The Brutal History of Prison Labor

The idea of prison labor is relatively new in the annals of crime and punishment. And it's just as bad as you think.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 1 (01:13):
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us. Jerry's on leave right now.
She's having a little R and R living it up
in the South Seas, falling in love, spending a lot
of time on beach writing people's names in the sand
for money. Wow, I assume that's what she's doing. Oh okay,

(01:47):
she might also just be in New York.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
It's one of the two, right, unless she could ride
on a beach there, Jones beach. I guess, so sure,
Coney Island.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
I guess we should stop all the joking around the
horse and around Chuck. This is a very serious episode,
so let's just end that now.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah. I mean, what better to chat about over what's
probably gonna end up being the holiday season when this
is released, right than hard labor at prisons in that history?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, Because I mean, if you think about prison labor,
it's bad enough as it is, but when you really
start to get into the nuts and bolts of it,
and all the loopholes that are abused, and all of
the ways that prisoners are actually treated in exchange for
the labor. It's even worse than you would think, it
turns out.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, that's the good news, right.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, And we'll get into the bad news for sure.
But the thing that I was a little surprised about
from the outside is that I would have thought that
this was ancient, like the Sumerians doing stuff like this,
And it turns out no Sumerians forward all the way
into the Enlightenment period in Europe, just killed people. They

(02:59):
hung you, or they cut your hand off, or yeah,
put you in the stocks. Maybe the stocks were a
non lethal form of punishment, and you would be ridiculed
by your neighbors. And then a guy named Thomas Moore
wrote a book called Utopia, and he said, there's a
better way people, There's an alternative to just killing people
or cutting off their hands. What if we just put

(03:20):
them to work. There's all sorts of benefits and upsides
to this. And they said, well, what are they? Thomas Moore,
he said, let me tell you.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
I'm glad you asked, yeah, And he basically I mean,
and we'll see this over and over again. The you know,
the point has sort of always been one. It can
or really threefold. One, it can deter people from committing
crime if they see somebody manual laboring, yeah, for probably
no money or very little money these days. Right. The

(03:49):
second is it can you know, help rehabilitate that person
and make them, you know, make them think about what
they've done basically, Yeah. And then the most obvious one
is we can get them to do stuff for us
for nothing.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, Like we can really use that labor. Especially if
you put a bunch of people together and make them
work for free, you can get a lot of stuff done.
And that is a fairly new form of punishment. It
wasn't like immediately adopted after Thomas Moore wrote Utopia. He
wrote it in the sixteenth century. Even into the American

(04:24):
Revolution and beyond, there was not like a lot of
government enforced punishment using prison labor. They were still crazy
for the stocks. But there were things regarding the colonies
that did have to do with punishment that did result
in your labor. And that would be if you got

(04:44):
into trouble saying in England, you would be sentenced to transportation,
either Australia or the United States, maybe even Canada if
you were lucky, and I think sixty thousand people before
the American Revolution while America was British colonies or British
colonies were sentenced to transportation and showed up there and said, Okay,
what do you want me to do? I'm here to work.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, well, I doubt if they said that. They were
probably more told that, but they were known as the
King's passengers, and they, you know, the colonies, you know,
the people in the colonies, they weren't that wild about this.
They were worried about, you know, sending convicted criminals there, obviously,
but most of these criminals were you know, maybe not
petty crimes, but pretty minor crimes, maybe theft, maybe vagrancy,

(05:31):
you know, depending on what the laws were, and whatever
weird English village you lived, you might have committed a
crime against one of those. But they weren't sending over
generally to the colonies. That is like the worst of
the worst. Right, if you were a plantation owner or
if you were an employer that maybe was near a prison,
you were pretty psyched because that was very cheap, meaning

(05:54):
usually free labor compared to what it cost to you know,
trade in the slaved African market.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, and we should say this early indentured servitude is
what they called it if it was aimed at white
people exclusively in the colonies and then later on the
early United States, because if the government intervened in a
plantation owner enslaved person's dynamic then and they removed the

