More than 800,000 incarcerated people work in American prisons, earning wages as low as $0.13 per hour — and nothing at all in five states. This labor keeps prisons running, supplies major corporations, and supports government agencies. Its constitutional basis is the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause, which abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime” — a provision that was not accidental but deliberate, deployed after the Civil War to recreate forced labor through criminalization. The system benefits government agencies, private corporations, and state prison industries. The incarcerated workers who produce that value are punished if they refuse to work and face barriers to using that work experience after release. This is the structure, and the structure is the argument.
How the System Works
Incarcerated people across the United States work full-time jobs that keep prisons running, supply major corporations, and support government agencies. According to the ACLU, more than 800,000 people in American prisons perform this labor — in food service, janitorial work, manufacturing, agriculture, and firefighting. In places like Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, they receive no compensation at all. In other states, wages run as low as $0.13 per hour.
Prison systems and their defenders justify this structure by pointing to the provision of housing and food — the argument that incarcerated workers are receiving compensation in kind. The Prison Policy Initiative has documented the inadequacy of this framing. Incarcerated people in many systems are charged room-and-board fees for the housing they are compelled to occupy. They pay co-pays for medical care they cannot opt out of receiving. Phone calls to family — a basic social need — are priced at rates that far exceed what the general public pays. Commissary items are marked up beyond market prices. The structure forces labor, pays nothing or nearly nothing for it, and then charges the worker for survival. Calling that compensation requires redefining the word.
Who Profits
The beneficiaries of prison labor are not difficult to identify. Government agencies rely on this labor to reduce operational costs — the savings are real and they flow to budgets that serve the general public rather than the workers who produce them. Private corporations are connected to prison labor through contractors and supply chains in ways that AP News has documented across major American brands. State prison industries programs, operating under names like “Corrections Enterprises” or “Prison Industries Authority,” sell goods produced by incarcerated workers to public institutions including schools and government offices — institutions funded by taxpayers who may not know how the goods they purchase are made.
If every defendant exercised their constitutional right to trial, the plea system would collapse. If every incarcerated worker refused work, the prison labor economy would collapse. Both systems are designed around a captive population that has no realistic ability to opt out. The prison labor economy’s dependence on workers who cannot refuse — who are punished if they do — is not a design flaw. It is the design. The distinction between this structure and the definition of forced labor is a matter of legal classification, not of practical reality.
The Racial Roots of the System
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery except as punishment for crime. That exception clause was not incidental. It was the mechanism through which the labor economics of slavery were preserved after emancipation. Southern states enacted Black Codes after the Civil War — laws that criminalized vagrancy, loitering, unemployment, and other aspects of ordinary life — and used those laws to prosecute Black people at scale. The resulting criminal convictions provided the legal basis for convict leasing: the practice of hiring out convicted prisoners to private businesses and farms, which replicated the conditions of slavery while evading the constitutional prohibition that had supposedly ended it.
Today’s prison labor system is the structural descendant of that framework, not a departure from it. The Black Codes evolved into other mechanisms — Jim Crow laws, drug policies with racially disparate enforcement, policing patterns that concentrate surveillance in Black communities — but the pipeline from criminalization to forced labor remained operational throughout. Black Americans constitute approximately 13% of the United States population and nearly 40% of the incarcerated population. The disproportion is not accidental. It is the compounded product of a system designed from the beginning to extract labor from a specific population through the mechanism of criminal law.
Incarcerated workers clean up toxic spills and fight wildfires for less than $2 per day. They manufacture uniforms for state troopers, furniture for public schools, and goods for sale in state-run prison industries. If they refuse, they lose phone access, visitation, and commissary privileges. When they are released, they typically cannot list prison labor on a resume, and most cannot access unemployment benefits for the work they performed. The labor produces value that flows entirely to the institutions and corporations that employ it, while leaving the workers who performed it with no portable economic benefit and significant collateral barriers to employment in the free world.
What Reform Requires
The constitutional provision that allows forced labor as punishment for crime is the legal foundation of the prison labor system. Removing it through constitutional amendment — as several states have already done at the state level — would eliminate the basis on which compelled labor without compensation is legal. Without that foundation, prison labor would be subject to the same federal labor protections that apply to free workers.
Incarcerated workers who perform labor should be compensated at rates that reflect the market value of that labor, with the same basic worker protections that apply to free workers — including protections against retaliation for refusing unsafe work assignments. The current system’s structure, in which the punishment for refusing work is the loss of access to basic social connections, does not satisfy any meaningful standard of voluntary labor.
Government agencies and publicly funded institutions that use goods or services produced by unpaid or minimally compensated prison labor are spending public money in ways that subsidize forced labor. Prohibiting the use of unpaid or below-minimum-wage prison labor in public procurement contracts would create an immediate market incentive to shift toward compensated labor and would make the public’s subsidy of forced labor visible rather than invisible.
Corporations whose supply chains include prison labor benefit from it whether or not they are directly contracting with prison systems. Mandatory supply chain transparency requirements — similar to those enacted for other forced labor contexts — would require corporations to identify and disclose prison labor in their supply chains and create accountability for benefiting from it. Consumer and investor pressure, once the information is available, creates market incentives that regulation alone may not fully achieve.
The defense of prison labor as rehabilitative is undermined by the reality that prison work experience rarely translates to post-release employment benefit, that the skills developed in many prison industries do not correspond to labor market demand, and that the structure of prison work is organized around institutional convenience rather than workforce development. Genuine rehabilitative job training — connected to labor market demand, accredited, and producing portable credentials — is a different thing from the extraction of cheap labor marketed as rehabilitation.
Prison labor is not hidden in some obscure corner of the justice system. It is embedded in the supply chains of everyday life — in government offices, public schools, state equipment, and the products of major American corporations. Choosing not to see it is a choice to endorse it. The Thirteenth Amendment exception clause was written to preserve a particular form of economic extraction after formal slavery was prohibited. Understanding what the system is — and what it was designed to do — is the precondition for deciding whether to change it.
Sources
Rita Williams, Prison Labor Is Modern Slavery. And We’re All Complicit., Clutch Justice (June 5, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/05/prison-labor-is-modern-slavery-and-were-all-complicit/.
Williams, R. (2025, June 5). Prison labor is modern slavery. And we’re all complicit. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/05/prison-labor-is-modern-slavery-and-were-all-complicit/
Williams, Rita. “Prison Labor Is Modern Slavery. And We’re All Complicit.” Clutch Justice, 5 June 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/06/05/prison-labor-is-modern-slavery-and-were-all-complicit/.
Williams, Rita. “Prison Labor Is Modern Slavery. And We’re All Complicit.” Clutch Justice, June 5, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/05/prison-labor-is-modern-slavery-and-were-all-complicit/.
