In episode 8 of Beyond Prisons, we have a wide-ranging conversation on the subjects of prison labor and slavery. First, we hear more from Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, an incarcerated member of the Free Alabama Movement, and a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of incarcerated human rights advocates and prison abolitionists, on the connection between slavery and the 13th amendment, and how society justifies the exploitation of prisoners through academia.

We are then joined by Jared Ware, our producer and a fellow abolitionist. Jay worked with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) during the nationwide prison strikes against slavery. He helped manage their Twitter account, which was a crucial source of information as the strike unfolded.

The three of us talk about prison jobs programs, organizing against prison slavery, abolishing the 13th Amendment, and the upcoming Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March in Washington, D.C. We also attempt to complicate the discussion of prison labor by considering the economic relationship between the minimum wage labor movement and the use of prison labor, the ethics of working in prisons, and the relevance of prison jobs to the broader labor market.

Episode Transcript

Jay Ware: Welcome to Beyond Prisons. This is Jay and I’m the producer. This week I got to talk with Brian and Kim about prison slavery. Before we get started, I wanted to share with you a couple of audio clips. Recently, I spoke with members of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and a member of the Free Alabama Movement about the recent case against the Geo Group and their use of prison slavery practices within an ICE detention facility that they operate as a private contractor. 

Here are the words of Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun related to that case and the way in which in society justifies prison slavery through academia and through public discourse. 

Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun: I waned to point out something about that case. You know, in the article… there’s an article out, I think you sent me the article, in it there’s a quote from a professor from Northwestern University and her name is Jacqueline Stevens. She was talking about how the program does not meet the criteria for violence at work under labor law, but she said that prison labor has two purposes. She said one, to punish the offender after they’ve been convicted of a crime and the other one is to rehabilitate. 

Well that’s coming from the academic institution, this is coming from a professor at a prestigious university. What you see here is she’s justifying the use of prison labor supposedly to punish a person and to rehabilitate. Now, we live in a society, where the 13th Amendment says that a person can be enslaved and so, when you have this being taught at the academic level of an institution of higher learning that somehow this can punish a person, I would like for her to define, ”What do you it’s punishment for a crime? How does a person, who has a drug conviction, be… how does this punishment fit into the crime itself?”

I just don’t understand it and then she says it’s to rehabilitate the person. If a person… in prison labor, if a person comes in, let’s say you have a person who has a skill or trade or what not, they have a drug addiction, how does free labor, forced labor rehabilitate? I don’t understand that and so when she makes… when you have people in these positions making these kinds of statements, it just goes to show you how deeply rooted the problem is and it shows you how deeply rooted society is being programmed to accept this, accept slavery as an accepted form of punishment for crime and a rehabilitative mechanism and it’s not that, it doesn’t have anything to do with punishment for crime, it does not have anything to do with rehabilitation, it has everything to do with profits. It’s amazing to see that, but again it was good to see because it reveals just how ingrained this stuff is in this culture, in our society. 

Jay: And here are two members of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak discussing the connection between prison slavery, the 13th Amendment, and other cases against prison labor practices. 

Person #1: I think one’s getting more attention than the other, when the situation doesn’t need to be separated because our situation, the federal situation, and the private-owned prison situation is all the same entity, we’re all under the same amendments and the same laws. And if it gets separated like that, then eventually they’ll break away and that’s when the different litigation comes into effect and we don’t get what we necessarily need and that’s to be recognized. 

Person #2: One of the things when you address the relation of the two, you’re absolutely correct in that there has been less media attention, less play on this thing here as it relates to the 13th and we definitely need to put a focus on that. It is actually enabled by the 13th. I think before they even went to these immigration detention centers, people started to realize that all of this started in state and federal facilities, so by taking it to the immigration facilities, well it opened the door up for private detention, for immigration detention, and now we are learning that it’s spreading all around now to house arrest, to probation, to probation and parole, privatization of that and they even have these individuals working under private companies to pay off these outstanding restitution fees now. All of this definitely connects it and it definitely is all enabled by the 13th and it only spells a bigger picture that America still condones slavery. There is no way around it. It shows, it highlights it, that we still have a slavery issue in this country. The only thing that separates us differently from other countries is that the United States actually has it legalized, it is actually in their Constitution, that’s what distinguishes this particular industrialized country from other countries. 

So, I applaud you for making sure that the 13th stays front and center and that issues are not disconnected because we do know that they will try to disconnect the one issue so that they don’t have to address another issue when we all know it is one issue. 

Brian Sonenstein: For the second half of our episode this week, we’re talking to our wonderful producer, Jay Ware. How are you doing, Jay?

Jay: I’m good, Kim and Brian, how are you? 

Brian: Doing well.

Kim Wilson: Hanging out, doing good. 

Brian: Jay is, like I said, the producer of the podcast, he is a good friend of ours. He is @jaybeware on Twitter and he, we all got to know Jay, around the September 9th prison strike because he was one of the people running the IWOC Twitter account, which was responsible for disseminating a lot of information, communications on the prison strikes going on around the country. So we wanted to talk to Jay a little bit about the issue of prison slavery and prison labor, the 13th Amendment following our conversation with Khrystal Rountree and you know, I guess maybe a good place to start, Jay, would be if you could talk a little bit about the historical connections between prison slavery today and slavery around the time of the Civil War and before. 

Jay: Yeah, so, I think it’s really important to look at this as a continuum. Often history sort of treats it as these completely disjointed and disconnected things that quote unquote “prison slavery,” as the media would like to always put quotes around it and history would as well I think, is something different and really that it’s a type of labor that is based in rehabilitation or at some points, has a punitive aspect to it and that those things are okay and it’s okay… And some people will argue that it’s good, that it’s good to have prisoners working and I think that there are certain aspects of that that are true because I think that you have a ton of time, obviously, when you’re in prison, all you have is time. And I think that, obviously, people in prison generally want to be productive with that because it helps the time to go by, but I think that the issue around it is primarily sort of the racial history of it as well as the economic implications of it and I think that those two pieces are really important.

