The annual estimated value of commodities created by prison labour in the US stands at $2 billion. Prison labourers perform tasks ranging from producing hand sanitiser, to staffing call centres, to manufacturing furniture, writes BLM UK. [GETTY]
Los Angeles is a city of stark inequalities. So, some might have said that it was predictable that the worst environmental disaster in the area’s history would play out along class lines. During crises, for example, the Covid-19 pandemic, the gap between rich and poor often becomes more stark, with poor, racialised and criminalised people being exposed to the greatest level of risk.
When it was reported that over 1,100 California prisoners had been deployed to fight the fires that have continued for over three weeks, this reality felt clearer than ever. Incarcerated people, some of which are aged between 18-25, have continued to fight multiple blazes for a wage of $5.80-$10.24 per day, with an additional $1 an hour given for responding to ‘active emergencies’. They make up a total of 30-40% of all those fighting the fires.
While this may sound unprecedented, prison labour in the US is not a novel phenomenon – with at least 30 states explicitly including incarcerated workers in their emergency operations plans for disasters and emergencies. Incarcerated firefighters also already fight wildfires in at least 14 US states, and have battled blazes in California since World War II.
These life-threatening risks posed to the most marginalised – for little remuneration – should be of concern to anyone invested in justice. But they should be of particular concern to those of us invested in the antiracist struggle. After all, Black people across US states are incarcerated at an average of six times the rate of their white counterparts, making them significantly more likely to be recruited for this kind of dangerous prison labour.
Prison labour in the US is also historically entangled with slavery, which was supposedly abolished with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. This legislation made involuntary servitude a constitutional violation, except when it occurred as punishment for a crime.
Since agriculture-dominated economies in Southern states had been largely propped up by Black enslaved people, these states were financially motivated to find ways to sustain their income, and therefore sustain slavery by any other name. Racist laws known as “Black codes” were created, criminalising Black people for petty offences like the selling of crops without permission to a white person; walking too close to a white person; and walking “without purpose” or too close to a railway track.
This led to the mass imprisonment of Black people, who were put to work on plantations, railways and mines, where they were often treated even more brutally than formerly enslaved people. As the Black sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois writes: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
Today, the annual estimated value of commodities created by prison labour in the US stands at $2 billion. Prison labourers perform tasks ranging from producing hand sanitiser, to staffing call centres, to manufacturing furniture. This modern incarnation of slavery continues to perform a key function in sustaining the US economy, and yet prisoners continue to be economically disenfranchised themselves. For example, the very prisoners fighting fires for a pittance would be excluded from formal employment in the fire service upon their release.
In 2021, a California federal judge upheld a law that bans imprisoned firefighters from earning a living as firefighters on the outside. This exclusion continues despite the fact that, as former incarcerated firefighter Amika Mota explains: “We always had this reputation on the fire ground of being the ones who did the dirtiest work, the hardest work, got there the earliest, stayed there the longest”.
The treatment of prison labourers in the US clearly illustrates the fact that prison is not a place for rehabilitation or redemption. Despite what the state and mainstream media often leads us to believe, prison produces harm, violence and inequality, stripping people of their futures. It also largely exacerbates issues that prisoners faced before incarceration – for example, poverty and unemployment.
While firefighter prisoners make up just one subsection of those incarcerated, virtually all prisoners experience some form of traumatisation on the inside, and most face worse financial prospects upon release. Surveys suggest that 65% of all US employers would be reluctant to employ someone who was a former prisoner. Meanwhile, as many as 60% of former prisoners are still not employed one year after release.
As a result, abolitionist organisations like Black Lives Matter UK do not see prisons as an institution that keeps communities safe or remedy social issues. As demonstrated by the history of prison labour and “Black codes”, prisons aren’t vehicles for catching “bad guys” and making them “good”. On the contrary, prisons largely incarcerate people who have already experienced trauma, racism, poverty and inequality, and make their conditions worse. They also serve an economic function, largely scooping up people who are seen as unproductive and unexploitable, and putting them to the work of protecting capital.
We use the language of “abolition” after W.E.B. Du Bois, who believed that the abolition of slavery never actually arrived. While chattel slavery was ended, this did not remedy the economic or social systems that were invested in the exploitation and oppression of Black people. Du Bois argued that true “abolition”, or the creation of a racially just society, required the creation of new institutions, new practices and new social relations.
Like other abolitionists, we are therefore invested in creating alternative structures of harm reduction and care that make people less likely to come into contact with the police and prison system. These include transformative justice – a framework that encourages us to remedy the conditions that produce harm, violence and trauma.
We also must, crucially, challenge the capitalist economic system, which both incentivises incarceration, racism and prison labour, and makes environmental disasters like wildfires more likely to occur in the first place.
Like Du Bois, and other contemporary abolitionists including Angela Davis, we believe that abolition demands the total transformation of our society. It is only then that we can truly free ourselves from the shackles of slavery and exploitation, to finally have our moment in the sun.
Black Lives Matter UK is a national, member-led, anti-racist organisation fighting to end systemic racism.
Follow them on X: @ukblm
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