(06:25):
enslaved person and put them in jail, the poor white
plantation owner was the one suffering there, he lost the laborer.
So it was left entirely to the plantation owners to
basically keep their slaves punish their slaves essentially, And if
you've ever have you ever seen twelve years of slave yet.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
That still shamefully cannot bring myself to see.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, I mean I get it, I totally understand your reticence.
But it's the way that plantation owners punished slaves is
depicted throughout in really brutal, honest fashion, and it's it
really drives home like what it was like. But you
were left up to the guy that owned you legally
doling out punishment based on his whim. Essentially, the state

(07:11):
would not intervene. It was just strictly up to white
people or it was just strictly directed at white people
at first.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, and you know what, that's the kind of movie
that you got to watch that when it comes out
and when it's in the zeitgeist, because that's never the
movie when you're like, what do I want to watch tonight?
Like Gloomy Set several years later, it's just not going
to happen, So I need to just you know, it's
like a history lesson, So I need to watch it.
And I've heard it's it's good, like in an upsetting way,

(07:39):
but like a well made film.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Oh yeah, definitely. Everybody does an amazing job. And look
at it like a classic novel that you just have
to read before you die, because I think that'll be
a good approach to it.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
You know what, when I start Moby Dick, finally, I'll
watch Twelve Years of Slave and I'll just I'll just
do both at the same time.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
I remember we talked about reading Mobi Dick and a
couple of people wrote in and they're like, Josh, do
not waste your time. It is not worth reading. And
I'm just gonna go with their interpretation. Oh wow, I
like Bartleby the scrivener, but I'm not sure I could
take hundreds and hundreds of pages of that writing.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah. Well, you know, our mutual friend in front of
the show, Joey cr is gonna be very upset to
hear that.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
I'm sorry, Joey.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
So as far as these laborers, ninety percent of the
ones that were of those sixty thousand that were sent
to the States, which is I'm surprised it was, you know,
ninety percent, they ended up kind of in two places,
Maryland Virginia, probably working in you know, industry like you know,
the Industrial Revolution type stuff, or on the farm, so
like tobacco farming obviously in Virginia. And it was terrible work.

(08:45):
It was really brutal. You know, you're talking maybe seven
to fourteen years as your sentence. After your sentence, maybe
you go back to England. Maybe you have a shot
at a free life in the New Colonies. But you know,
just like getting out of prison these days, it's a
it's not an easy transition to make.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
Right. The ones that went back to England were like,
I really missed the tasteless cuisine of home.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Right, so back then, maybe sure, it's come a long way.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
So one of the it has for sure. One of
the other things that had to evolve for prison labor
to become an actual thing in the United States was
prisons themselves. Like at the same time when they were
still crazy about the stocks and indentured servitude, like you
had jails, you didn't have prisons, and a jail was
just basically where they kept you while you were awaiting

(09:35):
trial or sentencing or something like that. And then sure
you left the jail. The idea of going to a
place to be held as a punishment in and of itself,
that is prisons that came later on after the American Revolution.
I think it was the Quakers that came up with
the idea of the penitentiary, which is meant to give
you quiet time to reflect on what terrible things you've

(09:57):
done and hopefully find God and come out bit a
better person. Of course, it's not how it worked out,
but very quickly after penitentiaries became a thing, prison labor
became a thing. In early short order, actually like decades maybe.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Yeah, And I never thought about the root word penitent
for penitentiaries. It was sort of one of those things
where I was today years old, you know.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, But I mean, like you, yeah, it's just so
easy to look right past it. It's its own thing,
yeah for sure.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
But yeah, redemptive suffering is what they called it. And
that was a big part of being in prison and
committing well, not committing to hardly like being committed too
hard labor. Auburn Prison in New York was one of
the sort of leading examples that set the way forward
for what was to become the norm where private businesses
would lease prison buildings along with the prisoners and say, hey,

(10:52):
we're just gonna You've got this big building over here,
You've got lots of free labor. I'm going to bring
my machinery into here, and all of a sudden, the
prison is part prison in part you know, industrial plant
for whatever company worked out whatever deal. And that proved,
you know, provided a real model moving forward. I think Auburn,
they the prisoners of Auburn ended up building Sing Sing.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, yeah, they use them for that as well. And
that I think Sing Sing opened in eighteen twenty eight.
So this is going on, like if prisons became a
thing around the time of the American Revolution, like this, this,
like I said, my point, has proven this transition happened quickly. Yeah,
so by the time the Civil War came around, like this,
it's called the Northern model or the Auburn prison model,

