The following piece, written by Nicholas Brooks, was originally published in Hell Gate. This article was supported by a grant from the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation and the Vital Projects Fund. 

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When I first arrived at Sullivan Correctional Facility in 2016, I was placed in the kitchen by the program committee and told this was the highest paying job in the facility. I remember feeling a sense of pride, looking forward to a job that gave me a sense of normalcy, and made me feel good about myself in a place that doesn’t offer much of that. After two weeks of hard labor—scrubbing pots, delivering food, mopping, and prepping—I received a total sum of $21. The work was productive and essential to our lives, but the compensation made it all seem futile. After buying a box of laundry detergent at the commissary for $13, I had $8 left for food to supplement the meager prison chow. I’m fortunate to have support from loved ones who make sure I’m clothed and fed, but without their help, I couldn’t live off of $40 a month. It made me wonder how anybody else could.

Albert Marrone, whom I met shortly after I arrived, made even less than I did. He used to greet me every morning as he walked past my cell. He always wore a homemade necklace made from a string tied to an empty vitamin E bottle, filled with tobacco. He carried a spray bottle full of cleaning solution in one hand and a rag in the other, with which he wiped banisters and tables. He was a porter on the cellblock, and earned $12 every two weeks. Some people made even less—in New York’s prisons, wages can be as low as 10 cents an hour, or $3.00 a week.

Sullivan Correctional Facility closed this past November, and I’m now at Green Haven. But the prison labor system remains. The concept began at Auburn Prison, founded in 1816, where hard labor was implemented to replace religious reformatory practices preferred by Quakers. Today, prison labor is a big business, and the profit margins are staggering.

Between 2010 and 2021, Corcraft, the prison labor division within the state’s Department of Corrections, made approximately $550 million by selling prisoner-made office furniture, cleaning supplies, and more. Corcraft jobs, which pay prisoners cents an hour for their labor, include making license plates, desks, chairs, soap, and many other products. These goods are then sold at a significant markup to state and local governments that are required to buy from Corcraft, even if they charge more than other suppliers.

One can find Corcraft products in court houses, the NYPD, and even higher education institutions such as the State University of New York system. That means a student studying criminal justice at a SUNY school sits at a desk made by a prisoner. Yet the wages earned are not enough for a prisoner to afford basic necessities. While inflation continues to rise, hourly wages have not changed for over 50 years.

In California, a ballot proposition prohibiting punishing inmates with forced labor failed in November of 2024. But In Nevada, similar legislation passed. California legislatures have cited the high cost to the state of paying prisoners minimum wage as reason for abandoning the measure, but the rejection may also indicate a transition to voter’s tougher views on crime. Another explanation could be semantic—Nevada’s successful legislation included the word “slavery” where California’s did not.

In 2025, New York state has the opportunity to improve working conditions for prison laborers—and maybe even end prison slavery for good. But will legislators act?

A bill reintroduced at the start of the 2024 session in the New York state legislature called for the state to end the “last vestiges of slavery” by providing incarcerated people with a living wage. Its primary sponsor was State Senator Zellnor Myrie, the Brooklyn Democrat who has lately been in the news for running against Mayor Eric Adams in this year’s mayoral race. Called “The Prison Minimum Wage Act,” the bill would raise our pay to a minimum of $3 an hour.

A second piece of legislation, dubbed the “No Slavery in New York Act” and introduced by Myrie in the State Senate and Manhattan Democrat Harvey Epstein in the State Assembly in 2024, states that no person incarcerated in New York “shall be compelled or induced to provide labor against their will.” Famously, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery with an exception, declaring that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist except as punishment for a crime.” Without constitutional protections, incarcerated people need specific laws to exclude them from forced labor. Refusing to work can result in a variety of punishments from loss of privileges, such as using the phone, to time in solitary.

“Our laws must stand for the dignity of all people, including those who are incarcerated,” State Senator Myrie told Hell Gate in July 2024, though his office did not respond to repeated inquiries on whether he would reintroduce both bills during the upcoming legislative session. Myrie added, “I believe we must end the practice of forced labor in prisons once and for all.” Assemblymember Epstein’s office told me the bill would be reintroduced again in 2025, but in an altered form.

In a speech in 2023, Epstein spoke to the serious need to address low wages with legislation, saying, “Our government is abusing New Yorkers, allowing slave labor and involuntary servitude for incarcerated people.”

Laws of this kind wouldn’t just provide a modicum of human dignity and fairness to the work performed by incarcerated people. When the state demands that people work for cents an hour, under threat of punishment, many have no choice but to try and earn illegal income elsewhere, such as drug dealing, reselling stolen goods, or even sex work. When caught, they risk losing vital privileges like visits and phone calls with family. Some will end up enduring the torture of solitary confinement. Some will face denial of parole, or even the leveraging of additional criminal charges.

