‘As many hours of faithful labor in each day and every day’

Florida prisons and unpaid state inmate labor were shaped by slavery.

Even 50 years after abolition, slavery’s remnants were explicit in the state’s nascent correctional institutions. In 1919, an official state correctional report claimed “the negro constitutes a very large percentage of Florida criminals, and the same is true of other Southern States.”

“The negro as a class has a dull or poorly developed moral sense, and lacks mental activity,” the report continued, “but, as a rule, he is a more docile prisoner than the white man.”

Today, the handful of states that have unpaid prison labor are Southern, with majority black or close-to-majority-black prison populations.

“You can trace all prison labor policies to the period of emancipation,” said Sam Sinyangwe, a data scientist and activist who studies race and prison labor. “Florida was one of the worst states not only in terms of the proportion, but the fact that they’re required to work.”

Sinyangwe pointed to the Florida state law on inmate labor, which mandates that “the department shall require of every able-bodied prisoner imprisoned in any institution as many hours of faithful labor in each day and every day during his or her term of imprisonment as shall be prescribed by the rules of the department.”

The Department of Corrections highlighted the same passage in its defense of the work squad program.

But the community work squad program is also distinct from the general rule that prisoners are expected to work no matter their station. The squads are filled with low-custody prisoners nearing release,not convicted on sex offenses, who go “outside the wire” and work in plain sight of mostly rural communities.

The Department of Corrections has used different reasoning to illustrate the purpose of work squads in the past decade, sometimes describing it as a way to save taxpayer money, and at other times claiming it helps inmates learn work skills.

The stated objective of the latter, however, did not add up for Sinyangwe.

“If [job skills] were the goal, how is the type of work that folks are overwhelmingly doing aligned with that?” Sinyangwe said. “If you are picking vegetables or doing trash pickup, how is that going to reintegrate you into society?”

Departmental policy and state law changes would help achieve that goal, however, according to Sinyangwe. At the state level, lawmakers could help eliminate obstacles preventing people released from prison from getting gainful employment, he said. At the prison policy level, Sinyangwe said inmates should be compensated for their time and Department of Corrections should realign work programs to teach job skills useful in the outside world.

Florida’s state prisons do offer some vocational degrees, but those are taught in lieu of a work squad assignment.

One real incentive for prisoners on work squads is that they can receive up to 10 days of “gain time” reduced from their sentences each month for participating in work programs and good behavior. But that is capped due to a state law mandating all prisoners serve at least 85 percent of their sentences.

“They try to say that you’re working for your gain time, you’re working for your days, but the state of Florida said I have to do 85 percent of my time,” said Jamaal Little, who has also been struggling to get a job since being released from RMC Work Camp.

And while prison work squads don’t provide for degrees or certificates, they do take advantage of skills prisoners already have.

Chad Brown, for instance, had learned how to weld before serving his second prison sentence. He was incarcerated at Reception and Medical Center work camp, where he first welded for the Department of Corrections, then moved to a shop outside the gate, working for Union County.

Brown said he made laundry carts and 600-pound metal doors for the prisons, to be used in the Mental Health Unit. The doors, he said, had to be tight to the point that even a dental floss couldn’t fit through the cracks. Brown and other prisoners spent six months building about a dozen of them, he said. For the county, Brown said he worked mostly on dumpster rebuilds.

Like all prisoners interviewed by the Times-Union, Brown thought he should be compensated for his work. He cited the difficulty in getting a job after doing his time, and the fact that prisoners who had $100 or more on their bank accounts at any point in the last six months no longer get any money upon leaving prison.

“They used to give you $100 and a bus ticket,” Brown said. “Now, they just give you a bus ticket.”

Nicole Cataland contributed historical research to this report.