In terms of the history, I think it’s really important to understand that prison slavery today is a direct vestige of slavery pre-Civil War and that that distinction really happened like right away. So the 13th Amendment says that people can’t be enslaved except for as punishment of a crime and while there’s different arguments about what that meant, what it does, is it really says… it’s really an admission by the state that prison in itself is tied to slavery and it’s been called the loophole, I think some people take issue with that. But, what it is it became, how it’s been used historically, is that judges have used it to uphold the authority of the state to make people work for nothing and that is still done today. So I think that, you know, that really right after slavery, obviously you had convict-leasing, as well as outside of prisons, you had systems of sharecropping and debt peonage and all of these things were about devaluing Black labor and about also control because what became an immediate response after people were, after quote unquote “freedom” came was that basically they started using criminality as a way to replace that, or a new way to basically criminalizing Blackness. 

Brian: Right. 

Jay: And I think that, that history continued. So you know, we had the abolition of sort of Southern slavery as it was known before the Civil War, then you had the quote unquote “abolition of convict-leasing,” but still to this day, you have close to 2.5 million people incarcerated in some form or another and they are all subjected to forms of labor that is unpaid or paid really pathetic amounts of money and one of the things that people also don’t understand that people, who are incarcerated, don’t lose their expenses. It’s not like you’re just in prison and you have nothing to worry about financially (Brian agrees.) and I think that’s true for them within prison in terms of getting things that they actually need, but it’s also true for their families, which don’t go away because they’re incarcerated. And so that’s just kind of a quick over-the-top view of it. 

Brian: Can you talk a little bit about the ways that labor is forced in prison? I think some people would take for granted that if you’re in prison, maybe there’s these work programs where you don’t get paid very much, but if you don’t feel like being exploited, maybe just don’t work then. Can we talk about what prison labor is actually like and how it fits into the functioning of the prison itself?

Jay: Yeah, these are critical points. I think that beyond the 13th Amendment, there’s this thing that’s less talked about that’s called the housekeeping exception, which basically includes people that are not just folks that are convicted felons in prison, but also people who are in jail awaiting trial, also people who are immigrants in detention for immigration issues and all of those people are required to labor for nothing or for again, maybe a dollar a day in order to basically just maintain the cleanliness of the facility, to serve food to other prisoners, to do… they do things like groundskeeping work within the facility, cleaning bathrooms, mopping floors, so this idea is sort of based in this sort of like “if you’re in prison or if you’re in jail, the least you can do is clean up after yourself,” which is just sort of absurd, (Brian agrees.) I think, because the reality is you don’t choose to be there, you can’t leave and then I think back to your point of what does forced mean. 

Forced means that people are threatened with torture and are subjected to torture, if they don’t do it and that can include, through the state’s own justification, putting people in solitary confinement if they don’t participate in it. It can also include abuse obviously from corrections officers not legally, but one of the difficult things about being incarcerated, of course, is that you have quote unquote “rights,” but what is your remedy to resolve them? How do you prove that your rights were violated by the state? When they have all the control and the power in the situation and their word will always be taken above yours basically in a court of law or in some sort of administrative hearing that you might have. And so, in the example, of the people that have participated in the prison strike, Brian and Kim, most of the people that are prominent activists, incarcerated activists during the prison strike, are now in solitary confinement and have been there since basically the start of the strike. 

Brian: And yeah, some at other prisons, they were moved around. 

Jay:  Yeah, so you talk about people like Kinnetic Justice or Bennu or from the Free Alabama Movement, people that were involved in the Kinross [prison] uprising, people even in Portland, there were some anarchist prisoners that were involved, Zero, was one of the names of one of them that I remember. And then, down in the Carolinas, I know Jailhouse Lawyers Speak representatives and they’re often incarcerated just for advocating for the rights of other people, not necessarily for prison strike activity, but just literally for standing up for other people’s rights and helping them to write complaints or writs can get them thrown in the hole, so…

[Editor’s note: Jay misspoke; he meant to say “...I know Jailhouse Lawyers Speak representatives and they’re often retaliated against just for advocating for…”]

Brian: I think too, it’s important to note that people can lose good-time credits, which is also an insidious punishment for refusing to work and good-time credits are days off of your sentence, it’s a small movement toward a potentially earlier release and if you refuse to work, those can be withheld from you and going off what you were saying before too, I think the other thing to drive home is that in almost all of these cases, these facilities cannot function without the forced labor and the exploited labor of incarcerated people. Prisons and jails are already incredibly expensive facilities to run and to staff and to maintain and they save a lot on overhead by exploiting the labor of incarcerated people, so I think that’s another thing to point out. 

Jay: Yeah, it absolutely is. As you said that, I was reminded of something I read on Twitter earlier today, which was an excerpt from Hillary Clinton’s book, where she talked about how they had incarcerated labor at the Arkansas State House, at the Governor’s mansion and that she would frequently send back prisoners, who weren’t doing a good job. And I thought about how, and I saw recently there was a tweet storm from Sam from Campaign Zero talking about this in Louisiana, (Kim agrees.) talking about this as well and just about how incarcerated people, their labor is used, not just in prisons, not just within private enterprise as we’ll talk about more as well, but it’s also used to help make other institutions of government run more quote unquote “affordably.” And I think that all of those things are really sick vestiges of slavery and I think that good-time piece is critical, Brian, because again, tying back into the way that… even if you think about indentured servitude, which was different than slavery, but it still was a form of forced labor and it was still a form of unpaid labor. 

