The Invisible Workforce We Need to Recognize
Labor Day has passed; a sunny holiday meant to honor the contributions of American Workers. However, a significant portion of the US labor force is left out of the celebration and conversation –- currently incarcerated workers.
The US has the highest percentage of incarcerated people in the world, and the most layered and complex prison industrial complex by far. When we talk about the problems with our prison system, we often focus on topics such as unjust sentencing and arrest patterns, unequal verdicts, and the legal and social inequities that contribute to a skewed and tilted system. But we must examine the relationship between prisons and the vendors who are profiting from prison labor - either by profiting off of the incarceration industry itself or the labor that incarcerated individuals may be engaged in while incarcerated.
As NPR reports, prison labor is a “multi-billion-dollar industry with incarcerated people doing everything from building office furniture and making military equipment to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.” Prison labor is also one of the only ways that private businesses can pay or contract transactions with the government directly, and incarcerated workers are not required to be included in official employment statistics in the same way that their non-incarcerated, government-employed peers must be accounted for. So what really is this industry, and what do we know about it?
As the Data Science Lead at FreeCap Financial, I’ve been interpreting data from state departments of corrections (or equivalents) that house 50% of the country's incarcerated population. From this analysis, I’ve noticed a massive lack of transparency when determining which vendors are on the contributing end of vending relationships (or doing business with the enterprises operated by incarcerated individuals). This is a huge problem! There is already too much secrecy surrounding what happens in America’s prisons, especially privatized institutions which have financial incentives to incarcerate and elongate the sentences of justice-involved folks. Without streamlined and regulated reporting metrics, we are forced to depend on individual institutions to self-report the amount of time, money, and manpower being used to produce goods and services, and notating where those goods and services end up being allocated in the larger economy. It is imperative that prison institutions be mandated to accurately report these metrics so we can have transparency of what’s going on in this multi-million dollar (and often under-compensated) industry.
Transparency not only creates accountability; it also recognizes the otherwise invisible labor of our incarcerated workers. While working with the data around facilities that house over half the country’s incarcerated population, over $2 billion were exchanged through vending relationships with private and non-profit correctional facilities and the Russell 1000 from 2019 to 2022. This money has a direct impact – and contribution – to the United States economy. This often forgotten workforce directly contributes to the fiscal health of our country, and deserves recognition not only on Labor Day, but every day.
Another layer of this issue is the fact that justice-involved people often struggle with community and economic support once released from incarceration. Even before the pandemic hit, formerly incarcerated individuals were unemployed at a rate of 27%, and things certainly haven’t gotten any easier in the last two years. Many formerly incarcerated folks were promised transition services intended to aid with societal reintegration upon their release, but these services often fall through. People are often left without proper paperwork, in-person training, or higher education opportunities, which severely limits employment options if physical labor is not feasible. Many companies or institutions refuse to hire the formerly incarcerated on principle, even if the position is one in which they have extensive experience.
What’s worse, even if a justice-involved person can beat the odds and find a job (and hopefully one that pays more than $30/day), they are often left without government benefits. Health insurance, a 401K, or other assets are often out of the question, and leave individuals in a terrifyingly precarious position when thinking about aging, injuries, or simply living expenses. There are an estimated 800,000 incarcerated workers today, producing about $11 billion worth of goods and services every year. That is labor, staunchly and clearly, and an immense amount of it. We owe it to the people who work for years in invisible positions, making pennies on the dollar with no benefits and no workplace protections to, at the very least, demand reports of who is profiting off of their labor.
Written by Jordan Brown
Jordan Brown is the Data Science Lead at FreeCap Financial and Founder of Alluvium Insights. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame and a M.A in Education Policy from George Washington University. Throughout his career, Jordan has managed and conducted rigorous research analyses and developed visualizations/dashboards for a wide range of clients ranging from federal government departments to small nonprofits. He is a native of Laplace, Louisiana, and is currently based out of Washington D.C.