In 1981, at the age of 42, Bob Sloan left prison a new man. Convicted of a “white-collar crime” in 1981, Sloan went to prison in Florida to serve a ten-year sentence. There, he got a degree in architectural design and worked as a draughtsman for a company called PRIDE, a prison industries company that also focuses on rehabilitation. He’ll be the first to tell you that the work he did in prison transformed him. “When I got out of there, job placement worked with me and I got two different jobs with them. I got on my feet—got my own home, my own car. I was on probation, and got all that taken care of. [Prison labor] introduced me back into society. That was a big impact and a big help.”

While in prison, Sloan was able to pay off all $10,000 of his restitution through his work as a draughtsman. He left prison in 1990, having paid off his debt to society and having gained the ability to contribute in a concrete way through the skills he developed “on the inside.” Sloan’s experience turned him into an advocate of rehabilitation of the incarcerated through labor programs. Having gained a sizeable following on the left, he now writes a blog for Daily Kos, chronicling and investigating the issues that surround prison labor in the United States, all while working on a book about prison labor in the United States.

With 2.4 million people currently incarcerated, the United States has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. 18% of those who are in federal prisons work in some capacity; the number of employed in state penitentiaries varies since some states require that all able-bodied prisoners work, while others provide very few programs. Yet these laborers—who frequently receive wages as low as 25 cents an hour, and whose maximum wage in Federal prisons is $1.15—may be the key to many states’ budget crises. To alleviate the increased strain on public services, more and more local jurisdictions are looking to prisoners as a cheap source of labor. While it’s difficult to quantify how much inmate labor has helped budgets as it varies on a case-to-case basis, The New York Times reported that Florida managed to save $2.4 million a year by employing inmates as farmers.



But the reason that prison labor saves money is that inmates aren’t treated like the rest of the country’s labor force. Sloan, for instance, has seen a shift in prison labor since he left his program. “It’s no longer dedicated to improving skills of inmates but directed to getting the highest profits [prison labor organizations] can get.” These prisoners lack virtually all of the basic rights that Americans “on the outside” take for granted: minimum wage, worker’s compensation if injured in an accident, the right to unionize. It may seem like this is saving us money, but in fact our economy loses out because of it. Estimates vary, but some analyses show that prisoners’ potential economic output could add up to $125 to each US citizen annually, if inmates worked at the minimum wage. So not only does this present problems on basic humanitarian grounds, but the economic benefits of prison labor would be even greater if the prisoners were afforded the same working rights as America’s free population.

Prison labor has long existed in a “legal black hole,” as David Fathi of the ACLU puts it. Fathi, who directs the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told me: “[Prison labor] seems more common than it did ten or twenty years ago. And a real concern is that employers, whether they’re public or private, are naturally going to be attracted by a uniquely docile and powerless, and literally captive labor force.”