You had a certain period of time that you had to do and then, you got your freedom. If your freedom is based upon your behavior all the time and if people can arbitrarily decide whether your behavior is good or bad, and we’ve seen this with members of the Black Liberation movements in the 70s that a lot of times, they finished their sentences and they’re still not released and I think that is another sick way in which the state can just sort of dictate this endlessly, you’re just at their mercy always and obviously, there are people like Bennu and Kinnetic that constantly advocate that there needs to be mass work stoppages to combat this and I think that makes sense. Their argument is that these institutions would no longer be able to function if we can keep this up, but I think that the danger is that anybody participating in that activity faces just the most brutal forms of repression.

Kim: And to that point, I think that beyond just moving people to isolation or to further isolation, to the SHU or the hole or denying them good-time, is also the problem that we have where people, who refuse to work, because… who refuse to work are not reclassified in a timely fashion. So you can, and this is different than earning good-time on your sentence, right, so that technically would reduce your sentence, right, by x number of days or weeks or months that you accumulate, but being reclassified within the facility itself, so that you can earn quote unquote “privileges,” right, so you can move from one unit to another unit where you are allowed to go to the yard or you have workout facilities or you have whatever privileges they deem are privileges, including things like honor visits and what have you. But there are thousands of ways, in which work and unpaid work or minimally paid work is forced on people inside, right, but you also raised another issue and I want to go back to this a little bit because the economic part of it is always emphasized. 

That this cost… that the cost savings to the prison, to the facility are huge, right, are huge for using the labor there, but there’s also this issue that we have, and I want to think about this a little more, that when people hear the conversation around prison labor, or what I’ve heard I’ll put it this way, what I hear from people often times is that this assumption that there are jobs just laying around and people are just refusing to work, but the jobs or jobs programs are very few and the number of jobs available don’t match the number of people who are incarcerated. 

So there’s a huge gap between these two things, so then it becomes, or at least one of the questions that I’m thinking about, is that there is something else going on here. It’s not just about having everybody who’s in prison working, it’s not, it’s about having certain groups of people working and they use the work as punishment on top of the already existing punishment of incarceration. So there seems, at least in my mind, to be something else at work here, because this is not just about cost savings, it’s more about control and about power and this is a really important part of the overall, the overall problem of prison labor, right, that I think we might talk about a little bit more. I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that. 

Jay: Yeah, I definitely do and I think that one of the things that you brought up is this idea of… it gets treated as though these jobs are privileges. The reality of everybody in prison, for the most part, wants a job and they want to be paid more for their job and there’ve been legal suits and things like that to try to get prisoners minimum wage that are always shot down under the guise that “it’s not real work” and “they’re not real employees,” so they don’t have the protections of the Free Labor Standards Act. 

The other part of it, too, is there are quote unquote “good” jobs that people really do want when they’re in prison because they can learn a trade or they can learn a skill, or there are jobs where you might be able to go out, where you might be able to leave the prison to do something and that obviously feels like a little taste of freedom. At the heart of it, I think that a big part of my issue with it and I think a part of a lot of the incarcerated activists’ issue with it is, “I’m still a human being and my labor is still valuable. You’re actually extracting more profit off of my work than you would be if I was doing this outside of prison and I still have to pay for things for my family, the phone rates that I have to pay are jacked up, the commissary rates are jacked up.”Sso there’s no element of a free exchange and you have these sort of combating sides of if I don’t work, I’m gonna face some form of torture or different forms of punishment and if I do work, I’m going to be exploited in another way. So that creates a dynamic where the conditions are the same as those, or of someone, who was enslaved. There is no free way for them to engage in the use of their own labor beyond their conditions of that enslavement. 

One of the things that I thought was interesting about the GEO Group case that I covered for Shadowproof was about how they use this thing call the Trafficing Victims Protection Act and they got a judge to basically say, “Prison labor is slavery as defined by the Trafficing Victims Protection Act,” and the moment that was done, as well as the judge said, “This can be a class action lawsuit and 60,000 people can participate in the class,” GEO Group actually appealed it to a circuit court, before the decision was even rendered, under this clause like, “If you allow this to happen, it could disrupt our whole ability to run private prisons” basically and using a lot of arguments basically like, “Hey, the state’s been doing this forever and they say, ‘it’s perfectly fine.’” 

And I think what’s interesting there is one, you actually got some judges or a judge, at this point, to really recognize based upon law that’s not the 13th Amendment and not the Housekeeping Exception, but looking at this Trafficing Victims Protection Act can say that, “Yeah, private prisons are engaging in a process that looks a lot like human trafficking and you kind of have to argue with me to say that it’s not.” I think that that is really interesting and, in that case, they talked a lot about these different dynamics about how there’s no such thing as voluntary work within in a prison… 

Brian: And I think that on a subject of control, getting back to what Kim said a little bit, I think it’s important to think about this as a system, too, and larger when you’re incarcerated specifically, but once you’re convicted and if you get out of prison, then your labor is still criminalized, your labor options are severely limited, and that has all kinds of effects on the rest of your life, on your ability to get healthcare, on your ability to find housing, and so, often times drives people back into the system and condemns their whole families and I just think, yeah go ahead, Kim, were you going to say something? 

Kim: Yeah, this is just one of the things that just frustrates me to no end. Many of the programs, programs, that are set up in prison, do not map against the kind of jobs that would be available to someone not in prison, right, so on the outside. So, for example, and I’ll use Vaughn as an example. Vaughn has a program where they train prisoners to do braille and those prisoners create braille books and what have you. Now, if you look for a job in braille outside of prison, it’s not like there’s hundreds or even thousands of jobs available to people. Like anybody [laughs].