Over Al’s nearly 30 years in prison, he was sent to solitary confinement 10 times. Each time, it was because he was hustling to make money behind bars. When I told Al about the minimum wage bill, he said he wished it had been law when he first came upstate. “I used to make about $700 a month hustling. If I could have earned between three and six hundred a month legitimately, I never would have sold drugs, and I would have been able to have a small nest-egg upon my release. Most guys in prison hustle out of necessity,” he said. He added, “There would be a lot less guys going to the box, that’s for sure,” referring to solitary confinement.

According to a 2022 report published by the ACLU and the University of Chicago’s Global Human Rights Clinic, prison workers produce at least $11 billion a year in goods and services across the country for corporations such as McDonald’s and Walmart. An investigation by the Associated Press found that prison labor was connected to hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products later sold commercially in the United States.

It can be dangerous—another AP investigation documented dozens of cases in which incarcerated people were injured or even killed while performing dangerous work—fighting fires, evacuating hurricane zones, operating heavy machinery—with virtually no avenue for redress.

When I spoke to Al about this, he didn’t seem surprised. “I know I made mistakes that landed me here, but there is something very ugly about big companies poaching prisoners for labor just because the law allows it,” he said.

Al had been trying to stay out of trouble so he could be released. “I don’t want to go home with no money in the bank and be a burden to my family, but I have to be good,” he told me. Being sent to solitary confinement, especially, could compromise his chances for release.

“The box is horrible,” Al said. “I’ve been there so many times, but it never gets easier. You have to be mentally strong, or it will break you. You’re always hungry. I’d hear men crying at night sometimes.” Being in your head all day and night can be dangerous. “I’d think about all the mistakes I’d made,” he told me. For others, especially those with underlying mental health issues, solitary can be fatal. When I asked Al why he hustled in spite of such risks, he told me he felt like he had no choice. “I hustled drugs to support myself and my family. I have two kids who needed clothes and school supplies, and drug dealing was the only way I could support them.” Earning around $10 every week for the jobs offered in New York’s prisons is a setup for failure and an invitation to misconduct. “I did what I had to do,” Al said. A report published in 2017 by the Prison Policy Initiative notes: “Making it hard for incarcerated people to earn real money hurts their chances of success when they are released, too. With little to no savings, how can they possibly afford the immediate costs of food, housing, healthcare, transportation, child support and supervision fees?”

Despite the failure of recent ballot initiatives, some states have successfully passed laws or changed their state constitutions in order to end forced prison labor and provide incarcerated people a decent wage. Like all meaningful change, it is very slow to come, and subject to being undermined at every turn. In 2018, Colorado made history as the first state to amend its constitution and prohibit forced prison labor. However, records from the state’s Department of Corrections show that since 2019, more than 14,000 prisoners have been written up for failing to work.

In 2022, voters in five states—Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont—approved measures that would ban or limit prison slavery. But a recent lawsuit provided convincing evidence that in Alabama, at least, forced labor continues apace. As temperatures peaked this past summer, a federal judge ordered Louisiana to take action against severely unsafe working conditions at the state penitentiary known as Angola. The state immediately appealed the decision.

As with most legislation, budgetary considerations are bound to be a factor for the New York bills. There has been no calculation of what these laws would cost the state of New York. The Department of Finance in California, which has about three times the prison population of New York, has stated that changing their state constitution to pay incarcerated people a living wage would cost taxpayers $1.5 billion dollars a year.

Since the United States incarcerates some 2 million people, the vast majority of whom will eventually return to society, investing in their preparedness for release seems worthwhile as well as just, regardless of cost. Supporters of change also believe you can’t put a price tag on an issue with this kind of moral weight. Dyjuan Tatro, a prison reform campaigner in New York City and a member of the Abolish Slavery National Network, told Hell Gate, “Work, as it currently exists in NYS prisons, is a form of slavery, and I am against slavery in all of its forms whether or not someone is incarcerated or has committed a crime.” He hopes both bills pass, but for Tatro, single-issue reform doesn’t go far enough: “Our legislators have to have the courage to delegitimize the entire system. Trying to pick it apart is like cutting a patch of mold off of a chunk of bread. It leaves the rot at the core.”

Al is home now, and is trying to put the pieces back together. He’s having a hard time figuring it out, especially new technology. I heard from a friend that he’s set up a Facebook account which he’s been using to try to sell clothing. Many people accepted his friend requests, but it turned out they were mostly bots. There weren’t any programs in prison that taught about current technology. Al is 51 now, with a long criminal record, so I understand why it’s been hard finding a job. Still, he has a lot more options than he did on the inside. “In society, people call me Albert Marrone,” he said. “In there I was inmate #16B2784. I guess it’s easier to pay someone a dollar a day when you’re just a number.”

Featured photo: An incarcerated worker making road signs for Corcraft, the prison labor division within the New York State’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. (Photo via Corcraft)