The government has long infringed on Americans’ fundamental rights and liberties under the guise of national security. From the FBI’s surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the round-up of innocent people simply because they were perceived to be Muslim after 9/11, new initiatives to address real or perceived national security concerns have inevitably and disproportionately impacted communities of color and immigrants. Over the past two decades especially, we’ve seen how domestic counterterrorism policies target Black, Brown, and Muslim communities for unmerited surveillance and investigation, trampling their freedoms of expression and association. Now the government is at it again — under a new name and a new bureaucracy — and is stonewalling our attempt to learn more about what it is up to this time around. So we’re suing.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced new measures to address domestic violent extremism, with a focus on violent white supremacy. It established a Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships and a domestic terrorism branch within the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. In its press statement, DHS described this effort as a “whole-of-society” approach, including collaboration across every level of government, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and communities.

We’ve previously explained that in responsibly addressing white supremacist violence, policymakers need to ensure that the broad powers federal agencies already have (or claim to have) do not violate the civil rights, liberties, and privacy — of all of us. DHS and other agencies have consistently viewed American communities through a threat-based security lens, targeting and harming Black, Brown, and Muslim people, as well as other marginalized communities, in the name of “national security.”

For example, the Obama administration launched a program that cast unwarranted suspicion on Muslims by utilizing a deeply flawed approach: it called on social service providers and community members to identify potentially “extremist” individuals based on vague and broad criteria that encompassed lawful speech and association. They targeted young people and schools, giving recommendations to schools on how to police for signs of radicalization, all of which undermined young people’s ability to express themselves and encouraged teachers and other students to view their peers as inherently suspicious. Under the guise of community outreach, the Federal Bureau of Investigations also targeted mosques for intelligence gathering and pressured law-abiding American Muslims to become informants against their own communities.

These programs flagged innocent behavior — such as religiosity, political activism, and mistrust of law enforcement — as indicators of radicalization. The Trump administration followed this model and created the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, raising the same acute concerns for communities of color and immigrants who were targets of that administration’s xenophobic and racist policies.

DHS’s latest efforts appear to continue these harmful programs and use similar frameworks and methods such as “threat assessments” intended to detect “risk factors for radicalization to violence,” without clear guidelines, definitions, or safeguards to protect civil rights and civil liberties. We’ve seen this story before.

Two months ago, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about these initiatives. We wanted to know DHS’s plan to safeguard civil liberties, rights, and privacy, or whether they even had one. But we’ve been met with silence. We know that further expansion of national security systems can harm the very communities they say they’re trying to help, which is why we’re asking for details. Our concerns are heightened by the fact that DHS still uses guidance that pretends to prohibit bias, but includes loopholes permitting bias-based profiling in the context of national security and immigration. This gives law enforcement express permission to discriminate on the basis of race and disproportionately target marginalized communities.

In fact, DHS has been the first to admit that its own ability to address domestic violent extremism is hampered by the fact that it has not formulated an official definition of “domestic violent extremist,” offered guidance about what constitutes domestic violent extremism, or provided training for those tasked with identifying violent extremism. This, to say the least, is a problem.

Even if the government is engaging in a good-faith effort to stanch white supremacist violence inside the United States, recycling the same abusive frameworks that have been used against communities of color for decades is not the solution. Without more insight about what DHS intends to do and why, it is difficult for the public to put stock into strategies that are all too familiar. We deserve to know more.

Our nation incarcerates more than 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, and two out of three of these incarcerated people are also workers. In most instances, the jobs these nearly 800,000 incarcerated workers have look similar to those of millions of people working on the outside. But there are two crucial differences: Incarcerated workers are under the complete control of their employers, and they have been stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse.

A new ACLU report, Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers, explores the use of prison labor nationwide. Here’s what we found:

From the moment they enter the prison gates, incarcerated people lose the right to refuse to work. This is because the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against slavery and involuntary servitude, explicitly excludes from its reach those held in confinement due to a criminal conviction. The roots of modern prison labor can be found in the ratification of this exception clause at the end of the Civil War, which disproportionately encouraged the criminalization and effective re-enslavement of Black people during the Jim Crow era, with impacts that persist to this day.

