The Brutal History of Prison Labor

27:32As cybersecurity expert Camille Stewart-Gloster reminds us, We are in a divisive time where our comments are weaponized against us. And so what we find is a lot of Black women are standing up and speaking out because they feel the brunt of the pain. Each week we explore the tools and insights that help you move with purpose, whether you're navigating something new or returning to yourself. If you're ready for thoughtful guidance and grounded support, this is the place for you. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:21Okay, so when we left off, convict leasing was dead in the north thanks to labor unions. The South has long been considered kind of anti-worker, so labor unions never really got a foothold here. So it took a little longer for convict leasing to go away. But again, that doesn't mean that there was no such thing as prison labor. They just kind of directed them to state-owned stuff. A really good example of this is a Parchman Farm in Mississippi, part of Parchman State Penitentiary. It's a 20 ,000-acre farm where in the early 19-teens, with a 90 % black prison population, prisoners were put to work on this farm.

29:05And one of the reasons it got so famous very quickly, in addition to just the scope of what was going on, was they used a trustee system. They spelled it trustee as in T-R-U-S-T-Y, where some of the worst, most violent convicted felons that were prisoners there were given rifles and said, you guys make sure this other 80 percent of your fellow prisoners do the work the way we want them to. Yeah, that's a really interesting system. It really is. It seems risky, you know? Yeah, I wanted to look more, I'm going to look more into that just for my own edification, because I'm curious that that dynamic is, I don't know, it seems like it would create a really dodgy dynamic.

29:49It would, but it also reminded me of, what is the Quentin Tarantino antebellum slavery movie? Django Uncanny. Oh, yeah, Django. Remember he posed as a black slaver? Uh-huh. that's kind of how I took it to kind of be like yeah I think you're probably right chain gangs is something that you know you've seen in like movies and stuff like I was watching Oh Brother Where Art Thou again the other night and there was you know chain gang scenes in that and that was another type of sort of very public penal labor because they were put in place to build roads in the south in the 1920s You know, hard laboring all day, again, in the south, out in the hot sun, on that blacktop, 10 to 15 hours a day.

30:38But they were chained together. That's why they were called chain gangs. They were chained to their ankle. They stayed chained when they walked to the job. They stayed chained as they slept in their bunks that were close to one another. And, again, the conditions were abysmal. Terrible food. They were beaten. They were tortured. I think there was this one investigation. This wasn't a chain gang, but this was Tucker Farm in Arkansas, where they found that the staff stripped prisoners naked at the prison hospital and put electric shocks to their testicles and penis. Women prisoners were also subjected to work in the fields, not as much as men.

31:17They were the main labor force, but women were put to work as well. Have you ever read a beloved Toni Morrison novel? I feel like I have to say yes you should read that too if you have no I haven't read that it's very good but there's a it's mind-bogglingly good actually but it's there's a a few scenes about a chain gang and just what it would have been like one of the main characters spent time on a chain gang and I mean this is you said it was brutal work and they were building roads like a good example of what chain gangs did if you were building a road You were using like human labor to build roads.

31:56This was before they had machinery. Right. Like road building machinery. It just didn't exist. So you used human beings to do this stuff. If you ran into, say, in Georgia and you were building a state road, if you ran into a chunk of Stone Mountain that was popping up out of the ground where you wanted your road to go, well, you would just set a bunch of convicts to work on it with sledgehammers and eventually they're going to wear it down to nothing if you give them long enough and work them hard enough. That's what people did on chain gangs. That's just what life was like. And again, you were working outside, so you weren't protected in any way, shape, or form.

32:30You were fed meagerly. You were working as hard as anyone's ever worked in their life with the minimum amount of nutrition, the minimum amount of rest. And if you put all that together, especially if you think about it accumulating, that's a brutal, brutal form of prison labor. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, and it was a racist framework. I know we're talking a lot about the racism involved. There were white labor camps and stuff like that, of course, too. You know, sometimes they look like Paul Newman even. Yeah. But there was it was very much a racist framework where and the threat of violence, the threat of torture, they felt was like a necessary component to, you know, quote unquote, keeping guys in line.

