PRISON LABOR
July 25, 2022
Originally aired in 2019 John Oliver explains how prisoners make and spend money, and how companies can profit at the …
July 14, 2022
Image by Javad Esmaeili licensed under the Unsplash License. Note: I have been using the term “incarcerated people” throughout my column (as opposed …
June 29, 2022
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A proposal aimed at removing the last remnant of slavery from California law failed to pass …
June 23, 2022
Executive Summary Our nation incarcerates over 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, and two out of three of …
June 18, 2022
Despite producing nearly $11 billion worth of goods and services each year, incarcerated workers in the U.S. earn an average …
July 25, 2022
Original Publication in 2015 Executive Summary Each year, the United States spends $80 billion1 to lock away more than 2.4 …
June 6, 2022
Outside prison gates in Yangon, Myanmar Executive Summary This executive summary includes extracts from the full report published in English. …
January 4, 2022
“Prison labor is slave labor. Pass the #AbolitionAmendment.” Congressional Democrats on Monday marked the 156th anniversary of the ratification of the 13th …
January 27, 2022
The 13th Amendment is having a moment of reckoning. Considered one of the crowning achievements of American democracy, the Civil …
February 2, 2022
It is 2022 and slavery and involuntary servitude is still legal in the United States. Passed by Congress on January …
January 17, 2022
When many people think of prison labor, they get an image in their head of convicts stamping license plates for pennies an hour. …
December 31, 2021
Two dozen conspirators forced workers to pay fees for travel and housing while forcing them to work for little to …
January 28, 2022
Curtis Ray Davis II was wrongly convicted of murder. He served nearly 26 years in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison before …
January 28, 2022
Ancient Mogilev, a former city of the medieval Duchy of Lithuania and now part of Belarus close to the border …
January 28, 2022
The state of Florida allows for unpaid prison labor, but that could change if a Tampa-based Democratic lawmaker’s joint resolution …
January 28, 2022
In May 2018 after an exhaustive one and a half years of investigative research on prison labor, I published a …
March 10, 2021
Efforts by States to Eliminate the Exception Allowing Slavery or Involuntary Servitude as Punishment for a Crime The Thirteenth Amendment ...
September 25, 2017
Within the debate of penal labor, one commonly ignored aspect is the use of labor in contract facilities, also known …
January 19, 2021
Around the country, correctional industries are quietly furnishing our public universities with beds, desks, bookshelves, and more. These businesses, born …
January 26, 2021
Public universities are much more likely to buy goods made by incarcerated people because they can (and are sometimes required …
September 29, 2020
As the world contends with the coronavirus, and the United States reckons with systemic racism, the West Coast is being …
February 11, 2020
This is the first in a three-part blog series authored by Polaris to introduce the issue. Read part two here, …
February 25, 2020
Most people assume that in 1865 with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment slavery in the United States was abolished. However, forced labor still exists in the United States today through the exception built into the Thirteenth Amendment for those who have been “duly convicted of a crime”. This exception made it legal and permissible to continue slavery within prisons in the United States. This is commonly known now as prison labor.
May 5, 2020
This is the final part in a three-part blog series authored by Polaris to introduce the issue. The first two …