Today, more than 76 percent of incarcerated workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.

U.S. law also explicitly excludes incarcerated workers from the most universally recognized workplace protections. Incarcerated workers are not covered by minimum wage laws or overtime protection, are not afforded the right to unionize, and are denied workplace safety guarantees.

Incarcerated workers typically earn little to no pay at all, with many making just pennies an hour. They earn, on average, between 13 cents and 52 cents per hour nationwide. Wages remain stagnant for years, even decades. In seven states, incarcerated workers are not paid at all for the vast majority of work assignments.

Yet even these abysmal wages are not theirs to keep. The government takes up to 80 percent of these wages for “room and board,” court costs, restitution, and other fees like building and sustaining prisons. These wage deductions generally leave incarcerated workers with less than half of their gross pay. Workers are left with even less disposable income because prison systems charge incarcerated people exorbitant costs for basic necessities, like phone calls to loved ones, hygiene products, and medical care. Almost 70 percent of surveyed incarcerated workers said they were not able to afford basic necessities with their prison wages.

Because incarcerated workers’ wages are so low, families already struggling from the loss of income when a family member is incarcerated must step in to financially support an incarcerated loved one. Families with an incarcerated loved one spend $2.9 billion a year on commissary accounts and phone calls, and more than half of these families are forced to go into debt to afford these costs.

At the same time, incarcerated workers produce real value for prison systems and state governments, the system’s primary beneficiaries. Nationally, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion per year in goods and more than $9 billion per year in services for the maintenance of the prisons.

More than 80 percent of prison laborers do prison maintenance work, which offsets the costs of our bloated prison system. Many prison workers are assigned to general janitorial duties like sweeping or mopping, while others are assigned to grounds maintenance, food preparation, laundry, and other work to maintain the very prisons that confine them.

Another 8 percent of incarcerated workers, assigned to public works projects, maintain cemeteries, school grounds, and parks; do road work; construct buildings; clean government offices; clean up landfills and hazardous spills; undertake forestry work; and more. At least 30 states explicitly include incarcerated workers as a labor resource in their emergency operations plans for disasters and emergencies. Incarcerated firefighters also fight wildfires in at least 14 states.

State-owned businesses employ 6.5 percent of incarcerated workers and produce over $2 billion in goods and services sold to other state entities annually. Less than 1 percent of workers are assigned to work for private companies, which generally offer higher pay but are still subject to exorbitant wage deductions.

Prisons spend less than 1 percent of their budgets to pay wages to incarcerated workers, yet spend more than two-thirds of their budgets to pay prison staff. The revenues from commodities and services generated by imprisoned laborers prevent policy makers and the public from reckoning with the true fiscal costs of mass incarceration. Some government officials have even voiced opposition to efforts to reduce prison and jail populations precisely because it would reduce the incarcerated workforce.

Prison policy should not be driven by a desire for cheap labor. While prison labor is not a driving force behind mass incarceration in the United States, when incarcerated people are used for cheap labor, there is a risk that our criminal justice policy will be hijacked by the desire to grow or maintain this captive labor force.

A majority of incarcerated workers surveyed say that they received no formal job training, and many also say they worry about their safety while working. Incarcerated workers with minimal experience or training are often assigned hazardous work in unsafe conditions and without standard protective gear, leading to preventable injuries and deaths. Prisons don’t keep good records on the number of incarcerated workers injured on the job, but California reported more than 600 injuries in its state prison industry program over a four-year period. Because of poor data collection, this number likely underestimates the true impact of prison work on the health and safety of incarcerated workers.

