences for refusing to work can include “restricted privileges, loss of other privileges, delayed parole hearing date, and not being eligible for earned time”—all the things incarcerated people use to “better or maintain your body and your mind,” Gibson-Light said. Attorneys for the state of Colorado have argued that they are “incentivizing work” and not forcing it. 

“Many programs provide certified classroom education, apprenticeships, and certificates as well as on-the-job training and experience in a variety of in-demand industries,” a CDOC spokesperson said in a written statement to Bolts. “In addition to technical skills, our programs also teach critical soft skills that help prepare inmates to interact professionally with others in a work setting. These skills help contribute to the successful rehabilitation of inmates.”

State prison systems typically justify forcing people to labor for little to no money under the threat of punishment by claiming the work is rehabilitative. But often, the jobs on the inside don’t translate to opportunities on the outside. 

“​​We’re talking about full internal labor markets with lots of different jobs: stamping license plates, making street signs, cleaning trails, raking rocks, building prison walls, operating call centers, repairing and maintaining vehicles, janitorial work, and anything and everything in between,” Gibson-Light said. “On the surface, it sounds like ‘Oh, there’s so many opportunities.’ (But) they do not align with the realities of the labor market,” he added. “You can be a barber and make good money, but you get out and you can’t get a barber license if you have a record.”

Groups in Colorado first organized and got a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2016, but it failed by a slim margin, with 50.4 percent of voters choosing to leave the language alone. 

“When we woke up to Donald Trump being president, we also woke up and found out that Colorado voted to keep slavery,” Allen recalled.

In 2018, a coalition of organizations tried again, this time putting a bill in front of lawmakers to get it on the ballot. The bill passed unanimously. Then, in preparation for the question going in front of voters, organizers went door to door and held film screenings in churches across the state showing the 2016 documentary “13th” by Ava DuVernay, which explores the historical connection between slavery and mass incarceration.

The 2018 amendment passed overwhelmingly, with 65 percent of voters approving it. Ray, who worked on both amendment campaigns, says the vote, while decisive, still points to a large number of Coloradans willing to tolerate a form of slavery. “Obviously, that goes to show (that) we’ve got some more work to do,” Ray said. “We haven’t all arrived.”

After they won, the calls started to flood in from organizers across the country looking to make the same change in their own states. 

Like in Colorado, the push has been an uphill battle for other states. After failing to get lawmakers to put the issue on the ballot in 2021, organizers in Louisiana tried again in 2022 and got a bill through both legislative chambers, setting up a fall referendum. But it ultimately failed.

“People were like, ‘No, slavery was abolished in 1865!’ Meanwhile, I’m over here pickin’ cotton,” said Curtis Davis, the executive director for Decarcerate Louisiana who advocated for the measure by talking about his own experiences while he was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Davis says he thought he had rights and tried to refuse when he was sent to pick cotton within his first week of being locked up in 1990. “The guy just pointed his shotgun at me,” he recalled. “The guy told me, ‘You gave up your rights when you got convicted.”

Later, Davis says he purposely dropped a weight on his foot so he didn’t have to work 12 hours in the scorching Louisiana sun. As punishment, he recalls being sent to solitary confinement and was written up for “damaging state property.” He says removing the slavery exception is about, “Treating people as people, not property.”

Some of the measure’s champions, including the ACLU of Louisiana and Representative Edmond Jordan, a Baton Rouge Democrat who sponsored the amendment, eventually pulled their support during the 2022 campaign. They said the version that had made it before Louisiana voters was too ambiguous after legislative dealmaking diluted the language. Voters at the ballot box were asked, “Do you support an amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude except as it applies to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice?” 

In the face of that confusion, the amendment failed by a large margin, 61 to 39 percent.

During the 2023 legislative session, a bill to put the amendment on the ballot again this year passed the House but died in the Senate. “We are just keeping on going,” Davis said to Bolts. “We are like that little energizer bunny.”

Even if voters in more states pass constitutional amendments that end the exception for prison slavery, Gibson-Light says that elected leaders and officials across all levels of government have an incentive to oppose meaningful changes to prison labor. 

“If (incarcerated workers) were regarded and protected and compensated like real workers, which they are, the state would go bankrupt,” he added. “And I think that’s an important part of the underlying story.”

In October 2022, a state district judge hearing the lawsuit over forced labor in Colorado prisons ruled that the threat of isolation or physical punishment could be deemed unconstitutional, but also concluded that CDOC’s practice of taking away privileges such as good time may be allowable, according to 9News. The lawsuit is still pending.

Advocates who pushed to end the slavery exception say they are looking for other ways to improve prison work conditions that go beyond giving incarcerated people the choice of whether to work at all. Ray with Together Colorado says she wants better access to work programs that have connections to employers on the outside; better wages to help incarcerated people support themselves and their families; banning the use of solitary confinement, which has been used to punish people for refusing to work; and giving incarcerated people more worker protections.