33:16Yeah, one of the other things, too, is there was a certain amount of usefulness to letting these chain gangs get these horrible reputations because the reach of these things reached out beyond the inside of prisons into the outside world. because if you were black and you were looking for a job and you could be arrested for not having a job and put onto a chain gang and you knew it, you would accept all sorts of terrible working conditions and low pay because at least that was better than being put on a chain gang, which if you didn't accept this job and got caught without a job, you would end up on a chain gang anyway.

33:55That was another really kind of insidious effect that they had. Yeah, but, you know, it's not like this kind of thing was being, you know, there were no exposés being written in newspapers about chain gangs. You might drive by one, and that's how you knew they existed. But little by little, what went on with these chain gangs started to kind of leak out, especially all over the South. there are a couple of famous examples in 1932 there was a white northern veteran who was a convict obviously named robert burns he published a book called i am a fugitive from a georgia chain gang uh exclamation point that's why i read it that way uh that kind of got the word out a little bit there was a movie adaptation have you seen that i haven't seen it have you yeah really yeah it's really yeah for some reason i don't know where you found out about it but she was one of Her well-liked movies, I don't want to say it's one of her favorite, but she showed it to me.

34:51What year was that? The movie? Yeah. I thought you were asking when I saw it. 1932, I believe, or 1935, something like that. I don't watch a lot of movies from that era. But, Chuck, you should. This one, it has 8.2 on IMDb, and that's a pretty high rating. It's really good. It's a good movie. Well, in 1947, some more news leaked out when a black civil rights activist named Bayard Rustin, and I know we've talked about Bayard Rustin before. He was on a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for civil disobedience. And a series of articles that he wrote came out in the New York Post. Did you read those?

35:33I read some of I read like, you know, snippets from it just to sort of get an idea. Oh, I was just kidding. I don't know. I looked into some of it, but I didn't like sit around and read them. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, no, I was trying to get you again. I got you. But the 50s and 60s, like because of the New York Post and because of that movie that Yumi Loves came out, 50s and 60s is kind of when chain gangs basically went away. Although, you know, if you lived in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 90s, you know, they tried pretty hard. What was that guy's name? The sheriff there? Joe Arpaio. Yeah, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but he made big news a lot.

36:13And he was one of the guys trying to push for the reinstatement of the chain gangs. Did not happen, though, because, again, America lost its taste for chain gangs in the first half of the 20th century. And the idea of bringing them back was not something that you would want to do. Even beyond that, not bringing back the chain gangs, prison labor got to be more and more, or I should say less and less brutal. How about that? Because the other way I could have put it is more and more less brutal, and that just doesn't make sense. Well, we took a late break, so it wasn't too long ago, but I feel like we should go ahead and get our second one under our belt.

36:53Okay. All right, we'll be right back and talk about the modern era of mass incarceration.

37:15New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link.

37:48Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

38:23This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and on Therapy for Black Girls, we create space for honest conversations about identity, relationships, mental health, and the choices that help us grow.

39:01As cybersecurity expert Camille Stewart-Gloster reminds us, We are in a divisive time where our comments are weaponized against us. And so what we find is a lot of Black women are standing up and speaking out because they feel the brunt of the pain. Each week, we explore the tools and insights that help you move with purpose, whether you're navigating something new or returning to yourself. If you're ready for thoughtful guidance and grounded support, this is the place for you. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

39:50All right. We've covered mass incarceration quite a bit, certainly in our prisons episode. But here's a stat for you. Over a 36-year period from 1970 to 2008, the population of the United States rose by about 50 percent. And the population of incarcerated prisoners rose by 700 percent. That's crazy. So we entered the mass incarceration era big time over about a 36-year period thanks to, well, thanks to a lot, but namely thanks to Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Yeah, Nixon's war on drugs, Reagan's tough on crime thing, Clinton trying to wrestle the tough on crime, I guess, moniker away from the GOP.

40:41And I guess it was part of the Democrats platform every year until 2008 and when it was quietly removed. And not coincidentally, 2008 is the year that the peak incarceration happened, like you said. Yeah, now we're about, that went from 1.6 in 2008 to about 1.3 million incarcerated individuals in the United States now. Yeah, because America's become softer and gentler. About 600 of every 100 ,000 people in the U.S. are incarcerated. That is a higher rate than any other country in the world except Cuba, Rwanda, and El Salvador. And Louisiana, once again, leads the way at 1 ,000 per 100 ,000. And the rate for black Americans is 900 per 100 ,000.