So another program, for example, would be where car repairs are being done by people in prison. So, you know, dealerships set up contracts with their local prison, a bunch of cars are brought in, these could be leased vehicles or fleet vehicles or what have you, and the prisoners are the ones doing the work. Now, when you think about that in the context of what’s happening in the broader labor market and where there’s a lot of hysteria around “certain people taking our jobs,” if you will, this never becomes part of the conversation. So, it’s out in the open, but it’s obscured. It’s this secret that's right there in front of you and that is again undermining, if we want to start getting technical about it, undermining not only the wages, but the ability of people on the outside to get work, including formerly incarcerated people because if a company can pay via this contract $2-3 dollars an hour, that’s a lot, those are high wages if you’re in prison, to fifteen people, who are in this job program to fix cars, why the hell would they pay anyone $17 or $25 [an hour] to do it outside? They’re not! They’re not! 

The numbers just don’t work and this again, this gets left out of the conversation and it would be nice if we started taking, not just politicians to task on this, but anyone else who’s really talking about prison labor without providing a robust picture of this. Another issue and I won’t go on much longer that you brought up is about extracting more profit from prisoners and things like phone rates and commissary  rates and things like that and the thing that I know from my own personal experience, but from talking to a lot of other people with incarcerated loved ones is that the wages that they earn if they have a job are never enough to actually pay for things like commissary, they’re never enough, so the burden of that gets offloaded onto people on the outside, people, who before their loved one went to prison more than likely were already economically disadvantaged, so this places yet another burden economic burden on them, right, and there’s just no way, if you’re earning $.25 an hour that you can buy anything at commissary. Some of the cheaper items may cost $2.00, so if you’re paying $2.00 for a package of ramen, you would have to work 8 hours to get one package, you know? A full day to get one package of ramen, like this is obscene, right, and blugh [frustrated noise]! Say something!

Jared: I’ll respond to a couple of things you said there, Kim, because I think you make some great points and I think the first about the sort of labor aspect and really great failures of the labor movement today, I think. I think historically, and Du Bois talks about this obviously, the white workers’ inability to recognize that its class condition and its shared class condition with people of color, with Black people, and its inability to sort of fight for working-class, to fight for universal healthcare, to fight for free college, to fight for living wages for all, to fight for housing. All of these things that a lot of countries actually have because they have a working class that is more unified than ours.

We don’t have, because the white worker will shade towards these sort of petty privileges and I think that one of the things that happens within the labor movement and I saw this working with IWOC is that we couldn’t get labor unions to come out in support of the prison strike. The IWW was really the only one, that I can think of, that did. They were trying to talk to them and part of the reason why and I think it’s important to acknowledge this, is that the labor unions do invite corrections officers into their movements. 

Brian: Exactly. 

Kim: Mhmm. 

Jared: And so, again, like you see this sort of, fi you use a historical perspective, right, and think back to real slavery times, the white worker would align with the slave owner, they would align with the… they would take positions to be overseers and things like that and they would use this racial privilege, despite being, still in many cases extremely poor, and that was enough, right? This psychological idea of, “I’m better than someone else,” was enough for them to give up all that could be achieved through true solidarity and I think that that’s… you’re exactly right in terms of looking at the Fight for 15 should support prison labor because the reality is that only by equalizing those wages, only by allowing prison workers to be paid what people are paid outside of prison can you advocate for higher wages for everybody. 

Because like you said, if people can… quote unquote, and they use this term “insourcing,” of sending labor into prisons or sending it into detention centers, then they don’t have to outsource, so they don’t have to say that they are sending it to Mexico or China and they actually, in many cases, get to say that this is “made in America,” and not say that it was made for $.20 an hour by somebody, who’s incarcerated in Alabama or Minnesota and it’s not as though… prison labor conditions are terrible everywhere. There are a certain number of states where prisoners are paid nothing, but they’re really bad wherever. There are no prisoners that are making minimum wage and I think that the point you make about those jobs is really important and then the other point you make about and this is something that the Free Alabama Movement talks about a lot and it’s that prison jobs are usually not jobs that you will find on the outside. 

For instance, they will use the example of license plates, which is sort of the generic thing that people think about in terms of prison labor, but there are no license plate factories that aren’t in prisons, you know, and so I learn how to make license plates, but that job, those skills that I learn are not transferable to anything on the outside and I think the other piece and I want to get back to this just briefly is about rehabilitation and my conversation with Bennu, I thought he really shot a great hole in this argument, which is just, “what is rehabilitative about prison labor?” He used the example, let’s say someone is in jail for… it really doesn’t matter, if they’re in jail for a sex crime or they’re in jail for a drug crime or even a murder, what is it about making license plates that is going to help them change whatever behavior led them to get into prison? There’s a real disconnect psychologically there. 

The idea that… let’s go back to drug problem. So somebody has a problem with substance abuse and he gave the example of a carpenter or some type of blue-collar worker with blue-collar skills, who develops an opioid addiction, who ends up committing crimes that are either, directly related to the drug and be drug crimes, or as we know, a lot of times quote unquote “violent offenses,” like burglary, or robbing someone with a weapon is actually can still be connected to drugs because if you don’t have money or if you don’t have access to money, a lot of times how you get it is by stealing something and so, none of those things, that person who has that drug issue is that they have a disease. They have something that needs mental healthcare, that needs… they need a program to help them with their addiction, they need resources, they may need healthcare, they may be self-medicating, all of those things are possibilities. They may not have any opportunity for any jobs, as I think we have all seen a lot, right, and so then using drugs is just how they make the time go by because they just can’t figure out how to contribute, right. 