“Many of them are up on roofs doing roofing with zero experience,” she added. “We are meeting folks who have lost fingers because they’re working on faulty equipment or equipment that they haven’t even been properly trained on.”

Arrington recently earned his aircraft mechanic license from the Federal Aviation Administration—the same one he was studying for when he was wrongly incarcerated. He’s moving out of state with his wife to pursue his career but plans to continue fighting to abolish prison slavery.

For now, Arrington and other organizers in Colorado have turned their attention to Polis, urging him to use his authority to force CDOC to change their policies. Organizers under the unifying title, End Slavery Colorado, asked to meet with the governor to discuss prison slavery last month, but as of this writing, they haven’t heard back. The governor’s office declined a request for comment for this story, citing the pending legislation. 

“(Polis) could end it tomorrow,” Arrington told the crowd on Juneteenth. “He could stop fighting slavery in court and actually be accountable for the thing that 65 percent of us told him we wanted to do.”

The post Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery  appeared first on Bolts.

As Houston officials prepped their annual budget two years ago, a staffer for city council member Abbie Kamin was taken aback while examining a contract the city was on the verge of approving. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had submitted a $4.2 million bid for a contract to repair tire treading on city trucks, a price some $750,000 below the competing bid. Kamin says her staffer broke down just how exactly TDCJ could float such a low price: with unpaid labor from incarcerated people forced to work inside a prison that also happened to be named after a slaveholder. 

Kamin, who was then in her first year in office, was alarmed enough to pull in another freshman council member, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz. The two met with TDCJ representatives to learn more about work programs inside Texas’ sprawling prison system before deciding on the contract. Kamin says the conversation inflamed rather than eased their concerns. She was appalled after realizing that Texas prisoners can face harsh punishment for refusing work assignments and that, along with being unpaid, many of them live and labor inside facilities without air conditioning in a state that regularly experiences triple-digit heat.

After their meeting, the council members quietly convinced Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to post a new request for bids for tire retreading, this time with added language requiring worker compensation in line with industry standards. The state’s prison system didn’t even reapply and the contract went to a private company, albeit at a higher price. 

“We were not comfortable with these practices,” Kamin told Bolts. “Bottom line, the conditions are awful, the practice is terrible, and we’re one of only a handful of states left that even continue this practice. It’s just flat out wrong.”

Texas is one of seven states, all in the South, that force people in prison to work but pay them nothing for almost all jobs. (The others are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.) Most other states only pay out pennies compared to what that labor would cost on the outside, according to a report published this week by the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union that catalogs prison work practices and profits across the country. 

The report estimates that around 800,000 people confined to U.S. prisons perform labor during incarceration, and that most say they are forced to work or else face additional punishment, such as solitary confinement or loss of family visits. Citing prison records, court documents and surveys with incarcerated workers, the report found that even prisoners who receive some pay for their work still mostly cannot afford basic necessities like soap thanks to exorbitant commissary prices and court costs, restitution and even “room and board” fees that garnish their meager wages. 

Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher for the ACLU and lead author of the new report, says that incarcerated labor is inherently exploitative and dangerous, with people not only forced and coerced into prison jobs but also largely excluded from workplace safety protections. 

“Most of this labor is happening in a sort of black box where there’s no outside oversight, and basic protections for safety and training simply don’t apply,” Turner told Bolts, pointing to instances of people maimed or killed on the job—incarcerated workers in North Carolina who received only diaper rash cream after suffering chemical burns, a kitchen worker in a Georgia prison who had his leg amputated due to improper medical care for a wound he suffered from slipping and falling at work, a prison sawmill operator in Colorado who was nearly decapitated after a supervisor ordered her to dislodge a piece of wood blocking a conveyor belt. According to written surveys that Turner and other researchers conducted for the report, most prisoners cite hazardous job conditions and little to no formal training, even when tasked with work involving heavy machinery. 

“People are not given personal protective equipment and other types of standard safety equipment, like machine-guarding mechanisms when you’re dealing with sharp objects,” Turner said. “It’s very different from workplaces outside of prisons, because on the outside, people supervising you usually have some experience, they’re more likely to give proper job training on dangerous equipment or have some kind of oversight. That’s just not the case in prison.”

The beneficiaries of all this coerced and dangerous labor are primarily state governments. Prisons are propped up by incarcerated people forced to help operate and maintain their own systems of confinement—the most common prison jobs, according to Turner’s report, range from laundry and grounds maintenance to kitchen and building repairs. 

And as the Houston example indicates, prison systems also rake in profits by monetizing the products and work produced by the people they detain. 

Texas Corrections Industries (TCI), a division of the state prison agency, sold nearly $77 million prisoner-made goods and services in 2019 to a broad range of government agencies as well as “public schools, public and private institutions of higher education, public hospitals and political subdivisions.” According to the new report, commodities and services sold outside prisons make up a significant share of prison labor and have risen in tandem with mass incarceration, from around $650 million in sales in the early 20th century to more than $2 billion in 2021.

