By Bryce Covert
Published July 30, 2024
Businessweek, Bloomberg.com
Original article can be found here: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-last-american-anti-slavery-campaign/?embedded-checkout=true
At least two states will vote this fall on whether to end forced labor for prisoners. Advocates have their sights set on a bigger goal—ending this exception to abolition in the US Constitution.
Jared Graham was charged with second-degree murder at age 16. He was tried as an adult and four years later was sentenced to life without parole by an all-White, nonunanimous jury. (Graham is Black.) He arrived at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, in 2010 at age 21 but looking younger—scalp buzzed, no trace of hair on his cheeks. Almost immediately, he was required to work in Angola’s massive fields, planting and picking crops. The prison sits on 18,000 acres of land, an area larger than the island of Manhattan, and houses close to 4,000 men. Soon enough, Graham says, he wanted to die.
Some days he was given a hoe or a blade and ordered to cut grass down to the dirt. Others he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees between rows of vegetables and pull weeds. On harvest days he was given a certain number of sacks, perhaps a dozen, and told to fill them by hand. Okra, which is covered in tiny bristles, was one of the worst crops to pick. “It feels like you have fiberglass in your skin,” he says. In the heat, with indexes reaching above 100F, dust covered his eyes and mouth. In the cold, his hands froze in wet gloves.
Guards on horseback frequently fired guns in the air to demand that prisoners work faster, stay on their assigned plots or work in straighter lines. Anyone who wasn’t moving fast enough might lose his commissary or visitation privileges. More than once, Graham says, he was put in solitary confinement for not working fast enough. One day early on, a guard kept hassling his section, saying the men weren’t working fast enough and demanding to examine the okra they were picking. “I kind of just had it, and I asked him, ‘Why you keep messing with us?’ ” Graham says. One of the guards cocked his gun and pointed it at him, then he was handcuffed and put in solitary.
For all this work, Graham says, he received no pay. Technically, he was eligible for a measly 2¢ an hour, but he says he signed away his right to compensation at the outset of his sentence because he’d been told it would reduce the amount of time he served. He learned, however, that the nature of his conviction left him ineligible.
Graham recalls the farm line as the hardest part of his long years at Angola. “It’s just against any and everything of your natural instincts,” he says. He’s clear on what he thought this forced labor made him: “a slave.”
The US abolished slavery in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Its first of two sentences reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The exception is smack in the middle: Convict someone of a crime, and they can legally be made a slave. And they aren’t afforded important rights and protections that they’d have as employees on the outside.
“It is forced labor. It is slavery,” says Lydia Wright, associate director of civil litigation at the Promise of Justice, an advocacy nonprofit. “There’s no real choice.” About two-thirds of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons across the country work, and three-quarters report being forced to work or else to face punishment such as solitary confinement or the loss of vital privileges. Terrance Winn, who spent 30 years at Angola, remembers being sent to solitary 13 times, one time for over a year, for refusing to pick cotton in the fields. “I’m nobody’s slave,” he says. Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with nine other people who were currently or formerly incarcerated in Louisiana prisons, and nearly all described the work as slavery.
The Louisiana Department of Corrections didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment on a detailed list of questions, facts and allegations. In the past, it has said that prison work, including Angola’s farm line, provides skills that incarcerated people can use when they get out, while acknowledging that budget constraints limit its other educational and rehabilitative programming. It has also said that Angola provides ample water and water breaks at job sites. In response to a recent lawsuit brought over Angola’s farm line, the state said, “It is well-settled that inmates may be required to work as a part of their sentence, and that such a requirement does not violate any prohibition against slavery contained in the Thirteenth Amendment.” It added that courts have also found that forcing people to work without pay “does not constitute involuntary servitude in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.”
In the past few years, the legal status of some incarcerated workers has started to shift. Starting with Colorado in 2018, voters in a handful of states elected to change their constitutions, eliminating crime exceptions that mirrored the federal one. With advocates advancing the idea across the country, similar measures could soon appear in more than a dozen states. Some have also started a campaign to alter the US Constitution.
On its face, it doesn’t seem complicated: Slavery is morally wrong. And yet, today’s abolitionists are encountering hurdles that demonstrate how entrenched forced labor is. Angola is but an extreme example.
“Almost all” prison work is “maintaining the prison itself in some capacity,” according to Michael Gibson-Light, a professor of sociology at the University of Denver and author of Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison. Taking it away, he says, “would mean a very quick and dramatic change to the way the whole system has to operate.”