41:28Can I talk about El Salvador for a second? Because I looked into their incredibly high incarceration rates. Sure. Do they do prison labor? I didn't check that out, but I got this other stuff about it. How about that? Sure. So they have essentially established an authoritarian crackdown on gangs. and in 2015 their their murder rate was 103 people per 100 ,000 population which means every year more than one percent of their population was murdered so they cracked down on on gangs and just started throwing everybody in jail and between 2015 and 2022 their murder rate went from 103 per 100 ,000 to 7.8 per 100 ,000, which you're like, okay, that's actually, I mean, authoritarian crackdowns on gangs and prisons is not very tasteful, but at least they got results.

42:25Here in the United States, we don't have the same excuse for that level of rise in incarceration. Our homicide rate in 1955 was 4.5. In 2024, it was like five. It's remained relatively flat, give or take a few points like here or there over the years. So there's no reason why our prison population should have increased 700%. It just, there's no reason for it. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you expand crimes, especially nonviolent crimes like drug possession and really throw the book at people, which is what happened during that time. Right. Exactly. As far as prison labor goes, most of the people in state and federal federal prison these days do some kind of prison labor.

43:13I think out of the 1.3 million-ish, that's about 800 ,000 as of a few years ago. The ones who don't are probably either too old or have some sort of disability or health problem that won't allow them to. About 80 % of those workers are working for the prison. So, you know, when you work in the cafeteria or you work in the laundry or something like that, that's about 80 % of it. And most of the rest are kind of what we were talking about earlier, government-run operations. Um, maybe you do laundry for a public hospital, maybe work in that DMV call center. Um, about 2 % of total prison workers in the federal prison system, uh, work for Unicor still.

43:56Uh, and I was curious about the whole license plate thing, you know, the sort of trope, but, uh, most of that doesn't happen at prisons anymore because it's just cheaper to have, you know, robot machinery do that kind of thing. But it's still a thing in some states. And I know Utah is one of them. It's called the UCI operation, and they call themselves plate busters. And they make them all, even the specialty like ski Utah plates and the Olympic plates and stuff like that. They're making them all still. I saw that there's like a longstanding kind of jokey observation that prisoners in New Hampshire make their license plate.

44:35And on the license plate, it says live free or die. Right. And that's actually true, and they still do today at the state prison in Concord. The prisoners in New Hampshire make those license plates. Yeah, I imagine making those and making ski Utah plates, I don't know, adds a little salt to the situation, you know? For sure. I like that saying. A little salt to the situation? Well, I didn't want to say wound. No one likes that word. No, it's not a very pleasant word. Some of these prisoners do dangerous work too, though. You know, it's not all just like sort of hourly, easy stuff. No, no. I mean, like, again, you're engaged in forced, unpaid labor.

45:16So you go where they tell you to go. I know in California, you might end up fighting wildfires. And this is one of the highest paying jobs, as we'll see. You get$2 to$5 a day plus$1 an hour when you're actively fighting wildfires in California. That's something they can make you do if you're a prisoner. Yeah. Saving the houses of the wealthy. Yeah. But not always wealthy, to be fair. Yeah. No, but there are a lot of wealthy people in California, to be sure. Yeah. Not only firefighting, disaster recovery sometimes, lead paint removal. I think there's around 5 % of the incarcerated workforce, which is about 40 ,000 people, work for private industry still.

46:01And that, a lot of times, is like the work camp that I was talking about. So they may they may work at a fast food restaurant or maybe like a work on the custodial staff at a well-known hotel chain. Yeah. And a lot of these bigger businesses have policies where they don't use leased convict labor like this. But they also sometimes can't do a thing about it. Like if their supplier part of the supply chain is that like like companies don't know who's painting the patio furniture that they're selling. Like they just don't know. And that the company painting the furniture might be using least convict labor or they their franchisees can use least convict labor in the corporate office can't do anything about it because they don't own those stores.

46:46So it still does happen, even though large corporations in the U.S. tend to have policies against that and, in fact, have policies that that they put in place to hire felons, like preferential hiring of felons. Still, it washes out to where there's plenty of least convict labor today in private businesses. Yeah. And, you know, we've talked about money a little bit here and there, like, you know, no pay. And, you know, sometimes there is pay, sometimes there isn't. There's no federal law that says that someone has to be paid for work if they're a prisoner. On the state level, it depends on the state, but, you know, a lot of them pay nothing at all.