(11:37):
where you can rent a building, rent the inmates, and
then set up shop there. That's what prison labor looked like,
or else you were working for the prison, like say,
building other prisons. That's what the North was doing. In
the South, they were still quite hung up on the
idea of chattel slavery and yeah, owning a person and
making them work until they died. Essentially that that was

(12:02):
something that was really ingrained in the culture and was
not an easy thing to give up despite having lost
the Civil War and the thirteenth Amendment being passed. And
I know you've seen thirteenth the Ava du Verne documentary.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
I have seen that.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
That's a great one too. That's one of those like
life changing, perspective changing, eye opening type documentaries.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
Yeah, and even if I hadn't seen it, I would
I would lie to your face right now, okay, and
all of our listeners, because there's no way you're gonna
double shame me.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Well, how about this if you but I did see it,
If you, well, if you are lying right now and
you go look for it. Do not be infused by
the documentary Thirteenth that came out in twenty twenty five, Yeah,
which was about the Yeah, it's about the high pressure
student exams in India.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure that's upsetting too.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
I'm sure, But the thirteenth Amendment is kind of what
we're talking about here, and that's not only abolished slavery.
It abolished involuntary servitude of all kinds except one tiny provision,
one little loophole that said that if you're a convicted prisoner,
you can be punished with slave labor. That's okay. And

(13:09):
not only was it okay, it's enshrined in the Constitution
that slave labor is legal in prisons.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, and you know, it's one of those things where
it's hard to go back and imagine what the original
framers intended, But I think most people agree that they
didn't intend to just have you know, enslavement and another
name basically, whereas that's basically what happened for a long
long time, you know, through that, through the loophole, and
you know, you mentioned loopholes in the beginning. There's been

(13:38):
a lot of loopholes over the year, and anytime there's
a loophole, somebody's gonna exploit it, like for greedy purposes.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, free labor. I saw that. The reason that they
included it in that amendment was because it was just
such a no brainer that you would want the ability
to to to perform hard labor rather than just being
punished in other ways. That it was just an accepted
thing that, Yeah, the loophole wasn't meant to be there.

(14:04):
But in the South, almost immediately they put that to use.
We did an episode on the Black Codes back in
January of twenty twenty two. Yeah, another very eye opening topic,
and those only lasted like a year or two. And
it was basically they criminalized being a free black person
in the South. Yeah, And so they could pick you
up and they could arrest you with something. If you

(14:25):
couldn't prove on the spot that, say, you had a job,
you'd be arrested for vagrancy. You'd be taken to jail,
and then you could be leased out as a slave
to a local plantation owner doing the work you were
doing before you were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Legally,
because of that loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, maybe to the same plantation where you were previously held, right, Yeah,
a lot of times. That's a great episode. People should
go back and listen to that creed that you know,
the black codes went away with the Civil Rights Act
of eighteen sixty six and the Fourteenth Amendment, which is
ratified in eighteen sixty eight, made equal rights and protections.

(15:04):
You know, you know the law everywhere basically, but you know,
there were still ways to make things happen, especially in
the South, and especially as it turns out shamefully, in Georgia.
Georgia kind of led the way in eighteen sixty eight.
That was a provisional governor named Thomas Ruger, and he
leased like this is when the kind of the big

(15:26):
sort of prisoner trade started, where they were leasing prisoners
to different states, kind of back and forth like hey,
you got to you've got a farm in your state
that needs like a crop tended to, Well, let me
lease you some prisoners from our state. And Georgia led
the way early on with one hundred black prisoners being
leased to William Fort of the Georgia and Alabama Railroad

(15:49):
for twenty five hundred bucks, so twenty five twenty five
dollars a prisoner. Right, But here's the thing, it's like, hey,
you're paying us to lead these prisoners to you, So
now not only are we getting money for that, but
now they're your responsibility. But your responsibility didn't really mean anything.
Like sixteen of those prisoners died in the first year.

