Presenter(s): Evie Blythe
Faculty Mentor(s): Noah Glusman
Poster 167
Session: Social Activism ARC
When the 13th amendment to the US Constitution was added, it outlawed involuntary servitude for almost all cases. The only exception is punishment for a crime. Today, prison labor generates massive amounts of revenue, upwards of $28 million for prisons in Oregon. Oregon passed Measures 17 and Measure 68 in 1994 and 1999 respectively. Measure 17 required that people incarcerated work 40 hours a week (with the ability to devote half that time to school or other educational purposes). Measure 68 made it so that labor done by people incarcerated could not be in a highly competitive market. Today, people incarcerated in these prisons work in laundry facilities, call centers, textile, metal, and wood shops, and various other menial tasks that both benefit the penitentiary and other companies who are allowed to subcontract prison labor. The University of Oregon contracted Oregon State Penitentiary workers to make most of the new furniture for residence halls. Incarcerated peoples get paid much less than minimum wage, some working for as little as $0.20 per hour. Our research question looked into whether or not it is constitutional and productive to society to have people incarcerated, whose numbers are racially disproportionate due to racism in other sectors of the criminal justice system, work 40+ hours for less than a dollar per hour. The working conditions and wages of prison labor constitute a form of modern slavery. We used articles posted by researchers who went into these prisons and interviewed the people incarcerated who work these jobs. The findings of their research were mixed. Some people incarcerated thought that money mattered less than receiving an opportunity to learn valuable skills and feel as though they were needed. Others voiced their concerns about being taken advantage of. Oregon Corrections Enterprises, who contracts the prison labor, said they could not afford to pay people incarcerated more, even if they wanted to. Regardless, it is still unclear as to whether or not this practice is constitutional. The practice of paying little to nothing for the work of people incarcerated feeds into the argument that mass incarceration is the Jim Crow of our era.