Prisoners making license plates is a popular stereotype, but most of the nation’s 800,000 incarcerated workers hold jobs more similar to those on the outside: They cook and serve food, mop floors, mow lawns, and cut hair.
Unlike other workers, though, the incarcerated have little say, if any, in what jobs they do. They face punishment if they refuse to work and are paid pennies per hour—if that.
The nation’s racial reckoning of the past few years has prompted a reevaluation of penal labor as a legacy of slavery, spurring people to question whether incarcerated people should be required to work in 2022. Activists are pressing for an end to work requirements or, if they continue, for higher wages.
Among the proponents of fully voluntary work in prison are the American Civil Liberties Union and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago’s School of Law. The groups released a report in June calling, among other recommendations, for the elimination of any laws and policies that punish incarcerated people who are unwilling to work.
Other groups and lawmakers insist it’s appropriate to require prisoners to work to maintain prison facilities.
“We still have to run our prisons,” California state Senator Steve Glazer, a Democrat, said in an interview. “We need hygiene, kitchen service, and groundskeeping to keep our prisons going. Those are all appropriate work elements to being in prison.”
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