“The wages are abominable”

Ronald Day was incarcerated at the age of 23. While he was in a New York state prison, he had a lot of jobs.

During his 15 years behind bars, he directed an AIDS education program, facilitated aggression and transitional release programs, and was a librarian in the law library. Usually, he took home $7 a week, which was considered a lot.

“The wages are abominable,” Day told me. Today, he’s earning a far better living by strengthening reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people as The Fortune Society’s vice president of programs.

In New York, prisoners make an average of 62 cents per hour, and sometimes as little as 10 cents per hour, depending on the job. But advocates for incarcerated people are trying to change that, pushing legislators to pass a bill introduced by state Sen. Zellnor Myrie (D-20) that would create a prison minimum wage of $3 per hour.

While still well below the state’s minimum wage of $13.20, he told me that he expected pushback for attempting to change the wage at all. “What we have heard in the past about anything that provides more benefits to the incarcerated is this notion that they have committed a crime, and they deserve everything that they get on the inside,” he said.

A minimum wage would allow prisoners to save money, which would make it easier for them to pay for things like housing, transportation and food when they’re released. That, in turn, could lower recidivism rates. It would also put New York on par with Nevada, Alaska and Kansas, where working prisoners already make at least $3 per hour.

Prison labor dates back to the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865. That prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for a crime.

So, to create a legal pretext for incarcerating Black people, southern states created “Black Codes,” which criminalized trivial things like loitering and not carrying proof of employment. Once in prison, states struck agreements with private companies and plantation owners to lease out prisoners to work for them. Prisoners were typically subjected to inhumane working conditions and no pay.

That convict leasing system is generally understood to have been phased out by the end of the 1940s, but according to prisoner advocates, remnants of it still exist today. In 2019, I wrote about how a top federal prisons official used incarcerated people under his supervision to perform landscaping duties at his church. Prisoners were paid 49 cents per hour plus a $30 bonus for five days of labor under the hot Texas sun. When I asked the church’s pastor about the scheme, he told me, “I’ll tell you they made more money than our volunteers did. We had dozens and dozens of people who worked with no pay.”

In New York prisons, one of the work options for incarcerated people is to manufacture license plates for the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. That is done under Corcraft, New York’s prison industry program that rakes in more than $50 million each year by selling its goods to city and state agencies. Corcraft made national headlines at the start of the pandemic when it tasked prisoners with producing hand sanitizer that they could not use themselves.

Jobs with Corcraft, which has a workforce of roughly 1,250 people, pay better than many others. Prisoners make 16 to 65 cents per hour – or up to $1.30 an hour in bonus pay – for performing dangerous jobs such as removing asbestos or mold, and cleaning up bird feces, reported Truthout.

The problem, Day told me, is that better wages sometimes compel people to give up on their education in order to earn what is considered “good” money. “People drop out of school, don’t complete their high school equivalencies and go into work in those industries because they’d rather put money in their pockets and be able to buy from the commissary than finish an education,” he said.

A guaranteed $3 wage might make them think differently, but last time that was on the agenda in 2020, it didn’t make it out of committee. Advocates are now calling on New Yorkers to pressure their state senators and Assembly people to get the legislation back on the agenda this year. “New York State must do better,” Myrie’s legislation reads. Thousands of prisoners working for less than a dollar an hour would agree.