(16:11):
And as you'll see, a story that you know is
going to be repeated over and over, that was you know,
one of the biggest problems with all of this is
like basic medical care was not provided, and decent food
and certainly, like you know, somebody was sick, they would
just let them die basically, right.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
And that still happens today, I mean not quite to
that dramatic a degree, but when people die in custody
in prison, there's not a lot the prison's held accountable for.
So that's that's essentially a long standing thing in the
United States. People like prisoners dying even though they haven't
been sentenced to death. So I think you said that

(16:50):
Georgia was making some pretty good money off of this.
Starting in the eighteen sixties, I read this started to
like other states were like, oh, that's a really good idea.
By eighteen ninety eight, convict leasing made up seventy three
percent of Alabama state revenue. Wow, yeah, which is really

(17:10):
saying something.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
So yeah, that's a staggering stat right.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
And then when reconstruction and did the federal government just
basically said, hey, we really just want to be on
good terms with the Southern elite against so we're just
going to leave you on your own and withdrew from
the South. Black people were in really terrible positions, really
vulnerable positions, and at that time prison labor stepped up.

(17:35):
Incarcerations stepped up, but prison labor also did it as well,
and it was nothing compared to what you would the
work you would be put to in the North. It
was essentially slavery all over again. But again this time
the Fed the Union wasn't going to come down and
push anybody around at the end of a bayonet, because

(17:55):
this was all agreed upon in the thirteenth Amendment.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
Yeah. Up North, if you were working prison labor, you
might work an eight or nine hour day. In the
South that was routinely twelve to sixteen hours or just
however long they felt like you needed to work to
get whatever job done. There's anecdotal evidence at least like
during the cotton harvest, like before the cotton harvest, that
the plantation owners would call up the sheriff and say, hey,

(18:22):
why don't you make some more arrests. We need some guys.
And you know, a lot of these pretextual arrests were
happening where it was just like you know, they would
just cook something up and arrest you and you have
basically no rights and no representation. So it's just a
way to stock the industry or the farm or the
field with workers. Right.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
So that was like plantation owners local plantations. Like you said,
you could have been a former slave who was arrested
for something as stupid as mischief and put back to
work on that same plantation essentially as a slave. They
would also, like corporations got in on this as well,
like you said the railroad. There was a company in
Alabama called the Sloss Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in

(19:05):
Jefferson County, Alabama. That's where their minds were. They had
a ten percent death rate from the least convict labor
that they got from the state. And there was a
sugar company, the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugarland, Tennessee, which
I guess is an appropriate place for.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
It to be where else.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
A lot of people died when Texas leased them every
single state prisoner it had in eighteen seventy eight to
help in the sugar fields. People were dying of things
like malaria. Like you said, they weren't They weren't given
any kind of medical care at all. They were fed
just the minimum amount to keep them alive and have

(19:44):
energy enough to work. And this is just par for
the course in the South.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, I mean, I was bagging on Georgia because that's
our home state or my home home state. But Louisiana
has kind of from the beginning been one of certainly
one of the worst defenders. In the eighteen seventies and eighties,
they built the New Orleans specific railway with prison labor.
About one hundred and forty people died, and when you

(20:10):
look at some of the incarceration rates and especially incarceration
rates for black males in the United States today, Louisiana
leads the way and also with some of the worst
you know, working conditions for forced labor.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
That's another thing too that you mentioned, like they built
the railroad or say they mined something that was turned
into a product that people use. They don't think about.
I'm sure they didn't think like, oh, this railroad is
really nice. The prisoners who built it really did a
good job. That actually still carries on today. Like a
lot of people don't realize that the stuff they're buying

(20:45):
from a big box retailer was made somewhere down the
line by a convict who was essentially leased out to
that company to make those products. It still goes on today.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
Yeah, I mean, the chicken on your plate in your
house might have come from a chicken farm that had
and you know, these are people that are sort of
the work release programs we're going to talk about later,
where they leave the prison to go work for like
a private industry, and a lot of times it might
be like a chicken farm, or they may work at
a D and B call center or something like that. So, yeah,

(21:18):
the person you talked to on the phone might be
you know, incarcerated.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, which is quite surprising, But Chuck, don't call it
convict releasing, even though essentially it's so much the same
thing that basically just the people's clothes changed. That's what's
going on today. Still Supposedly, in the nineteen thirties, thanks
to the New Deal, America became enlightened enough that we
moved on past convict fleecing. We didn't do that kind