And so, there is nothing really about any of those situations where learning how to press a license plate is going to create this “aha” moment for somebody or give them a skill that’s really going to make a difference for them in the real world. 

Kim: Absolutely. 

Brian: It’s like going back to our Angela Davis episode where we were talking about the puritanical bullshit that is engrained, you know, into the ideology of the prison and this idea that like that we just need… “these are ideal hands and they need to be put to work doing whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter, it’s the work, it’s the labor that will save them,” and it’s got no grounding in the real world like you said, Jay. 

Kim: In addition to that, it’s not just the Quaker values that inform these early prison labor programs, camps, and what have you, but also the Protestant work ethic which informs it and on down the line, but you also get this thing and I don’t wanna keep harping on this, that there aren’t enough jobs for everybody who’s locked up, there just aren’t. People in prison can lose those jobs, if they’re in a job program, for whatever reason, at any moment and at any time, which also creates consequences for them as you both have pointed out previously, in terms of either torture through increased isolation or losing good time and what have you, but they’re also… job programs get used in order to further exploit prisoners through the… COs will often times say, “You know we’re gonna get you a job,” or whatever or your counselor will say, “Okay, we’re going to try to set you up with this job.” 

And they target certain people to do certain work because they want to use those people as informants or in other ways and I think this is also an important point within the broader context of how bodies are getting used inside of prison and this breaks down along racial lines often times because they’re jobs that are seen as on the inside, as being more valuable and where you know, “Okay, if I have ‘x’ job, I can do ‘xyz.’” You’re awarded a certain amount of freedom on the inside and that doesn’t mean going outside to work at the governor’s mansion and what have you or working on a college campus, which happens and that’s another point…

Brian: Yeah, that’s real. 

Kim: …that we can discuss down the line, but as you said, this isn’t rehabilitative. If anything with this, the message that people get is that making you work is punishment, right? Making you work is punishment, that there’s nothing wonderful in work, that work is punishment for your crime, that we are going to force you to do this shitty work that isn’t really going to benefit you in here or out there. You can’t pay your fines with the kind of work that you’re getting. The experience that you’re getting, while many people love to do photo opportunities and talk about how great their prison job program is, and about how they’re helping people, it doesn’t actually mean anything for them once they get outside because most of these companies would not hire someone with a record and that also needs to be said. They will hire you if you’re in prison, but they will never hire you in and technically we know that’s not what they’re doing, but if you walked in off the street with a felony conviction on your record, they’re not going to accept, unless you’re in one of the cities with ‘Ban the Box,’ but ‘Ban the Box’ is not a panacea…

Brian: Right, it’s not enough.

Kim: … it doesn’t prevent the prospective employer from denying your application once the application is submitted, right? All it says is basically that they’re not going to ask that question on the application. It doesn’t mean that on a second, third, fourth interview or what have you or whatever set-up they have, they can’t deny you work, right? There’s so many things connected with work and in our identities as people in this country and in this society specifically, the first thing you say to someone or ask someone if you’re out somewhere, “Oh, what do you do for a living?” And that question is so loaded, there’s just so many things associated with that and for someone with a felony conviction, that’s… I mean the answering of that question is really… is a challenge, right, and I just want us to think about that a little bit as well and there was another point… oh, when you talked about the GEO Group, right, and we’re talking about how private prisons operate, one of the things that I wanted to talk about a little more is that this isn’t just about private prisons because state facilities do this all the time…

Jay: Absolutely. 

Kim: … so the state facilities that are operating in Alabama, in Pennsylvania, Delaware, California, this represents much of what constitutes the use of prison labor and private prisons are a much smaller part of that bigger pie. People just think that, “Let’s just get rid of private prisons!” I’m okay with that, right, but private prisons isn’t… getting rid of private prisons doesn’t eliminate the problem of prison labor because as you find through these various actions, right, whether it was the September 9th prison strike, a lot of these facilities grind to a halt, right, and they can’t operate without prison labor, so when we hear things like, “Oh, we need to increase the number of staff,” or, “We need to hire more people,” well what are these people being hired to do if much of the work being done by prisoners? What is their function? 

Brian: Control. 

Kim: … I don’t know, I just have more questions here than I have answers here, Jay and Brian, so… 

Brian: Totally. 

Jay: Totally. Those are all good. Go ahead, Brian. 

Brian: I was just wondering, I fell like this brings us to another point that I was wondering if you could talk about a little bit which is resistance, we’ve had the September 9th labor strikes, we have the march coming up in August and I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the movement, the resistance movement, against prison slavery both inside and outside and if you could maybe talk… I don’t want to say the parallels to slavery, because that would imply that they are on separate tracks, but you know the connection to the importance of labor resistance during the Civil War period. 

Jay: Yeah, one of the things that’s most relevant for the prison strike and in thinking about… imagining its most powerful incarnation is to actually think about the Civil War. And Du Bois really lays this out beautifully in Black Reconstruction and in talking about how the Civil War was not decided by the Union or by the Union’s belief against slavery, because the Union was actually, especially throughout most of the Civil war, it was their preference to maintain slavery and just bring the Union back together. What really changed the Civil War was a general strike, as Du Bois calls it, of Black labor in the South, meaning most of the people, who ran plantations in terms of control, the overseers, not the slave owners themselves obviously because they didn’t fight, but the people, the other white people, who helped maintain slavery, they had to go fight in the Confederacy because they had to draft such a huge portion of their population to fight and so, the enslaved people said, at a certain point, “we’re getting out of here and there’s not enough people to stop us anymore,” and a mass movement, hundreds of thousands of Black people in the South, basically just rejected their enslavement and kept trying to go to the Union and say, “Let us fight for you. Let us work alongside you,” and the Union for the most part kept saying, “No, you’re contraband and you must return to your plantation.”