“I made these people millions of dollars, and they paid me peanuts”
After the 13th Amendment was ratified, states ramped up the practice of convict leasing, which entailed renting out arrested people to private businesses for jobs such as farming plantations, laying rail track and mining coal. To ensure a steady stream of Black bodies, states passed laws known as “Black codes” for crimes such as vagrancy and “malicious mischief.” According to a contemporary Louisiana lawmaker, the idea was to get “things back as near to slavery as possible.” By the 1870s, more than three-quarters of the state’s leased convicts were Black; when their sentences ended, they received $5 for their labor, no matter how long they’d served. In 1880, Louisiana additionally enshrined in its constitution that juries could convict criminal defendants with only nine of 12 jurors in favor.
During this period, the state leased convicts to former Confederate officer Samuel Lawrence James, who owned the Angola plantation and made millions from their labor. In 1901 it bought him out, turning Angola into the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and kept the forced work in place. “The only thing that really changes is where the payments go,” says Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. “They go directly to the legislature.” The work and the prison grounds don’t look very different today, either. Burl Cain, the warden at Angola for two decades starting in the mid-1990s, described it in a 2009 documentary as “like a big plantation in days gone by.” (He added: “We hate to call it that, in a way, but it kind of is.”)
Graham’s mother, Charise Amos, left Louisiana shortly after Graham was sentenced and today lives in a one-story ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac lined with similar homes in Jackson, Mississippi. Sitting at a huge, round glass table in her kitchen, she leafs through stacks of family photo albums. In the pictures, Graham develops from a squishy baby in a bonnet to a wide-smiling kid blowing out candles on a birthday cake. In one of the last photos taken at home, he’s a baby-faced teen in a suit. The next, dated July 2011, depicts him sitting next to Amos and his older brother in front of a colorful painted background of trees and a waterfall—the visiting room at Angola. From then on, the photos all look the same. Graham grows into adulthood against a smattering of fake scenery.
The first time Amos arrived at Angola to visit her son, she was appalled. Just past the gates, flat fields sprawled out, extending as far as the eye could see, save for some that ended at distant woods. From the bus that drove her to the area where her son was housed, she watched White guards on horses patrolling rows of Black men in white shirts and jeans bent over, harvesting crops by hand. “It just reminded me of something that I had only seen on television,” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe this kind of stuff is still going on in the 21st century.’
“It’s just something that breaks your heart,” she adds. “You never really get used to it.”
Charise Amos, Jared Graham’s mother, at her home in Jackson, Mississippi.
All men at Angola except those on death row or in medical units for serious conditions are required to work the farm line for at least 90 days without any infractions before they can get a different job. The waitlists, for either a different job or an educational program such as GED classes, can stretch for years. (As of 2012, just 1% of Angola’s budget went to rehabilitation programs.) And people can be sent back to the fields for any infraction.
Graham managed to get moved, for a few months at a time, to jobs doing groundskeeping or keeping an eye on people on suicide or homicide watch. But frequent write-ups meant that, in his estimation, he spent seven or eight of his 11 years at Angola in the fields.
The men toiling there are roused in the wee hours of the morning with a yell of “work call” and forced to walk as much as a mile to reach the site, carrying their tools on their shoulders and arriving sweaty and parched before they start. The fields are filled with practically every fruit and vegetable imaginable, from cauliflower to watermelon. Corn and soybean fields are farmed for both food and fuel. In 2021 and 2022, men incarcerated at Angola harvested almost 3,000 acres’ worth of corn, cotton, grain sorghum, soybeans and wheat.
In past decades, people incarcerated at Angola also farmed cotton and sugarcane. Randall Warren, who arrived at Angola in 1973 at age 19, was forced to pick cotton and dig ditches. It was freezing the first day he had to work in the fields, but he wasn’t given extra clothing for warmth. “No boots, no nothing,” he says, the words forced out Prisoners in the fields at the Louisiana State Penitentiary of Angola in 2002, Photographer: Alec Soth/Magnum Photos sobs. He adds in a whisper, “It was horrible.” He eventually spent 20 years in the fields.
Men stay out for hours and may not get breaks other than to eat lunch. Most areas don’t have bathrooms and there are no port-a-potties, so they often relieve themselves in the fields. There’s little shade, often too little water, and no sunscreen. In Louisiana, prisoners get no pay the first three years, then can earn between one-fiftieth of a cent to 20¢ an hour. It’s the fourth-lowest-paying state. “I made these people millions of dollars, and they paid me peanuts,” says Gary Childers, who spent 12 years working in the fields at Angola decades ago for 4¢ an hour.
