What Prisoners Get Paid for Forced Labor in Every State

The state has the 17th highest incarceration rate in the country, higher than El Salvador and Turkmenistan, countries with the second and third highest incarceration rates after the United States, according to the Prison Policy Institute. West Virginia operates a “unique blend of business and government” through West Virginia Correctional Industries, which touts teaching “good work habits” to state inmates.

The state’s department of corrections assigns jobs in five categories: prison operations like kitchen and laundry work, warehouse services; farm work; a so-called “hobbycraft” program for building furniture; and education, which is available as a work category for student inmates or prisoners pursuing addiction treatment, according to a New Hampshire Public Radio report from 2019. The state has the third-lowest incarceration rate in the U.S.

In 2015, North Dakota legislators traveled to Norway to learn lessons from its success in educating and rehabilitating inmates. But there are many differences in how Norwegians deal with the issue. The country’s per capita incarceration rate is also a 10th the size of the U.S. rate, and it has one of the world’s lowest recidivism rates. If prisoners choose to work in jobs maintaining the facilities, they earn between $7 to $8 a day, according to Prison Insider.

In 2013, Rhode Island passed a law requiring all government institutions to buy furniture from the Department of Corrections. The state’s incarceration rate is below the national average but is about the same as the southern African country of Namibia.

Before 2020, not only did jailhouse jobs in Nebraska not pay for the labor, but also prisoners were compelled to work for free as part of the disciplinary process under threat of losing time off for good behavior and lengthening their sentences, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. Like other states, Nebraska’s department of corrections has a system under which inmates produce goods such as furniture, street signs, and soap products for a fraction of the state’s $10.50 hourly minimum wage.

In November, Tennessee voters approved with a strong majority a ballot measure to amend the state constitution that officially bans all forms of slavery, a move that impacts prisoners the most by prohibiting involuntary servitude. The measure passed despite opposition from six legislators that voted against the measure, CBS News reported. “I’m a non-lawyer and most of my voters are non-lawyers and I can’t explain this amendment in words they understand,” Republican State Sen. Frank Niceley said in 2021.

Arkansas has the fifth-largest per-capita incarceration rate in the country despite ranking 33rd in population. In 2020, a measure that would have removed language in the state’s constitution permitting involuntary servitude or slavery as “punishment for crime” failed to make it onto the ballot. As of February 2022, eight states allow slavery or involuntary servitude as a form of punishment, according to Ballotpedia.

Like all but 15 states, Washington has a constitutional article permitting slavery or involuntary servitude as a form of punishment. In January, Democratic State Rep. Tarra Simmons proposed raising prisoner wages to the state’s $15.74 hourly minimum wage. Simmons, the state’s first formerly incarcerated elected lawmaker, said in January she had been subjected to threats of solitary confinement if she refused to work for 42 cents an hour.

A state Court of Appeals ruled in August 2022 that Coloradans who voted in 2018 to make slavery and involuntary servitude unconstitutional did not intend to extend that protection to inmates. The ruling allows the Colorado Department of Corrections to continue to coerce inmates with “restricted privileges” if they do not agree to work. Last year, the state passed a law requiring prisoners who work in transitional day release programs to be paid the state’s hourly minimum wage of $13.65. However, only a fraction of Colorado inmates participate in the program.

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North Carolina inmates repair roads, raise crops and cattle, work in construction and textiles, make road signs, furniture, and license plates, and are contracted out to local governments to perform clerical duties. “Money earned by the inmates helps defray the costs of their imprisonment, pays restitution to victims and helps support their family,” says a state government website. North Carolina is one of eight states whose constitution allows involuntary servitude, but not slavery, as a form of punishment.

Maryland pays inmates based on skill levels, with the highest “craftsman” earning the maximum hourly wage of $2.75, well below the state’s standard minimum wage of $13.25 an hour. In 2020, the Baltimore Sun reported that the state spent $7.68 million on wages to about 13,200 inmates annually within the Department of Corrections and Maryland Correctional Enterprises, a program that utilizes inmate labor to make products for state agencies.

One example of the private sector’s use of cheap prison labor is at South Carolina’s Evans Correctional Institution, where inmates produce cable and harnesses for a Missouri-based company that sells these products to British defense giant BAE Systems, according to a Vice Motherboard report in 2021. Prisoners who work in state public-private “enterprise programs” like this tend to earn the highest inmate wages. But what they earn is still below what a comparable worker would earn outside of prison.

Wisconsin’s prison enterprise program was established in 1913, a time in U.S. history when prison chain gangs and convict leasing (a form of unpaid forced labor utilized by private interests like coal mines and plantations) were common in many parts of the country. In 2021, the Madison-based Badger Herald student newspaper profiled a former inmate who worked for the state’s prison enterprise program for five years stuffing envelopes, beginning at 42 cents an hour and ending at $1 an hour making traffic signs.

Like all but 16 states, Virginia does not have a constitutional provision that carves out an exception for slavery and/or involuntary servitude. But like most states, Virginia still vastly underpays inmate workers. In 2020, the Virginia chapter of the ACLU estimated that 58% of Virginia inmates are Black despite making up only 20% of the state population.

Many Montana inmates work in agriculture, producing food for the prison system. About 85% of the milk they harvest ends up in consumer refrigerators, according to a 2018 report from Marketplace. Montana collects 15% of inmate wages earned through its public-private enterprise program to pay for court-ordered obligations or the state’s crime victims’ compensation fund, and they collect charges for prisoner room and board.

Arizona has the nation’s eighth-highest per capita incarceration rate, almost double that of Thailand, which has nearly ten times the population. An investigative report published last year from the Arizona Republic and local KJZZ News found that prisoner labor had become “ubiquitous across the state,” used for projects like private home renovations, church confessional boxes, and even bowling alleys. The inmates were told to keep out of sight of staff and students “so no one knows they’re there.”

The state’s Department of Corrections touts itself as a “pioneer in United States prison labor.” It began to suggest replacing torture and mutilation as forms of punishment in 1682, and in 1773 built its first jail. The state’s incarceration rate is about the same as the national average. Last year, Dr. Zane Kaleem, assistant director of the Correctional Health Care Task Force at Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform, criticized the state’s $5 medical co-pay that can require a prisoner to work up to 26 hours to pay for one visit.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic panic of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced “New York State Clean,” a hand sanitizer produced by prisoners and distributed to businesses and government buildings during a nationwide shortage of virus-killing products. Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, recently proposed reconstituting private prison labor, a move that would reverse a century-old ban on private employment of inmates in New York state.

California is one of eight states whose constitution allows involuntary servitude, but not slavery, as a form of punishment. Efforts last year by some state assembly members to end forced prison labor failed to win enough legislative support. The state’s Department of Finance, which opposed the measure, said it would cost $1.5 billion to pay inmates the state’s hourly minimum wage, which increased to $15.50 at the start of the year.

The second-largest state by population has the 10th largest per capita incarceration rate in the country, at 840 per 100,000 people in 2021, or 53% more than the country’s most-populous state, California, at 549 per 100,000 people. This is why Texas has nearly double the number of prison workers as California’s. According to a 2021 report in the San Antonio Express News, Texas Correctional Industries, the state’s for-profit prison enterprise system that was established in 1963, raises more than $70 million a year from labor that is outsourced to prisoners by private companies.