Workplace safety and labor laws explicitly exempt prison laborers from the protections that virtually all other workers enjoy. Incarcerated people sometimes work in inherently dangerous conditions that would be closely regulated by health and safety regulations and inspectors if they were not incarcerated. Some are exposed to dangerous toxins on the job. In numerous cases we documented nationwide, injuries could have been prevented with proper training, machine guarding mechanisms, or personal protective equipment that would be standard in workplaces outside prisons.

Given the vast power disparity between incarcerated people and their employers, incarcerated workers are an exceptionally vulnerable labor force. These workers were especially vulnerable to exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic. As most of the country stayed at home, incarcerated people faced brutal working conditions. Many reported being forced to continue working and were threatened with solitary confinement and having their parole dates pushed back if they refused to work. Workers in at least 40 states were forced to produce masks, hand sanitizer, and other personal protective equipment during early pandemic lockdowns as COVID-19 tore through prisons — even as they often lacked access to these protective tools themselves. Others were forced to launder bed sheets and gowns from hospitals treating COVID-19 patients, transport bodies, build coffins, and dig graves.

Nearly a third of incarcerated people have contracted COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, and more than 3,000 have died due to overcrowding, lack of access to virus mitigating tools like masks and vaccines, and inadequate access to health care. Yet even as COVID-19 turned prison sentences into death sentences due to COVID-19, 16 states denied incarcerated essential workers early access to vaccines.

Most prison workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics — 70 percent — said the most important reason for working is to develop skills that they can use to build careers after release, but prison labor programs fail to provide incarcerated workers with transferable skills. In reality, the vast majority of work programs in prisons involve menial or repetitive tasks, and prison industries jobs and vocational training programs are declining nationwide, while maintenance jobs increasingly represent a larger share of work assignments.

Formerly incarcerated people are released with little money and face barriers to employment, including discrimination and state occupational licensing restrictions that bar people with conviction records from work in the very fields they trained in while incarcerated.

The majority of incarcerated people wish to be productive while in prison. They want, and often need, to earn money to send home to loved ones and pay for basic necessities while incarcerated. They want to acquire skills useful for employment after their release. Studies show that people who had some savings when they left prison and got jobs after their release were less likely to recidivate than those who did not.

Prison work that provides meaningful experience and skills, rather than pure punitive exploitation, is in all our best interest. Yet despite the potential for prison labor to facilitate rehabilitation, the existing system very often offers nothing beyond coercion and exploitation.

That needs to change.

We must push both state and federal lawmakers and prison authorities to eliminate laws and policies that punish incarcerated workers who are unable or unwilling to work. This will ensure that prison work is voluntary, and that people who refuse are not held in solitary or denied other benefits because they don’t want to — or can’t — work on behalf of the state.

We also need to guarantee incarcerated workers the same labor and wage protections as everyone else. This includes minimum wage, health and safety standards, the ability to unionize, protection from discrimination, and speedy access to redress when their rights are violated.

We must raise incarcerated workers’ wages and limit wage deductions. By paying incarcerated workers the state minimum wage, they will be able to pay for necessary expenses like child support, phone calls home, and commissary costs, while supporting their families and saving for eventual reentry into the society.

Prison workers deserve dignity. They should be properly trained for the work they perform, and we should be investing in programs that provide incarcerated workers with marketable skills that will help them find employment after release and eliminate barriers to employment and release.

Finally, we must push lawmakers to amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish the 13th Amendment exclusion that allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. The 20 states with similar exclusion clauses in their constitutions should also repeal them. It’s past time to end slavery in all its forms — including in prisons.

You can read the full report below, as well as explore the stories of incarcerated workers here.

https://www.aclu.org/report/captive-labor-exploitation-incarcerated-workers

It has been 157 years since the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, yet hundreds of thousands of people are still living in involuntary servitude — legally — due to loopholes in the law allowing states to extract free labor from prisons instead. Today, over 65 percent of incarcerated people report being forced to work in prison, doing jobs like firefighting and paving roads for little or no pay while governments and private companies generate billions of dollars each year from their labor.

