Labor Lost: The Missing Data problem of Incarcerated America

When Dominique Morgan was convicted at 18, they had racked up a grand total of thirty felony charges from a life of survival-crime. Morgan had never held a job, and their maiden employment as an adult was a courtesy of the Omaha Correctional Centre, where they were set to serve a 16 year sentence. Morgan’s grueling twelve hour shift would start at four in the morning, where they cooked for 1,200 fellow inmates. At the end of their shift, Dominique Morgan would become the rightful owner of $2.25 for a whole day of hard labor. Their grand total for the month was just about $54 (net taxes).

The princely sum was then used by Morgan to buy phone calls to their family, Doritos, or grossly overpriced sticks of deodorant sold in the prison store. Simple services provided by the prison itself, or by for-profit companies within the correctional system ate up most, if not all of Morgan’s pay. They weren’t allowed sick days or leaves, which were considered rule-violations punishable by solitary confinement.

Eventually, Morgan was contracted-out by the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services to the Oriental Trading Company, where they earned 37 cents an hour making tablecloths. In reality, the regulation wage was much higher, but Morgan’s share was reduced to cents because the prison deducted room and board expenses from their wages. In effect, Morgan was being made to pay for their own incarceration, a wide-spread strategy used by prison administrators to reduce operational, court, restitution and building costs. At the end of their 10-year person term, Morgan walked out with $300 of net wages after prison deductions.

Morgan is only a drop in the bloated incarceration machinery of the United States. According to the last census taken over fifteen years ago, the US prison system employs (and contracts out) over 1.5 million people, 600,000 of which work in the manufacturing sector. No systematic records have been collected since then, and it is up to individual prison systems to count and report their labor statistics. Federal prisons on the other hand have UNICOR, a state-owned corporation that is responsible for contracting incarcerated laborers to private companies. According to its annual report, the organization employs 17,000 incarcerated workers who work in heavy manufacturing and computer-aided design, making $500 million of revenue annually for the nation. There is a uniquely sophisticated industry of prison labor in the States that is supported, aided and furnished in part by the state, and it continues to grease the wheels of exploitation.

According to a recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, more than 76 percent of workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics report that they face additional punishment, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence and family visitation rights if they deny work. The 13th Amendment exclusion allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, making for explicit legal machinery that prevents prisoners from unionizing, being covered by minimum wage laws, overtime regulations, safety guarantees and punitive damages.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, incarcerated laborers in at least 40 states were forced to produce masks, hand sanitizers and protective equipment. With abysmal protective conditions for themselves, they also laundered bedsheets and gowns of hospitals treating COVID-19 patients, transported dead bodies, built coffins and dug graves. Around a third of these workers contracted the virus, and prisons reported 3000 deaths, most likely the result of overcrowding and lack of proper healthcare.

From the patchy post-covid data in the ACLU report, stats note that more than 80 percent of these workers (or legal slaves) are employed in the production of prison maintenance services like food, laundry, maintenance and groundskeeping – running the very institutions they inhabit. About 8 percent of prisoners are assigned to government run public work projects like cemeteries, school grounds, road work, landfill clean ups and park maintenance. Only about 1 percent of laborers are employed by private companies like Oriental, who claim to be blissfully unaware of the cents per hour deduction-wage rate.

It's not just companies like Oriental that are feigning ignorance – The Bureau of Labour Statistics defines Non-institutional Civilian Population as the number of people available for employment excluding those under the age of sixteen, those in the armed Forces, or jail. Which means that the entire mass of prison labor goes unrecorded in official employment statistics – there is barely any data bar the ACLU report and twenty-year outdated censuses, evidence of a mass erasure of labor data. Most stats are self-reported by prisons, and likely subject to revision. It is extremely hard to estimate the sheer impact of the sector on the economy, from data that simply doesn’t exist.

Lost labor has policy implications too: The United States’ prison system is bloated, and its maintenance costs are hidden by the unrecorded labor effort of prisoners, both federal and private. It is possible that the cents on the hour payment scheme for out-contracting can incentivize companies to seek out more prison labor, and prevent reform in the pursuit of cheap workers. Some government officials have explicitly voiced opposition to efforts to reduce prison populations because it would reduce the incarcerated workforce. While the implications of the slavery amendment are too garish to be ignored, the extraction of free labor in correctional facilities is both an accounting and a political issue.

While they are designed to accrue transferable skills in inmates, correctional institutions force them to maintain their prisons, and those that are contracted out perform menial tasks that yield low skill development. Morgan commented that upon release when they contacted Oriental Traders for their old job, they were deemed unqualified, pointing to a well known barriers to employment problem that many prisoners are victims of. The existence of systemic forced labor only exaggerates the cost of reassimilation in society, and perpetuates archaic and inhumane labor treatment that commands more attention and reform.