And then, a few generals and colonels started to actually not push them away and that was only created by the enslaved people themselves just continuing to say, “We’re not going anywhere, we’re not going back and we’ll just build these tent cities basically around wherever Union armies were constructed,” and there was some really, for the time I want to caveat that, progressive stuff that happened as certain generals and colonels actually developed programs and began to involve the Black people that were coming to them in different forms of support for the Union and eventually, they became armed and became soldiers as well. All of that movement, all of that Black resistance during the Civil War are the critical pieces that changed, turned the tide and I think that’s really a historical narrative that gets lost along… a lot of time on purpose…

Brian: Definitely.

Jay: … but really when you see it laid out, it’s really obvious and especially when you read things like conversations between Lincoln and Horace Greeley within a year before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, saying things like, “My goal is to restore the Union and keep slavery,” and that is not a direct quote, but it’s definitely a paraphrase. You think about that in the modern context of a prison strike, right, and we can see that what happened this past year is that 24,000, at sort of the most widely accepted estimate, I know that Brian, you looked at larger numbers in terms of prisons that were just shut down because a lot of them shut down just prepping for this strike, knowing that it was going to happen, which still creates the same impact, because if nobody’s working, if everyone’s on lockdown, nobody’s working, it’s the same basic impact, if people are striking or not. 

So when you think about that and you think about the power of that, if more and more people, I mean 24,000 is a very small percentage of 2.5 million right? So we know that that… that basically it was this moment that created a lot of attention to prison abolition, a lot of attention to prison slavery, and I think it spurred… it was a continuation of resistance, right, because there is always prison resistance, I don’t think it’s fair to say that there is a period of time that it is not going on because it’s always going on in different ways. Honestly,  and I’m sure that Kim knows this, whether it’s accurate or not, better than I do, honestly I do look at Vaughn as a continuation of that because I think that the prison strike itself was a completely nonviolent attempt and it was totally quashed and repressed and I think that when you take away people’s ability to raise their voices nonviolently, the only option that remains is for them to rebel really and I think that that part shouldn’t be lost, I think, I know that there were a ton of, and I don’t want to get deep into Vaughn, but obviously it’s current because they just released the report, which was just total hackery about what the causes were being, “Not enough staff, too much overtime basically for corrections officers,” which also connects to the recent reports out of California that it costs $76,000 a year to incarcerate someone there because of how much they’re paying corrections officers and how many corrections officers they have now. 

The march is the next step for the people who were involved in the prison strike, a lot of the organizers. They look at the march as an ability to bring more awareness to the movement outside, because you have to have that as well. I mean I think one of my… one of the personal things that I struggle with is knowing that those of us that are prison abolitionists, those of us, who are advocates, we are never doing enough on the outside to raise the awareness of what’s going on and I think that we try, but we don’t have the material conditions that people do inside and I think… in my most recent conversation with Bennu, he talked about how one, for the people… the immigrants, who are suing GEO Group that they should be extracting their labor for the system as they’re suing. He actually said that their lawyer should be recommending that, right, if the lawyer believes what’s going on is a violation of federal law, then why wouldn’t he tell them not to work anymore? 

And I think obviously a lot of the people that are involved in that case are formerly incarcerated there, so they’re not still there and I think that’s an interesting thing and I think that hunger strikes are an important aspect and you just looked at what happened in Palestine, where they had a very successful hunger strike. I feel like hunger strikes in America are so hard because they’ll force feed you, they will… there was one that went on in Mississippi earlier this year and the state had a policy that they wouldn’t recognize a hunger strike until someone’s been on it for like sixteen days or something like that and it’s just like, it’s like how disgusting is that? You have to strike… 

Brian: It’s terrible. 

Jay: … you have to not be eating for long enough to probably kill yourself before somebody will recognize that you’re on a hunger strike. The hard part is that you’re always against this just overwhelming power and control of the state. To the people that are incarcerated that resist, I don’t know how anyone cannot be moved by what they do because I think that, you just face every… it’s the most fascist environment that any of us can imagine and yet, they stand up to it. And they stand up to it knowing that they are going to be brutally punished for it, but that just tells you how bad it is, right? If 24,000 people are willing to risk torture to raise their voices against something, then I think that’s a strong message right there and I think in terms of the future, I think there will be more labor strikes, I think there will be more rebellions, there will be more hunger strikes. We have seen a lot of this year really, it just hasn’t been reported as much, all of that is going to continue. 

I’ll be interested to see what happens in August this year. Black August is always a month of resistance for incarcerated people, which is a connection back to George Jackson. That will be interesting, along with the march, because I know that people inside are planning actions as well, you know, and obviously I don’t know much about what those are nor would I want to tip their tactical hands and I really hope that the march is a really successful event. I think… I’m always kind of disgusted about how many people on the outside really care about this serious level beyond the types of reforms that you guys have talked about over the course of the series. 

Kim: I… a number of things that I’m thinking and the first one, and I jotted a note to myself here so that I wouldn’t forget it, has to do with your points about what happened at Vaughn and the report that just came out and the one thing that came to mind when I read that report were the words of Margot Harry and she wrote a wonderful book based on her piece back in I think 1986, 1987 it came out, called “Attention, Move! This is America” and she said in describing the aftermath of the bombing of the homes on Osage Avenue, she said, “There’s more than one way to whitewash an investigation.” You can give the appearance that you’re doing, conducting an investigation, but we already knew the conclusions and I actually outlined those, not just on Twitter, long before an investigation was announced. 