And other government agencies can and often do benefit from this captive labor pool to secure far cheaper contracts than they otherwise could. Data obtained from TCI show an array of municipalities, counties, local school districts, universities and medical systems across the state buying everything from cheap chairs and desks and other office equipment to aprons, lab coats, and even ornamental plaques for awards produced with forced and unpaid prison labor. 

TCI also publishes the prison iteration of an IKEA catalog to advertise its goods and services, and it operates showrooms in south Austin and Huntsville, about an hour’s drive north of Houston where the state prison system is headquartered. Lawmakers in Texas, who are permitted to benefit from low-cost prison-made goods, have in the past purchased furniture and other trinkets adorned with the state seal and flag to adorn their homes or gift to top campaign donors. 

“What really made an impression was to see how just the vast majority of work performed by people who are incarcerated is for the benefit of the prisons and state and local governments,” Turner said. “I think sometimes there’s a real misunderstanding that it’s largely for the benefit of private corporations.”

Prison agencies justify their reliance on forced and unpaid, or underpaid, labor by claiming they’re providing benefits beyond money, like keeping people busy in lockup or teaching them job skills to help them succeed after release. The cover of TCI’s products and services catalog declares, “Rehabilitation through real world job skills and training.” TDCJ responded to the recent report and claims that unpaid prison labor is inherently exploitative with a statement saying, “While inmates are not paid, they can acquire marketable job skills which could lead to meaningful employment upon their release.” However most incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated workers, and advocates for people in prison vehemently dispute such claims. 

“They force you to work, you’re guaranteed to have a shitty job and it’s guaranteed to be work that is tortuous,” David Johnson, an activist and organizer in Texas who did time in the state’s prisons, including stints where he was forced to work on a prison farm, told Bolts. “You are guaranteed to have a job that comes with no privileges and all downside, you are forced to work in the fields in the sweltering heat and deep cold. …It is tortuous, physically and emotionally and psychologically.” 

Low to non-existent wages for imprisoned workers also mean that their loved ones on the outside, who may already be struggling because of their incarceration and loss of earnings, must bear the full weight of supporting their survival in prison. The families of incarcerated people shell out billions every year on exorbitant commissary costs and phone calls, often forced into debt just to keep in contact with a family member or help them with basic necessities not provided by the prison system. 

“Incarceration puts an incredible monetary strain on family members,” said Savannah Eldrige, who has family inside Texas prisons and advocates for better conditions and treatment for incarcerated people. “The experience of supporting a loved one behind bars can be financially overwhelming because of all the expenses they have inside, from hygiene to health care, and the fact that they are no longer wage earners—I mean, where’s the money gonna come from? It’s gonna come from family.” 

Eldridge and Johnson are part of a growing national movement that seeks to abolish forced labor and servitude behind bars. They stress that much of the country’s modern prison archipeligo evolved from slavery, with convict-leasing and prison farms and laws that criminalized newly emancipated people replacing slave plantations after the Civil War. Johnson, who is Black, says he often thought of that history when he was forced to work the fields while incarcerated.

“It was always clear that there was a parallel between working in those fields and slavery,” Johnson said. “We had open conversations out there about how those conditions, how those armed men on horses guarding us evoked that history.” 

Johnson and Elridge are part of Abolish Slavery National Network, a coalition pushing for state and federal legislation to close a loophole in the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which was passed during Reconstruction and banned slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

Advocates in many states are pushing for anti-slavery language in their state constitutions. Voters in Nebraska, Utah and Colorado have all passed anti-slavery amendments in recent years, and similar measures will go to voters this year in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont. According to the coalition, there are also active efforts in Florida and South Carolina. Citing the new ban on involuntary servitude, people incarcerated in Colorado have sued the state seeking better wages and treatment and alleging the state is ignoring the will of voters by continuing to coerce prison work under the threat of punishment. 

Texas lawmakers have largely ignored the issue, in keeping with how they’ve ignored other crises inside state lockups. But discussions of prisoner pay and forced labor have started to circulate inside the state capitol. The state House held a hearing in 2019 on a bill to pay people incarcerated in Texas prisons $1 a day for their work. “The penal system today is slavery,” Alma Allen, a state representative from Houston, said during the hearing. “It is a legal way to enslave people.” The committee never voted on the bill. Legislative proposals to pay incarcerated people somewhat higher wages has stalled in other states like New York, too.

Even with the lack of movement on the state level in Texas, Kamin, the Houston council member, says that local government officials have a role to play in ending exploitative prison labor. She says the awareness of a city staffer and their willingness to research what looked like a routine contract for truck repairs became a wakeup call about local government’s role in a system that many equate to modern day slave labor. “This could have totally flown under the radar,” Kamin told Bolts.

Kamin says her office got a flood of messages from incarcerated people after Houston turned away from TDCJ’s bid. “I cannot tell you the number of letters that I received from inmates thanking us for the stand we took,” she said. “So many people reached out to say how they feel about the work programs in prison and how bad they are. It was mostly just a plea for help.”

The post “They Force You to Work” appeared first on Bolts.