Thanks to the 13th Amendment and subsequent legislation and court rulings, people in prison lack benefits and protections most Americans take for granted. The minimum wage doesn’t apply. There’s no workers’ compensation for someone who gets injured or sick. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has no jurisdiction to ensure safe working conditions, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can’t enforce antidiscrimination laws. Whistleblowers who raise alarms about safety violations get no protection. People inside prisons have no right to unionize or strike and can be punished if they try. In 1991, according to a book by a former Angola prisoner, dozens of welders there refused to build a lethal injection gurney. Hundreds of people on the farm line joined them in striking. Many were put in isolation and hundreds received disciplinary reports before the incident was resolved with the workers not being required to build the gurney.
Over 80% of incarcerated people in state and federal prisons report doing work that maintains prisons, such as cooking, serving meals, doing laundry and cleaning. “Most of it has to do with essentially reducing the state’s costs,” Gibson-Light says. The first statutory purpose of Prison Enterprises, the profit-making arm of the Louisiana Department of Corrections that runs Angola’s farm line, is to mitigate the cost of incarcerating people. While the Associated Press recently found that some goods produced at Angola ended up at big food brands, the majority of its products and services go to the Department of Corrections itself—nearly 60% between 2016 and 2018. Another 23% went to other state agencies, and about 4% to local governments.
The scale of unpaid or extremely low-paid prison work means that if states had to pay minimum wage or higher, the system would buckle under the cost. Seven states pay incarcerated people nothing at all for most jobs; the average minimum wage across states is 13¢, and the average maximum wage is 52¢. Incarcerated people produce more than $9 billion in services every year for the maintenance of their prisons. “The labor costs alone would be more than any single state budget could handle,” Gibson-Light says.
He notes, too, that only “a small handful of jobs” fulfill the idea of either giving people skills they can use upon release or providing them with enough money to afford basic necessities. Instead of training kitchen workers as cooks, for example, workers do things as simple as wrapping slices of bologna in plastic. Nor are fieldworkers at Angola taught agricultural skills such as crop planning or tending.
Calvin Coleman was forced to work in the fields as soon as he entered prison, first at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, Louisiana, which grew cotton and vegetables, and then in Angola’s fields. He says he immediately recognized this as slavery, and he’s been organizing to end it while incarcerated. In 2018 he took part in a strike at Angola that called for an end to forced labor. “I’ve been with it ever since,” he says. For him and others fighting with him, the battle isn’t just to improve labor conditions in prisons. It’s to ensure no one is made to work.
Kamau Allen’s first job after graduating from college in 2017 was with an organization fighting to eliminate the slavery exception in Colorado’s constitution. Voters had narrowly rejected a ballot proposal to remove an exception for crime from the state constitution in 2016, but in 2018 they approved it decisively, making Colorado the first state to take such a step. Allen and others then founded the Abolish Slavery National Network (ASNN) to export the lessons learned to other states. Nebraska and Utah voters followed Colorado’s example in 2020, as did voters in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont in 2022.
The abolition movement notched these victories when the conversation centered solely on the morality of permitting slavery. Since then, however, advocates have run aground on a thornier question: If incarcerated people aren’t slaves, are they due better working conditions and pay? And if so, what will it cost? A constitutional amendment to remove the crime exception failed to go before California voters in 2022 after the governor’s office warned it would cost $1.5 billion a year if prisoners had to be paid minimum wage.
Kamau Allen in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in 2024.
What’s more, says Valerie Collins, an attorney at the nonprofit law firm Towards Justice, after Colorado eliminated its exception, “literally nothing changed.” Four months after the amendment passed, a member of Allen’s church told him his nephew was still in prison and asked “why he’s still being forced to work against his will,” Allen recalls. “I didn’t have an answer.” More than 14,000 incarcerated people in the state were written up for failing to work between 2019 and late 2023. Towards Justice filed a lawsuit in 2022 on behalf of men incarcerated in Colorado prisons, arguing that the state is violating the law. “A state-imposed requirement that incarcerated people labor is inherently coercive,” the lawsuit argues, meaning it “replicates the condition of slavery.”
The state has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, but it’s still pending, and in the meantime the plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to make the Department of Corrections end forced-labor requirements—something Collins says Democratic Governor Jared Polis could do at any time. (Polis and the Colorado Department of Corrections declined to comment.) The suit doesn’t contemplate what, if anything, incarcerated workers are owed for their labor. All of the case law developed around defining forced labor has relied on federal law, which always had the crime exception. A 2020 suit demanding that people incarcerated in Colorado be paid minimum wage and receive the same benefits as state employees was thrown out.