(21:44):
of stuff anymore, not at least a private industry. Prison
labor working for the prison were working for the state.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
That was still aokay, yeah, I mean that was you know,
sort of fifty years before that is when wage workers
started complaining, Like prisoners obviously were complaining.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Families might be complaining, but they're not going to get
very far. But once wage workers got unions involved, they're like, hey,
these you know, we want these jobs. We want to
you know, make a little bit of money ourselves. And
that's when it finally started to change a little bit.
And I think eventually that led to that New Deal
era law prohibiting interstate trade and prison made products. But

(22:27):
in nineteen thirty four, the Federal Prison Industries was created.
It's now known as Unicor, and that is, you know,
still a big program at employees people that are incarcerated
in our federal system, not state prisons again, and obviously
not private prisons are federal. Are any federal prisons private?
Or is that just state.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
I don't know. I don't know the answer that question.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
I know we never did one on the private prison industry,
did we.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
No, and we really should.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
It's on the list.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
They do this too, and they like the idea of
them leasing out convicts for before profit prison is just
mind boggling.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah for sure. But yeah, and with Unicorn, they're making
things for the federal government like a lot of times,
you know, military fatigues or furniture stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (23:12):
Right, yeah, yeah, And if you are a government agency,
you have to go to Unicorp first to see if
they have what you want, then you order for them then.
And so even still today, like companies complain like these
guys it's unfair competition. You know, they have like unpaid
labor making these products so they can sell it for whatever.
And the Feds are basically like, we can't hear you.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
Should we take a break?

Speaker 2 (23:36):
I think so?

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yeah, I mean, since the Feds can't hear us, right,
we might as well.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
We might as well.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
All right, we'll be right back with more on prison labor.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Okay, So when we left off, like convict leasing was
dead in the North thanks to labor unions. The South
has long been considered kind of anti worker, so labor
unions never really got a foothold here, so it took
a little longer for convict leasing to go away. But
again that doesn't mean that there was no such thing

(24:34):
as prison labor. They just kind of directed them to
state owned stuff. A really good example of this is
a Parchment farm in Mississippi, part of Parchment State Penitentiary.
It's a twenty thousand acre farm where in the early
nineteen teens, with a ninety percent black prison population, prisoners

(24:55):
were put to work on this farm. And one of
the reasons that got so famous very quickly, in addition
to just the scope of what was going on, was
they used a trustee system they spelled it trustee is
in tr us t Y where some of the worst,
most violent convicted felons that were prisoners there were given

(25:17):
rifles and said, you guys, make sure this other eighty
percent of your fellow prisoners do the work the way
we want them to.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, that's a really interesting system, it really is.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
It seems risky, you know.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, I wanted to look more. I'm going to look
more into that just for my own edification, but because
I'm curious that that dynamic is I don't know, it
seems like a would create a really dodgy dynamic.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
It would, But it also reminded me of what is
the Quentin Tarantino Antebellum Slavery movie. So, yeah, Jenko, remember
he posed as a black slaver.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
That's kind of how I took it to kind of be.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Like, yeah, I think you're probably right. Chain gangs is
something that you know, you've seen in like movies and stuff.
Like I was watching over other where Thal Again the
other night, and there was you know, chain gang scenes
in that. And that was another type of sort of
very public penal labor because they were put in place

(26:18):
to build roads in the South in the nineteen twenties.
You know, hard laboring all day again in the South,
out in the hot sun on that black top, tend
to fifteen hours a day. But they were chained together.
That's why they were called chain gangs. They were chained
to their ankle, They stayed chained when they walked to
the job, they stayed chained as they slept in their
bunks that were close to one another. And again the

(26:41):
conditions were abysmal, terrible food. They were beaten, they were tortured.
I think there was this one investigation this was in
a chain gang, but this was Tucker Farm in Arkansas,
where they found that the staff stripped prisoners naked at
the prison hospital and put electric you know, shocks to
the testicles in penis. Women prisoners were also subjected to

(27:05):
work in the fields. Not as much as men. They were,
you know, the main labor force, but you know women
were put to work as well.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Have you ever read beloved Tony Morrison novel, I feel
like I have to see Yes, you should read that too.
If you have, no, I haven't read that. It's very good,
but there's a it's it's mind bogglingly good actually, but
it's there's a few scenes about a chain gang and
just what it would have been like. One of the

