Prisoners are essential workers, too

And by essential I mean forced to work in dangerous conditions through the pandemic.

Image: California City Correctional Facility, taken by Anthony Albright, Wikimedia Commons

Prisons are some of the worst Covid-hit places in America. It is not especially surprising given the fact that prisons by definition are places where people are forced to be on top of one another inside all the time.

The primary consequence of this is people are sick and dying: the Marshall Project tracker has 143,000 cases and just over 1,200 deaths from Covid in jails and prisons around the country since March.

The secondary consequence, though, is that prisons and jails have become even more horrifying places than they were before, basically cutting off access to the entire outside world and going on full lockdown for months now. At work, I just received an email letting me know that the families of our clients at Rikers can now schedule video conference visits. In person visits are still not allowed. IT’S OCTOBER. People have been cut off from in-person visits for seven months now. More than half a year later, they’ve added a weak substitute, which came with a disclaimer that demand will be higher than supply and many people won’t actually be able to get a video visit. (n.b. limited in-person visits seem to have resumed in upstate prisons, starting in August.)

A lot of prisons and jails have also cut off any and all extracurricular programs, meaning educational classes, religious groups and worship, and rehab programs. Instead of releasing people to keep them safe, the Covid solution in American prisons by and large has been completely sealing the people inside them off from the outside world. Sometimes I try to think about the loneliness and isolation that I would feel if I were as cut off from the world as most prisoners and it takes my breath away. The inhumanity of it is just staggering.

The brilliant Kiera Feldman at the L.A. Times reported this week that in California, everything has stopped in prison except the forced labor:

While much of California shut down this spring, Robbie Hall stitched masks for 12 hours a day in a sewing factory at a women’s prison in Chino. For several weeks, Hall and other women said, they churned out masks by the thousands but were forbidden from wearing them.

The incarcerated seamstresses at the California Institution for Women grew increasingly worried: The fabric they used came from the nearby men’s prison, where an outbreak ended up killing 23 inmates. And their boss regularly visited both institutions.

You’ll be unsurprised to find out that Robbie Hall contracted Covid, along with several of her coworkers, and spent weeks in the hospital.

There is an element of the surreal in this story, which I often feel when I read news stories about incarceration. The tone is the same as any other reported news story, but the facts are hyperbolic. It’s hard to take them in because they are so far from my comfortable reality.

The women were making masks, but not allowed to wear them. Daily quotas, already in the thousands, kept going up. They were working all seven days a week. They made less than $1 per hour. At one point, Ms. Hall tells the reporter that it was “like a slave factory.” That quote kills me because it’s not “like” a slave factory—it literally is a slave factory. Prisons are literally, legally allowed to run slave factories.

The institutions themselves don’t deny it, but they paper it over with the deflection of bureaucratic language:

Michele Kane, a spokeswoman for the California Prison Industry Authority, which oversees the factories, said in a statement that “essential critical enterprises,” such as food, laundry and the manufacture of masks and hand sanitizer, have continued operating during the pandemic.

In other words, prisons run on slave labor, and the state of California chooses to rely on slave labor to meet demand for masks and hand sanitizer. Prison slaves are essential workers, so they will continue to work through the pandemic. They have even less agency than regular “essential” workers facing precarity during the pandemic. Not working means potentially prolonging their stay in prison, to say nothing of the horrifying economics of existing in prison:

Sending a single email costs about 26 cents to buy a “stamp” from JPay, the company that runs the system. She also relies on her 60-cent-an-hour wages to pay for basic necessities like soap and food, which are sold at the prison canteen at premium prices.

Feldman throws in that “[s]upporters of prison labor say the practice helps defray costs of incarceration, provides job skills and reduces recidivism rates.” In other words, prisons use slave labor so society doesn’t have to bear the full cost of mass incarceration. Slave labor defrays the cost of enslavement.

Meanwhile, the prison officials keep telling Feldman that the staffing is approved by the “court-appointed federal receiver,” so everything is fine. That’s right: California’s prison healthcare system is so bad that it is in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A federal court seized control of the prison healthcare system in 2005, and 15 years later is still largely in charge. (This is the same case in which, in 2011, the Supreme Court declared that the California prison system was so overcrowded it was in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and 30,000 people needed to be released.)

The bottom line is that prison labor is legal, so it really doesn’t matter if it’s morally acceptable.

Reminder! I recently joined Discontents, a collective of newsletter writers on the left. We have a separate newsletter with a weekly summary of everybody’s work. It includes Substacks by: Gaby Del Valle and Felipe De La Hoz; Kim Kelly; André Carlisle; Derek Davidson; Luke O’Neil; Patrick Wyman; Kelsey Atherton; Connor Wroe Southard; Jordan Uhl & Rob Rousseau; and Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. What a lineup, eh? Consider subscribing. :-)