Shortly after voters in Alabama approved changing its constitution, Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed an executive order specifying that refusing prison work can result in losing three years of accrued good time. A group of currently and recently incarcerated people in Alabama is now suing the state and its agencies and officials, alleging that being forced to work for government agencies and private businesses amounted to being trapped in a modern-day convict leasing program. They say it violates federal and state human trafficking and discrimination laws and contravenes Alabama’s recently changed constitution. (Alabama officials and other defendants in the case have filed motions to dismiss; a filing from the state argues that its policies uphold the law. Businessweek wrote about the suit here.)
This year, Allen’s network is supporting ballot measures that will go before voters in California and Nevada, as well as possible ones in Michigan and New Jersey, and they have active campaigns to get ballot measures in 12 other states—Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin—and in Washington, DC. New York lawmakers are additionally considering legislation requiring incarcerated people be paid minimum wage and given basic labor protections.
In Louisiana, which has the country’s highest incarceration rate, advocates have struggled to make progress. Last year, a measure to get the issue on the ballot sailed unanimously through the state House. But by the time it got to the state Senate, lawmakers balked, worried about “unintended consequences”—meaning lost revenue, says Curtis Davis, executive director of the advocacy group Decarcerate Louisiana and author of Slave State: Evidence of Apartheid in America. Too many lawmakers, according to Davis, “say that we can’t afford to see what Louisiana looks like without codified slavery.”
Advocates are pushing forward in other ways, seeking higher wage floors for prisoners. There’s the lawsuit challenging Angola’s farm line, too, which says it violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The suit also argues that the line violates the Americans With Disabilities Act by forcing people with health conditions to go into the fields in the heat, and that anyone like Graham who was convicted by a nonunanimous jury was not “duly convicted” and therefore can’t be forced to work under the 13th Amendment. (In 2018, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment ending nonunanimous juries, though the state Supreme Court declined to make it retroactive, keeping people like Graham in prison.) A trial is set for 2026. In the meantime the state is seeking to dismiss the part of the lawsuit related to the 13th Amendment. An appeals court recently ruled that it must immediately correct “glaring deficiencies” in its heat-related work policies at Angola.
Reformers also have their sights set on the federal Constitution. Organizers launched the End the Exception campaign in the summer of 2021, as Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Nikema Williams, Democrats from Oregon and Georgia, respectively, proposed an amendment that would undo the slavery exception. By early 2023 it had garnered about 200 cosponsors, including 10 Republicans. It was reintroduced around Juneteenth last year. New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker, a co-sponsor, has also put forward legislation to ensure workplace rights for people in prison, including minimum wage and safe conditions.
Bianca Tylek, executive director of the advocacy nonprofit Worth Rises, which is managing the campaign with ASNN, doesn’t expect the amendment to pass anytime soon; the focus right now is to bring more lawmakers on board. Her dream, she says, is that it passes by 2026, at which point it would need to be ratified by three-quarters of US states. “If state campaigns win, it creates a bigger push for the federal campaign,” she says.
Tylek recognizes that even if these efforts are successful, they may not immediately improve prison workers’ lot. She calls ending the exception in the 13th Amendment “a necessary but insufficient step for creating labor rights.”
Amos holding photos of her family. Photographer: Rita Harper for Bloomberg Businessweek
graham is no longer incarcerated at Angola, and he’s no longer being forced to work. He arrived at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, in April 2023. He’d managed to get transferred after learning Elayn Hunt had a focus on education and so might offer “the best opportunity for rehabilitation.” The facility has no farm line, and Graham says not having to work in the fields has come as “a relief lifted off of me.” He’s become a certified mentor to other prisoners and has enrolled in business classes. He’s planning for a career once he’s released, though he’s sworn off physical labor for good. “I would prefer to use my mind outside of prison,” he says. He and his older brother have plans to start a trucking business.
Graham caught a break in 2012, when the US Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles—Louisiana is one of two states that mandate the sentence for second-degree murder—was unconstitutional and allowed it to apply retroactively. But his parole date isn’t until 2031.
He’s nervous about the possibility that he won’t be granted parole. Louisiana’s parole grant rate has dropped in recent years. If Graham isn’t released in 2031, he’ll have to wait two more years before he can try again.
Amos, who’s 70, prays she’ll be alive to see her son come out. “All I do is look forward to the day that Jared will be home,” she says. Choking up, she adds, hands pressed together in prayer, “That’s my greatest desire: to see him released and happy, being prosperous and successful.”
“I’m trying to do everything I can to make parole and also have a transition once I’m home,” Graham says. “I have to prepare myself any way I can.”
Written By: Bryce Covert
Published: July 30, 2024
Businessweek, Bloomberg.com
Original article can be found here: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-last-american-anti-slavery-campaign/?embedded-checkout=true
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