(27:33):
main characters spent time on a chain gang, and I mean,
this is the way you said. It was brutal work.
And they were building roads. Like a good example of
what chain gangs did. If you were building a road,
you were using like human labor to build roads. This
was before they had machinery, right, like road building machinery,
it just didn't exist, so you used human beings. To

(27:53):
do this stuff. If you ran into say in Georgia,
and you were building a state road, if you ran
into a chunk of stone mountain that was popping up
out of the ground where you wanted your road to go, well,
you would just set a bunch of convicts to work
on it with sledgehammers, and eventually they're gonna wear it
down to nothing if you give them long enough and
work them hard enough. That's what people did on chain gangs.

(28:15):
That's just what life was like. And again, you were
working outside, so you weren't protected in any way, shape
or form. You were fed meagerly, like you were working
as hard as anyone's ever worked in their life, with
like the minimum amount of nutrition, the minimum amount of rest.
And if you put all that together, especially if you

(28:35):
think about it accumulating, it's a brutal, brutal form of
prison labor.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah, and I mean, and it was a racist framework.
I know, we're talking a lot about the racism involved.
There were white labor camps and stuff like that of
course too. You know, sometimes they look like Paul Newman even. Yeah,
but it was very much a racist framework wherein the
threat of violence, the threat of torture they felt was

(29:04):
like a necessary component to you know, quote unquote keeping
guys in line.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah. One of the other things, too, is there was
a certain amount of usefulness to letting these chain gangs
get these horrible reputations, because the reach of these things
reached out beyond the inside of prisons into the outside world.
Because if you were black and you were looking for
a job, and you could be arrested for not having

(29:30):
a job and put onto a chain gang, and you
knew it, you would accept all sorts of terrible working
conditions in low pay because at least that was better
than being put on a chain gang, which if you
didn't accept this job and got caught without a job,
you would end up on a chain gang anyway. That's
that was another really kind of insidious effect that they had.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, but you know, it's not like this kind of
thing was being you know, there were no expos's being
written in newspapers about chain gangs. You might drive by one,
and that's how you knew they existed. But little by
little what went on with these chain gangs started to
kind of leak out, especially all over the South. There
are a couple of famous examples In nineteen thirty two,

(30:13):
there was a white Northern veteran who is a convict,
obviously named Robert Burns. He published a book called I
Am a Fugitive from a Georgia chain Gang exclamation point
That's why I read it that way. That kind of
got the word out a little bit. There was a
movie adaptation.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Have you seen that?

Speaker 1 (30:30):
I haven't seen it, have you?

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (30:32):
Really?

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, it's really yeah. For some reason, I don't know
where you me found out about it, but she's one
of her well liked movies. I want to say it's
one of her favorite. But she showed it to me
and it is.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
What year was that the movie?

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, you're asking when I saw it? Nineteen thirty two,
I believe, or nineteen thirty five, something like that.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
I don't watch a lot of movies from that era.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
But Chuck, you should this one. It has eight point
two on IMDb and that's a pretty high rating. It's
really good. It's a good movie. Well.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
In nineteen forty seven, some more news leaked out when
a black civil rights activist name Bayard Rustin. And I
know we've talked about Baird Rusting before. He was on
a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for
civil disobedience, and a series of articles that he wrote
came out in The New York Post.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Did you read those? Huh?

Speaker 1 (31:25):
I read some of I read, like, you know, snippets
from it, just to sort of get an idea.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Oh, I was just kidding.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
I don't know. I looked into some of it, but
I didn't like sit around and read him.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, No, I was trying to get you. Yeah,
I gotcha.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
But the fifties and sixties, like because of the New
York Post and because of that movie that Umi Loves
came out, fifties and sixties is kind of when chain
gangs basically went away. Although you know, if you lived
in Maricopa County, Arizona in the nineties, you know they
tried pretty hard. What was that guy's name, the sheriff there,

(31:58):
Joe Arpaio. Yeah, I'm not sure he pronounced it, but
he made big news a lot, and he was one
of the guys trying to push for the reinstatement of
the chain gangs.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
Did not happen though, because again America lost its taste
for chain gangs in the first half of the twentieth century,
and the idea of bringing them back was not something
that you would want to do. Even beyond that, not
bringing back the chain gangs. Prison labor got to be
more and more or I should say, less and less brutal.