47:27I think the average pay for a prisoner in the U.S. is 52 cents an hour, and that was like three years ago. So I doubt if it's gone up that much. Who knows? Maybe it's gone down. Almost always under a dollar an hour. You may get like minimum wage if you work one of the really hazardous jobs in a pretty forward thinking state. But then the prison can turn around and say, yeah, but we're going to take most of that paycheck to cover like room and board or maybe to provide restitution to your victims if it was a financial thing. Exactly. So like even if you're off making federal minimum wage at KFC as, you know, as a prisoner as part of your prison labor, you're ending up with pennies on the dollar per hour after they deduct all that stuff from you.

48:17So that's why that average for all prison workers is 52 cents an hour because they deduct so many things. That's why it's essentially convict leasing. That person goes out, works, they get paid, and the prison says, we're taking this X amount of your pay for our own use. That has to go into the private prison, like, financial, you know, success rate, right? Precisely. Private prisons are able to do that. They probably deduct way more. But the other problem with it, too, is that they're at the same time getting tax breaks for leasing out their convicts. to use in the outside world. So they're getting like fees and tax breaks.

48:58It's quite a racket from what I can tell. Yeah, while the basic needs a lot of times of these prisoners aren't even being met, still some pretty bad conditions as far as medical treatment goes and food. I think Olivia helped us with this. She did a great job. But she found one woman named Carla Simmons who is incarcerated in a woman's prison. And she wrote last year, and this is right here in Georgia, that prisoners aren't paid. And she said the food is so bad that people try to get work assignments where they can dig through the trash to eat the guards' meals, like the portions that they threw away.

49:34Good God. In 2024. Yeah. One of the other things, too, is that, I mean, people point to this and say, like, okay, yes, we agree that prison labor is in and of itself a good thing. Like Thomas Moore was right. Like you can, there is redemption in labor. We're not saying do away with it, but it needs a lot of reforms. These are the people who are like, well, reform-minded about the whole thing. There's basically no one saying we should do away with prison labor. But they say it should be the kind of labor that's going to help them get jobs on the outside where they learn valuable skills. They should be paid fairly, federal minimum wage at least, for the labor that they're doing.

50:17and they should also get protections that any worker gets in the United States. This to me is mind-blowing. We have workers protections out the yin-yang here in the U.S. We have OSHA. We have the Fair Labor Standards Act. All of these are meant to protect workers physically from injury and also protect them from being screwed over by their employers. And court after court after court has ruled that prison laborers do not count for these protections. They're not classified as employees because, as I saw it put, the prison owns the prisoner's labor. The laborer doesn't own their own labor. So how can an employee be in that situation?

50:58They can't. Therefore, they don't get any of these protections. Yeah. I mean, there was a lawsuit brought in Alabama in 2024 that was dismissed because they basically were like, oh, this isn't forced labor. These are mandatory chores. so it's just like depends on what you want to call it I guess in 2021 there's an international anti-slavery non-profit called Walk Free in Australia who produces what's called the Global Slavery Index and the United States is one of 17 countries that use state imposed forced labor along with China and Russia and some other places and the United States is one of the one of only six UN member states It hasn't ratified the forced labor convention of 1930, which we considered the Senate considered that in 1991.

51:47Like, hey, maybe we should sign on to this thing. And they said, no, it really, really conflicts with with subcontracting these prisoners out to private companies. So, like, let's let's not foul that. Yeah, we'll just we'll walk past that one. Yeah. And like I think you mentioned Europe and the U.N. In Europe, essentially, the way that they treat prison labor is what I was saying that in the U.S. prison labor reform people are calling for. Right. And you mentioned Alabama in that lawsuit about mandatory chores, not prison labor. The reason that lawsuit even came up is because Alabama, surprisingly, is one of seven states that in the last few years has passed in their state constitution a ban on prison labor.

52:37You're not allowed to, you can't force prisoners to work. They can. You can use prison labor, but you have to pay them and you can't coerce them with punishments. Right. Some of the punishments that prisoners face if they refuse to work, they might be transferred to a higher security prison, which is not what you want to happen to you. Their family visits may get cut. There's all sorts of punishments that can be meted out legally, except in these states under their constitution. But like you said, that lawsuit where they were like, these aren't, this isn't involuntary servitude. It's mandatory chores.

