Like many who fall afoul of the law, Tarra Simmons was born and raised in a taxing household environment from which few would succeed. She dropped out of school at 13 and gave birth at 15. In 2011, she was sentenced to 30 months in prison for several charges. It was in prison that, under threat of solitary confinement, she says was coerced into working for cents per hour.
After cleaning up her act, obtaining a law degree, and establishing a nonprofit to help ex-convicts, Simmons was elected to the Washington State House of Representatives in 2020. Tapping her experience as a former inmate worker, Simmons sponsored the Real Labor, Real Wages Act earlier this year that would raise inmate income to the state’s minimum hourly wage. Washington’s current hourly wage floor is $15.74. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that about 1.2 million people are incarcerated in state and federal prisons, and that nearly two-thirds of those incarcerated are workers – with many paid nothing for their work. The U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, at about 664 per 100,000 people. (Here are 23 famous cases of wrongful imprisonment in America.)
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