The investigation was happening the minute that quote unquote “rebellion” started, right? And that aside, you brought up and you’ve gone back to Du Bois and Du Bois is someone that I’ve looked to over the years for wisdom, insight on the history of what we’re dealing with today and looking at it on a continuum, as you’ve pointed out, and the one thing that I will encourage folks to read of Du Bois is “Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia,” and this is one of the papers published under “The Atlanta Papers” that he published in 1904 and I’ll just read a quick excerpt on this because he’s talking about prison and prison labor under the convict-leasing system in the South and he says: 

“The result of this was a sudden large increase in the apparent criminal population in a Southern states—an increase so large that there was no way for the state to house it or watch over it even had the state wished to. And the state did not wish to. Throughout the South, laws were passed authorizing public officials to lease the labor of convicts to the highest bidder. The lessee then took charge of the convicts, worked them as he wished under the nominal control of the state. Thus, a new slavery, a slave trade was established.” 

And there’s… that paper right there really sheds light and places this in that historical timeline in a way that very few historical accounts of that time have been able to achieve because it’s so clear, it’s specific and there’s so many parallels. We’re not saying these things are exactly alike. We’re saying that they inform one another and that there’s a throughline that we can draw from then up until now and the resistance piece of it is one of those things that really stands out for me because, as you said, people are willing to resist knowing that they will face some serious consequences. And they do it anyway, right, and while it’s easy for us outside to say, “How can there not be solidarity with prisoners?” and I know from talking to a lot of people inside that it can be difficult, it can be difficult to express solidarity because they, the iron fist of the state via their COs, their very repressive rules, and what have you makes it so that people want to distance themselves from what they consider to be the troublemakers on the inside, even if they recognize that the state is this really horrible, oppressive thing, right, that they don’t to be on the side of, that it makes their life really difficult because when a facility gets wind of any hint of resistance, they will concoct any of kind nonsense just to crack down on other people, even if those people had nothing to do with the resistance movement internally. And they use that as the way to shut down any further resistance and to intimidate people who might not have been part of the movement, but who they can exploit. 

So there’s so many different ways in which this operates and I want give folks as robust an understanding of this as we possibly can with this short time that we have available to us for this conversation, so that they don’t walk away thinking like, “This is a really kind-of clear-cut and simple thing,” because it’s not, if people are wrestling and they’re… they’re wrestling with this because it’s really difficult and if you have a case, if your case is coming up, you know, for… in front of the court, if there are other circumstances happening in your life, all of that stuff factors in, so it’s not just that people inside are like, “Everybody’s onboard and they’re not,” and I’m not going to say that it would be great if they were, because we know that movements don’t require everybody to be on board, you can have a small number of people having a huge impact, right, which may encourage or embolden other people, who are afraid and rightfully so, because they think that speaking to that fear is an important part of this broader conversation because you know, even the people who are participating, actively participating and organizing inside do express fear and you know, it’s like, “Of course, they do, because they are human beings.”

Jay: Absolutely. That’s all really good and I just want to clarify for a second and I think the solidarity that needs to have more is on the outside. I mean obviously it’s great if more prisoners are involved, but there are so many barriers, and they face so much repression and violence, we shouldn’t be asking that of them. 

Brian: (starts speaking)   

Jay: Go ahead.

Brian: I’m sorry. I think the solidarity from the outside piece is important. I don’t think it should overshadow in any way the resistance and the efforts of people on the inside, but I do think that there are some people, who are listening, who are wondering, “How can we get involved?” or “How can we help?” because it is a tremendous burden for incarcerated people to bear on their own.

I think one of the things that you brought up, which is a really great point, is the point about the ‘Fight for $15,’ so I really appreciate that. I also think that maybe you could talk a little bit about, just briefly, during the September 9th labor strikes, what people were doing on the outside that was effective. I’m thinking particularly of the phone zaps. 

Jay: And I want to say, too, this is something that I think that our social media age fails in because I think people are afraid to pick up the phone. I think one of the important things to do is to do call-ins and to make sure that the state knows that as many people are watching their behavior as possible and I know, like right now, that Prison Abolition, Prisoner Solidarity (PAPS) is doing some phone zaps about Rashid Johnson, who’s a prison activist that has had his typewriter stolen, I think, and some of his other items and he’s already in solitary and has been there a long time for his own advocacy and I know that Keith Malik Washington is another one in Texas that faces a lot [of repression]. 

I know that the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) folks like Kinnetic Justice, Bennu, Hassan in Ohio, which you’ve written about a number of times, Brian, so all of these people, there are people, who are raised, and they’re often not just political prisoners and I kind of hate that designation because I think that everybody’s a political prisoner if they’re incarcerated, but… 

Kim: Mhmm, mhmm.

Brian: Definitely. 

Jay: … but there tend to be activists that the state is actually actively repressing and so you know, one of IWOC’s strategies is to support people calling in, to, and they usually have scripts and I know that Prison Abolition, Prisoner Solidarity (PAPS) is one organization that has those, IWOC does them…

Brian: and IWOC is I W O C… 

Jay: Yeah, it’s the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World and so, basically the idea is to let, to have as many people as possible to call the state, the governor, the wardens, and tell ‘em, “Hey, we’re aware of what you’re doing here and we want you to back off and give them their typewriter back,” or whatever the situation is. I mean, I think there is always a little bit of danger that it’s putting more of a target on their back, but I think that the reality is, the target is there and they’re within this tremendously repressive situation and the more that people stand up and express some solidarity there, at least people know that there are people on the outside that care about this individual and it just kinda puts the lens back on them a little bit… 

Kim: Absolutely. 

Jay: … which is important, that they’re the ones that are doing something wrong. And I think that another thing that people do, which I think is great, actually, even though it’s a small thing, is like noise demos outside of jails and prisons and that happened in several places during the strike and I think it’s great because I think if you can get outside of a prison and the prison can hear you, as resistance is going on inside, it seems like a small thing, but I think that means a lot to a lot of incarcerated people, if they see that type of solidarity from folks on the outside and again, it’s this expression that sort of shows the jail or the prison or the detention center, there’s people that care about what’s going on to people on the inside. 

