• Relatively few incarcerated persons have work of any sort; roughly 60% have no work assignment whatsoever, meaning that most prisoners get zero; 35% work in institutional maintenance, about 2% in agriculture; only about 4% of US inmates work in traditional prison industries. 

• Weak statistics for working inmates suggest about 60 cents per hour (and no Social Security, no benefits), and perhaps totaling a few hundred dollars per year, annually less than the weekly paycheck of the median American civilian worker.

• In general, incarcerated persons are prohibited by Federal and state laws –heavily buttressed by societal rejection - from producing goods for sale in interstate commerce, thereby summarily excluding incarcerated persons from almost all employment protection of civilian labor law.

• Contrary to popular opinion and much literature, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting involuntary servitude, except upon conviction, has little practical relevance to contemporary inmate work, which is considered voluntary. In fact, inmate applicants typically exceed available prison jobs.  The reality of US persons incarcerated is that the work opportunity today is primarily the absence of civilian employment opportunity, leaving available solely (monopolistically) the mostly unprotected and unpaid labor opportunities afforded by Departments of Corrections.

Important corollaries of US inmate unemployment are (1) rather than supporting themselves and their children and families, they now become supported by the remains of their heavily disproportionately lower income families, thereby impoverishing those left behind; and (2) inmates are unable to pay fines, court costs, victim restitution, child support, and even for prison sick calls, phones, board & room, and other non-free goods and services, and therefore accumulate charges and interest imposed upon them immediately upon release.

While easy to point fingers, it is most difficult to find anyone not at least in part responsible for the sorry state of contemporary US inmate labor opportunity; we all seem to share the blame, including correctional industries, departments of corrections agencies and chains of command, policy makers and elected officials including governors, private business organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce, labor organizations including the AFL-CIO, major religions and human rights abandonment of incarcerated workers, and certainly we in the voting public who have long abandoned the prison laborer.  As the comic-strip character, Pogo would say, “I have seen the enemy and he is us.”  Like all discrimination, we by belief, abandonment, and inaction, ensure that current mistreatment continues.

And while the turnabout depends on all the above listed interests, in turn each looks to others to change first and facilitate their conversion.  While convenient to point toward others, my own belief is that reforming prison labor starts with us.