In partnership with the University of Chicago, the ACLU conducted a study of prison labor nationwide in a new report, “Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers.”

American Civil Liberties Union

Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers

Using open records requests, analysis of state and federal laws, and extensive interviews, the report documents the realities of prison labor and outlines steps lawmakers can take to protect the rights of the roughly 800,000 incarcerated people working in prisons.

Prison labor is inherently coercive and exploitative. Incarcerated workers are not protected by standard labor laws, like minimum wages, overtime protection, the right to unionize, and workplace safety guarantees. Many workers are forced into hazardous jobs without standard training or protective gear, often under threat of punishment — such as solitary confinement, loss of family visitation, and denial of sentence reduction — if they do not comply with orders. Lives and livelihoods are completely at the mercy of the public and private entities exploiting a cheap and captive labor force.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour; in contrast, most prison jobs pay an average hourly rate of 13 to 52 cents. Deductions for taxes, court costs, and other fees can leave workers with even less. Seventy percent of laborers surveyed in the report said they could not afford basic necessities on their paltry wages. “You can barely afford laundry soap with that amount of pay,” said an incarcerated laborer in Illinois, who reported earning only $4.80 per month working as a porter. That’s one cent per hour. Some workers are not paid at all, including the majority in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas.

Prison jobs often come with substantial risks to workers’ health and safety due to lack of training, inadequate protective gear, and poor work conditions that fall far short of basic safety standards applied in all other workplaces. As a result, prison labor can result in preventable injuries and deaths. “I’ve seen a man get electrocuted by a faulty wiring,” said a woman incarcerated in Illinois, who then had to return to work the next day. “I am nothing but a number to the people I am working for.”

Working conditions have become even more dangerous due to the widespread failure to administer basic COVID-19 safety precautions and protocol in prisons, despite being hotbeds of infection. During the height of the pandemic, incarcerated workers were made to launder bed sheets from hospitals treating COVID-19 patients, transport bodies, and even dig graves — all while producing masks, hand sanitizer, and other personal protective equipment for people outside. Attempts to refuse working were met with threats to push back parole dates.

Many workers report discrimination in how jobs are assigned. “Any job outside the kitchen is given mostly to white inmates,” said Jesus, who is incarcerated in Illinois. An anonymous inmate at the same facility reported that “white inmates get the plumbing, electrician, and carpentry jobs,” which are higher-paying and help them acquire skills and experience to improve employment prospects upon release, while people of color get “none of the jobs that can actually train us to get a good job on the outside.” Such practices contribute to systemic inequities that disproportionately impact communities of color.

Despite innumerable risks and rights violations, prison labor continues to flourish because it is not only profitable, but part and parcel of the mass incarceration system. Incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused, yet only 1 percent of state correctional budgets goes to their wages. Incarcerated workers’ labor offsets the staggering costs of our country’s bloated prison system, masking the true costs of mass incarceration.

Our new report outlines a number of measures that governments can take to improve prison labor conditions and protect the rights of incarcerated people. Recommendations include:

• Ensuring all prison labor is fully voluntary by eliminating laws and policies that punish people who are unable or unwilling to work.
• Guaranteeing the same standard labor protections available to other workers in the U.S., including minimum wages, overtime pay, health and safety standards, unionization, and anti-discrimination protections.
• Instituting comprehensive safety and training programs for all prison jobs.
• Investing in programs that provide incarcerated workers with marketable skills and training to help them find jobs after release.
• Providing speedy access to redress to workers whose rights have been violated.
• Eliminating licensing restrictions and other forms of discrimination against formerly incarcerated people in hiring and employment.

Voters can take action by urging lawmakers to amend state constitutions to eliminate provisions permitting slavery and involuntary servitude; and to amend federal labor-related legislation to explicitly include incarcerated workers under the definition of “employee.” As midterm elections approach, voters should research candidates’ stances on prison labor and mass incarceration, and push them to commit to reform.