53:11Yeah. They don't have any teeth right now. Yeah, Tennessee was in there too. Sort of surprising in Nebraska. Here's, you know, finally some numbers for you. And I love it when they kind of put numbers like this, which is like, hey, if you actually spent this in the long run, it would be better for everybody. Right. I love those stats. And this is one of those. Incarcerated workers saves prison. Saves prison is about$15 billion a year and produces another$2 billion in goods and services. And so the Edgeworth Economics Group did a study, a cost-benefit analysis last year, and found that, hey, if they actually use that money to pay incarcerated workers an okay wage, like maybe even just minimum wage, it would reduce the burden on families to send money, which they don't have a lot of money to begin with.

54:03Maybe they could pay child support from prison and improve their earnings once they get out. And so they did the math and they found out in the end, every dollar spent on prisoners' wages would add up to a society-wide return of$2.40 to$3.16. Man, that's pretty good ROI just for paying prisoners. I know. I can't think of any better way to end this one, can you? I got nothing else. I thought I heard you dropped your mic even. No, no, it's still up. Okay, well, since Chuck said his mic's still good to go, I guess it's time for listener mail. It's hard to drop the mic in the studio because you've got to unscrew it.

54:48I know. I've got like a windscreen. Two things have to get unplugged, and by that time, everyone's left their room, you know. They gave you a windscreen? I didn't get a windscreen. I bought my own. I brought this from home. So who is this from? This is from Kimberly. Hey, guys, thanks for keeping me company on long work trips, during chores, and throughout my day-to-day life. I feel like I'm listening to old friends like a lot of people have said before. I appreciate how my worldview is challenged and enlightened when I listen to the show. My weekly trivia team also appreciates how I can answer some of the most random questions thanks to the random facts.

55:23And Kimberly sent in a great recommendation, how crowds work. I'd love to know more about how humans move through crowds. How do we manage to avoid bumping into each other at airports, stadiums and other crowded places? That's a great one. How do we avoid crowd crushes? I feel like we touched on that, no? We have on our Black Friday episode and a couple others. We've talked about crowd crushes. Yeah, I think maybe just crowds would be a pretty good idea. Yeah. We could work in standing in line where that came from. Is that a, is that, do people do that? I don't stand in lines. No, a lot of people do surprisingly and wait for their turn.

56:00I think is what they call it. Their turn. I'm a line jumper. You know, people love those guys. Yeah. Right. The key is to just not pay attention to anyone behind you. Pretend like they're not there. I had a guy at the airport recently. And, you know, boarding an airplane in the United States is just one of the worst things that can happen, especially after I've seen how they do it in Australia, which is to say civil and friendly. And this guy was standing behind us, me and Emily and Ruby, like in the line, really, to get on, not the crowd that goes before they announce it. And he just like all of a sudden just walked right around us and jumped in front or tried to.

56:38And I like sort of just bodied up a little bit. And you want to see an incensed human is, I don't know if it's all 10-year-olds, but my daughter, when someone tries to jump a line, she was furious. Did you see that guy? He tried to break in line. It was like almost no worse defense at that age. Was he in your shot? Did he hear her say that? Wow, I don't think so, but I repeated it loudly so Emily could hear. I said, did you hear what Ruby just said? She's calling out this guy behind us. Man, why would you do that? I don't know. It's just, I don't know. I don't know, Josh. I mean, I get the drive to get on board as fast as possible to get some overhead space so they don't check your carry-on bag because it's all you have.

57:24And you don't want to stand around waiting for it because you've got to get out of the airport as soon as possible. but you still don't walk around people that you're in line behind. I know. And we were in that sort of, you know, they do zones now. I think we were zone one or two, so it wasn't like we were at the back of the plane and it was going to be dog eat dog for that space. Yeah. Maybe he just could not wait to get some pretzels. The mustard ones. Sorry. Rant over. Was that the end of Kimberly's email too? Yeah. Great idea, Kimberly. I think we will do one on crowds eventually, and we will try like heck to remember to credit you with the idea because it was 100 % yours.

58:03That's right. If you want to be like Kimberly and give us a great idea, we love that kind of thing, you can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

58:17Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

58:33I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks.

59:12Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.

59:46Hey, everybody. It's Michelle Williams, host of Checking In on the Black Effect Podcast Network. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New year, real you. Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.