Prison Labor In The United States

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As quoted earlier, today's inmates in private, state or federal prisons have been branded the term, “modern-day slaves” of the 21st century. The Thirteenth Amendment has created a way for prisoners to perform mandatory essentially unpaid hard labor than there were in 1830, 35 years before American slavery was abolished. Having 25% of the world’s prison population, more than 80% of inmates are locked up because of victimless, non-violent crimes, with most of them being drug related (Hartney, 2011, p. 5). Prison labor helps produce goods and services for almost every large-scale business in America. Over the last years, prison labor has significantly expanded in scope and reach. Locked up workers, laboring within convict leasing or in-house operations …show more content…
Their pay is often zero to 50 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours per day. Most inmates in privately-run prisons receive about 17 cents per hour while those in “high skilled positions” receive about 50 cents per hour for the six hours (Vicky, 2016, web). Compared to federal prisons where inmates are paid better, once again for-profit prisons fade out. Organizations such as McDonald's, among the world’s most successful fast-food franchise purchases prison manufactured goods such as uniforms for their employees while those that sew this uniforms earn less than those who wear them. Wal-Mart, another successful enterprise, company policy is against prison or forced labor, however, they continue to buy produce from third party prison labor factories. Previously, we heard the cases of the two women prisoners that were placed in solitary after telling journalists that they had been hired to replace “Made in Honduras” cloth tags with “Made in USA” cloth tags. Also, there has been cases of companies rushing to secure “cheap labor” that is almost guaranteed in the past like AT&T which laid off thousands of their telephone operators for inmate phone operators as a method to cut down on cost (Vicky, 2016,

Prison Labor In The United States

The United States has a long history of using prison labor. Some people think prison work programs help inmates prepare for life outside of prison, but others feel like prison labor is modern day slavery. Prisons in America earn millions of dollars from the sale of goods produced by inmates, but prisoners are paid very little for their work. This project will give insight into the use of prison labor in the United States, Specifically at Louisiana State penitentiary at and Gola. The project will…

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Words 1055 - Pages 5