With logistics for building the president-elect’s wall looking as murky as they ever have, plan after plan is being floated for how it could possibly be funded and completed. Trump’s latest is that we’ll fund it and Mexico will reimburse us for the cost — a plan that essentially has the same internal logic as putting a line of duct tape down the middle of your dorm room and then asking your roommate to pay you back for the tape and all the time you spent sticking it to the floor. But one of the more plausible plans that could be used to cut down on work costs was proposed by a sheriff from Massachusetts: Simply put, we should use prison labor from inmates around the country to build the great Mexican border wall.
This is a plan that politicians on both sides of the aisle could probably get behind, because few politicians of any stripe bother to care about prisoner welfare, particularly when lower infrastructure costs are at stake. Penal labor is a tradition in this country — going back almost to the dawn of our country, prisoners have been enlisted to make products from military gear to campus furniture to Victoria’s Secret lingerie and perform jobs like maintaining roads, providing janitorial services at government buildings and picking crops. It is one of the last acceptable forms of slave labor in our country, enshrined in law by the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
On average across the U.S., a prison laborer earns less than a dollar an hour because when they are doing non-industry work, the minimum wage does not apply to them. This average, 93 cents an hour, includes states such as Texas, Georgia and Arkansas, who don’t pay their inmate laborers at all. And out of that 93 cents an hour, a significant part doesn’t go to the inmate. In South Carolina, like in most other states, inmates’ salaries are chipped into for rent at the prison, taxes, victim’s compensation and any outside fees they may have to pay — like child support or court fees. At the end of the day, even prisoners who don’t live in Texas, Georgia and Arkansas can be left with little to nothing to show for a hard day’s work.
But what does that matter? It’s not like they’re out in the rat race with the rest of us, struggling to stay ahead of rent and grocery costs. They’re getting job training, and what do they have to spend money on anyway?
The truth is that, while working in prison does probably help reduce recidivism by teaching job skills that can be used after an inmate is released, that benefit is equally served in a system where prisoners are adequately compensated for their work. Not to mention that inmates can and do have to use money even behind bars — for things like personal hygiene products, telephone calls and food to supplement notoriously poor and sometimes inadequate prison fare — and they certainly have to use money after they get out. Unfortunately, with a 93-cent average hourly wage, most of which goes everywhere but their pockets, many prisoners may find themselves out on the street at the end of their sentence with not a dollar to their name, and all that job training fails to fill their immediate needs, putting them in a place that isn’t much different from inmates who don’t get that job training.
To some minds, however, keeping our roads maintained and building our walls is the least they can do to pay off their debt to society. When you say “slavery” in America, many people jump immediately to the injustices in our country’s history: That white America considered it acceptable to own black people is far enough away from us to seem aberrant. Even people who don’t acknowledge the lingering aftereffects of that practice can clearly see that profiting off the forced labor of people who were systematically abused and held as a permanent lower class of society was wrong. But we’re too close to the issue now — penal labor has been too normal for too long — to see that using workers who have no choice in the matter to perform menial jobs in conditions that are often hazardous or unhealthy with little compensation is wrong as well.
That injustice, as with every injustice suffered by prisoners in this country, is compounded by the fact that our prison population is mostly composed of people of color and those suffering from mental illness. Building our country’s infrastructure on the backs of inmates helps to keep groups of already marginalized people down for good — keeping them and their families in dire financial straits as a cost-cutting measure on anything, whether it’s mending potholes or building a thousand feet of unnecessary wall on the Mexican border, is cruel and greedy. And, aside from that, it’s a situation prisoners can’t escape from on their own.
As with most things in an inmate’s life, they have to rely on the goodwill of others for change — in September, inmates across the country began striking as a call to end prison slavery, but were largely ignored by the media. A few organizations noticed the strike on Sept. 9, when it started. It lasted for at least two months, as per the latest story about it — from CNN on Oct. 31. But at the time that article was published, the strike appeared to be ongoing. And it could still be ongoing. We would have no idea, because the media at large apparently exhausted themselves telling us about it on Sept. 9 and stopped even making the passing attempt to inform the public in late October.
More than that, though, inmates must rely on the goodwill of lawmakers and the general public — and in that arena, they face the same uphill battle any prisoners’ rights movement does. Prisoners are unsympathetic characters and we’re consequently disinclined to care about their rights.
Slavery isn’t behind us yet by any stretch of the imagination, especially since we continue to use forced, unpaid labor, primarily performed by people of color who have no viable avenue to protest their exploitation. The desire to punish prisoners for their crimes has overtaken what we know is right, and the profit we make off of them is clouding our ability to see it.
We like to think of ourselves as a moral nation. If we want to make that a reality we have to end the practice of prison labor — not use it to fulfill campaign promises.