(32:31):
How about that, because the other way I could have
put it as more and more or less brutal, and
that just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Well, we took a late break, so it wasn't too
long ago, but I feel like we should go ahead
and get our second one under our belt. Okay, all right,
we'll be right back and talk about the modern era
of mass incarceration. All Right, we've covered mass incarceration quite

(33:21):
a bit, certainly in our Prisons episode. But here's a
stat for you. Over a thirty six year period from
nineteen seventy to two thousand and eight, the population of
the United States rose by about fifty percent and the
population of incarcerated prisoners rose by seven hundred percent. So

(33:45):
we entered the mass incarceration era big time over about
a thirty six year period, thanks to well, thanks to
a lot, but namely thanks to Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah, Nixon's war on drugs, Reagan tough on crime thing
Clinton trying to wrestle the tough on crime. I guess
Moniker away from the GOP, and I guess it was
part of the Democrats platform every year until two thousand
and eight and when it was quietly removed and not coincidentally,

(34:19):
two thousand and eight is the year that the peak
incarceration happened.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Like you said, yeah, now we're about that went from
one point six to two thousand and eight to about
one point three million incarcerated individuals in the United States.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Now, yeah, because America has become softer and.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Gentler, About six hundred of every one hundred thousand people
in the US are incarcerated. That is a higher rate
than any other country in the world except Cuba, Rwanda,
and El Salvador and Louisiana once again leads the way
at a one thousand per one hundred thousand, and the
rate of for Black Americans is nine hundred per one

(34:55):
hundred thousand.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Can I talk about Al Salvador first second, because I
looked into their incredibly high incarceration rates.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Sure do they do prison labor?

Speaker 2 (35:05):
I didn't check that out, but I got this other
stuff about it? How about that?

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (35:09):
So they have essentially established an authoritarian crackdown on gangs,
and in twenty fifteen, their murder rate was one hundred
and three people per hundred thousand population, which means every
year more than one percent of their population was murdered.
So they cracked down on gangs and just started throwing

(35:32):
everybody in jail, and between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty two,
their murder rate went from one hundred and three per
hundred thousand to seven point eight per one hundred thousand,
which you're like, okay, that's actually I mean, authoritarian crackdowns
on gangs and prisons is not very tasteful, but at
least they got results. Here in the United States, we

(35:54):
don't have the same excuse for that level of rise
in incarceration. Our hamas rate in nineteen fifty five was
four point five. In twenty twenty four it was like five.
It's remained relatively flat, give or take a few points
like here or there, over the years. So there's no

(36:14):
reason why our prison population should have increased seven hundred percent.
It just there's no reason for it. Yeah, unless you
expand crimes, especially non violent crimes like drug possession and
really throw the book at people, which is what happened
during that time.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Right exactly. As far as prison labor goes, most of
the people in state and federal prison these days do
some kind of prison labor. I think out of the
one point three million ish, it's about eight hundred thousand
as of a few years ago. The ones who don't
are probably either too old or have some sort of
disability or health problem that won't allow them to. About

(36:55):
eighty percent of those workers are working for the prison,
so you know, when you were in the cafeteria, you
work in the laundry or something like that. That's about
eighty percent of it, and most of the rest are
kind of what we were talking about earlier, government run operations.
Maybe you do laundry for a public hospital, maybe work
in that DMB call center. About two percent of total

(37:18):
prison workers in the federal prison system work for unicorse still,
And I was curious about the whole license plate thing,
you know that, oh yeah, sort of trope, But most
of that doesn't happen at prisons anymore because it's just
cheaper to have, you know, robot machinery do that kind
of thing. But it's still a thing in some states.

