FREEDOM— “I am sure there was not word for freedom before slavery was invented. The old Greeks had every sort of government—monarchies, aristocracies, plutocracies, democracies—and argued fiercely about which system gave people most freedom, but all of them kept slaves. So did the ancient Roman Republic. So did the stout squires who founded the U.S.A. Yes, the only sure definition of freedom is non-slavery.”

Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

Labor abuse is practically as old as labor itself, and the maquiladora and EPZ model is only one of its more recent transformations. In the long history of forced labor that goes from outright slavery to indentured servitude and then to the deplorable conditions of the workers of the first industrial revolution, there is a particularly infamous chapter worth noting: that of unpaid prison labor. To look into how this new model of slavery became a multi-million dollar industry, it is necessary to make plain that “the United States is home to twenty-five percent of the world’s prison inmates. One out of every three African American males go to prison. More African Americans today are subject to the coercive forces of correctional control through prison, probation, or parole than were enslaved a decade before the Civil War.”¹.

This set of circumstances has led many scholars and activists to declare that the U.S. prison system, which houses a disproportionate number of African American prisoners, is nothing more than a continuation of the slavery policies that supposedly ended with the Proclamation of Emancipation (1863) and were codified in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865):

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

This exception opened the door to using the prison population as an inexpensive, involuntary work force within U.S. prisons. That this type of abuse should take place in a modern democracy might seem inconceivable but if, as Alasdair Gray argues, all forms of government have kept slaves, it is because slavery—the act of ownership that includes the power of life or death over the other—is a basic component of sovereignty (0.17). Seen thus, our time should be no exception.

Slavery as a continuum has been made possible largely because the U.S. correctional system is not composed entirely of federal prisons—that is, state-run correctional facilities—but also of private prisons that have helped turn the criminalization of specific sectors of the population, such as the African-American and Hispanic communities, into not just an ideology but a business (7.19). The massive implementation of these private prisons took place during the Reagan administration when the number of inmates of the so-called “war on drugs” rose alarmingly and it became necessary to create new detention centers to cope with the increase in prison population. Soon enough, private service providers like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)—recently rebranded as CoreCivic after a bout of controversy—soon caught up with ways to monetize the population upsurge and even colluded with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) a conservative think-tank dedicated to drafting legislation and pushing it in different legislatures to guarantee a steady flow of inmates into their prisons.

Under a logic of accumulation that takes inmates as a potential source of income, federal and private prisons have made forced labor an important part of their operation. That is how

over the decades, prison labor has expanded in scope and reach. Incarcerated workers, laboring within in-house operations or through convict-leasing partnerships with for-profit businesses, have been involved with mining, agriculture, and all manner of manufacturing from making military weapons to sewing garments for Victoria’s Secret. Prison programs extend into the services sector; some incarcerated workers staff call centers.

Seduced by a captive and extremely cheap labor force, not only Victoria’s Secret but other corporate giants such as Walmart, Unilever, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom and GEICO are subcontracting inmates for their workforce. The wages are alarmingly low:

The national average for inmates receiving the least compensation for their maintenance work in these prisons is 14 cents per hour, according to the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative. The countrywide average for those receiving the most for the same type of labor is 63 cents per hour. Inmates in Minnesota and New Jersey can receive the highest hourly rate for prison maintenance jobs: $2 per hour.³

During the height of the Covid-19 crisis, prisoners in Missouri were paid as low as 30 to 71 cents for making hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and protective gowns, wages that do not exceed those of the Asian EPZs at the beginning of the century. “Gracious and lovely ways of life,” we already quoted John Gray in this regard, “may be the offspring of tyranny and oppression, while delicate virtues may rely for their existence on the most sordid human traits.” (2.1)

Truly, mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance in keeping its humanity repressed.

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1. Hedges y Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, , 64. ↩︎
2. Whitney Benns, “American Slavery, Reinvented,” Portside, September 27, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/ ↩︎
3. Daniel Moritz-Rabson, “Prison Slavery: Inmates Are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government,” Newsweek, August 28, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/prison-slavery-who-benefits-cheap-inmate-labor-1093729 ↩︎