So, some of those things, the impact of those is hard. I also think boycotts are interesting, but I think we need to get more strategic about boycotts, if we are going to do them. I think the prison guard issue at Holman was interesting during the strike, in terms of the sort-of sick/outs that started to happen there, which is obviously problematic because you really can’t align the interests of incarcerated people with prison guards, because they’re so antithetical to one another, but I think that it is interesting because one of the things that we are seeing right now in response to a lot of resistance is “We need more guards,” “We need better systems of repression basically.” 

I think the degree to which you can discourage people from even participating in that type of labor, you know, and trying to figure a way to get them out of it into something else, and that labor, I mean, participating in being a prison guard, is good because the reality is even though that may make the conditions at that prison a little less good and they’re horrible and it may make them worse in the short-term, prison has to become an unsustainable thing. That is an important piece of resisting it, is it has to get smaller, it has to… we’re not going to abolish prison overnight, as much as we would all like to and think that’s the best thing morally, it’s not going to happen and so, anything that you can do to sort of whittle away the power and the control of the state is good and I think that I saw somebody recently say that how… trying to make an argument that more prison guards is better for prisons and I just fundamentally disagree with that, even though I recognize that I’m not incarcerated, but I think that you have more officers of repression, tighter control, and I think this is on a separate topic, but I just want to say something on this quickly because Kim reminded me of it earlier, is in terms of thinking about things that the state does and types of work that they give prisoners, I think this is a particularly interesting piece. 

In South Carolina last year and I’m sure that they’re still doing it, one of the things that Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS) was speaking out against is that they would make certain prisoners or they would give certain prisoners the job of being guards themselves. So, they would actually, which is illegal in most places, it’s probably illegal in SC where they were doing it, but they would actually bestow guard duties upon incarcerated people and if they refused to do it or they didn’t do it well, they would shut down visitation for the whole prison, you know, and so they’re basically creating this environment where you have to do become an agent of the state and against… pitting prisoners against one another. It led to people getting stabbed, it led to fights of course…

Kim: It’s their own little Stanford prison experiment in prison!

Jay and Brian: Absolutely. 

Kim: You know?! And you said, “doing it well…” defining “well” is being as oppressive as you possibly can, right? So coming up and concocting all sorts of ways to torture your fellow prisoners and that’s how they define “well” and I think that that’s a really good point to touch on because what we see often times in response to not just prison rebellions, but any kind of resistance behind bars is that the call for increased security, that more COs, more corrections officers will led to better security, better conditions inside of prisons. Let’s be real clear here. The conditions are shitty already. More COs does not make that, improve that condition or those conditions by any stretch. If anything what it does, how they’re defining, they, not us, are defining “better conditions” is to say that there are fewer disruptions or opportunities for people to organize and to resist the apparatus of oppression here. So that’s how they’re defining better conditions. Better conditions never has anything to do with responding to requests, demands, of prisoners, it never has anything to say about the human rights of prisoners. 

Everything becomes about what is good for the state, right, and we saw this this past week with that report that we keep going back to, right? Everything had to do with security, right? Of course, if you hire more people, more people to do what, which is your point, Jay. (Jay agrees.) And I think that if we take this a little bit further and we look at often times where many of these facilities, these prisons, I gotta stop saying facilities, it’s a horrible habit (laughs), but many of these prisons are located, the ways that these communities, often rural communities, have been sold on the idea that the prison is a good thing for them economically, that it’s going to provide jobs, but what we find in a lot of cases is a mismatch because many of the jobs are not occupied by people who live in the various surrounding communities. In some cases, they are, but in a lot of cases, people are commuting sometimes 40 minutes, an hour or more to get there just to work because there’s nothing there and they don’t want to live there, right? So I think there’s… when we’re doing about that and I think that’s part of the bigger conversation on prison labor is we have the prisoners’ labor being used here and not to conflate the two and then on the other side, you have the COs, medical staff and all of these other people and I like what you said about discouraging people from taking these jobs, right, that often times, it’s like, I struggle with the idea of being a medical health professional working inside of a prison and doing things like what was done to Maya’s [Maya Schenwar’s] sister, forcing labor on someone, like how do you do that? 

Brian: Yeah, I think about that all of the time. The medical ethics. Yeah.

Kim: How do you do that as a doctor? How do you do that as a doctor? How do you cosign that kind of torture? 

Brian: Yeah, how as a medical professional do you even do rounds in a prison and not object to the suffering of their environment that you’re trying to treat them in the entire time? 

The last thing that I just… going back to Jay’s point about dissuading people from working in these jobs, in service of that, it’s important to point out that there have been studies that people that work in correctional environments, corrections officers have high rates of suicide, of alcoholism, they don’t have… they usually have low to no benefits and wages. These are toxic jobs and not to in any way compare the struggles of incarcerated people to their masters, but just in service of making these jobs obsolete. 

Kim: I just want to say thanks, Jay, I appreciate your input on this and talking with you and I look forward to many more conversations. 

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. It was great to be with you guys!

Brian: And you can find Jay on Twitter @jaybeware. We encourage you to read his piece on Shadowproof.com, entitled “Lawsuit May Serve as Template for Challenging Forced Immigrant Labor in Private Prisons.” As always, don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Facebook and on Twitter @Beyond_Prison. You can follow me @bsonnenstein and you can find Kim @phillyprof03. Email us at beyondprisons@gmail.com. Please rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes and Google Play. Thanks to everybody out there listening and thanks to Jay for speaking with us today.