(37:39):
And I know, Utah is one of them. It's called
the UCI operation, and they call themselves plate busters and
they make them all, even the specialty like ski Utah
plates and the Olympic plates and stuff like that. They're
making them all.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Still, I saw that there's like a long standing kind
of jokey observation that prisoners in New Hampshire make their
license plate and on the license plate it says live
free or die, right, And that's actually true and they
still do today at the state prison and conquered the
prisoners in New Hampshire make those license plates.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, I imagine making those and making ski Utah plates
or I don't know, adds a little salt to them
to the situation.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
You know, for sure. I like that.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
That's saying a little salt to the situation. Well, I
didn't want to say wound. That's no. One likes that word.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
No, it's not a very pleasant word. Uh.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
Some of these prisoners do dangerous work too, though. You
know it's not all just like sort of hourly easy stuff.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
No. No, I mean like again, you're you're engaged in
forced unpaid labor. So you go where they tell you
to go. I know in California, you might end up
fighting wildfires, and this is one of the highest paying jobs,
as we'll see. If you get two to five dollars
a day plus one dollar an hour when you're actively
fighting wildfires in California, that's something they can make you

(39:00):
do if you're a prisoner.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah, saving the saving the houses at the wealthy. Yeah,
but not always wealthy to be fair.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, no, but there are a lot of wealthy people
in California to be sure.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, not only firefighting, disaster recovery sometimes lead paint removal.
I think there's around five percent of the incarcerated workforce,
which is about forty thousand people work for private industry still, right,
and that a lot of times is like the work
camp that I was talking about. So they they may
work at a food fast food restaurant, or may be

(39:36):
like a work on the custodial staff at a well
known hotel chain.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Yeah, and a lot of these bigger businesses have policies
where they don't use least convict labor like rice, but
they also sometimes can't do a thing about it, like
if their supplier part of the supply chain is that,
like companies don't know who's painting the patio furniture that
they're selling like they just I don't know, and that

(40:00):
the company painting the furniture might be using least convict labor,
or they their franchisees can use least convict labor, and
the corporate office can't do anything about it because they
don't own those stores. So it still does happen. Even
though large corporations in the US tend to have policies
against that, and in fact have policies that they put

(40:23):
in place two higher felons, like preferential hiring of felons.
Still it washes out to where there's plenty of least
convict labor today in private businesses. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
And you know, we've talked about money a little bit
here and there, like you know, no pay, and you know,
sometimes there is pay, sometimes there isn't. There's no federal
law that says that someone has to be paid for
work if they're a prisoner. Right on the state level.
It depends on the state, but you know, a lot
of them pay nothing at all. I think the average

(40:56):
pay for a prisoner in the US is fifty two
cents an hour, and that was like three years ago.
So I doubt if it's gone up that much, who knows,
maybe it's gone down. Almost always under a dollar an hour.
You may get like minimum wage if you work one
of the really hazardous jobs in a pretty forward thinking state.
But then the prison can turn around and say, yeah,

(41:18):
but we're gonna take most of that paycheck to cover
like a room and board, or maybe to provide restitution
to your victims if it was a financial thing exactly.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
So, like even if you're off making federal minimum wage
at KFC, as you know as a prisoner, as part
of your prison labor, you're ending up with pennies on
the dollar per hour after they deduct all that stuff
from you. So that's why that average for all prison
workers is fifty two cents an hour because they deduct

(41:49):
so many things. That's why it's essentially convict leasing. That
person goes out works, they get paid, and the prison says,
we're taking this x amount of your pay our own use.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
That has to go into the private prison like financial
success rate.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Right precisely that private prisons are able to do that,
they probably deduct way more. But the other problem with
it too is that they're at the same time getting
tax breaks for leasing out their contracts to use in
the outside world. So they're getting like fees and tax breaks.
It's quite a racket from what I can tell.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, while the basic needs a lot of times that
these prisoners aren't even being met. Still some pretty bad
conditions as far as medical treatment goes and food. I
think Olivia helped us with this. She did a great job.
But she found one woman named Carla Simmons who is
an incarcerated in a woman's prison, and she wrote last year,

(42:48):
and this is right here in Georgia, that prisoners aren't paid.
And she said the food is so bad that they
people try to get work assignments where they can dig
through the trash to eat the guards meals like the
portions that they threw away, good God in twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah. One of the other things too is that I
mean people point to this and say, like, Okay, yes,
we agree that prison labor is in and of itself
a good thing. Like Thomas Moore was right, like there
is redemption in labor. So we're not saying do away
with it, but it needs a lot of reforms. These

(43:25):
are the people who are like well, reform minded about
the whole thing. There's basically no one saying we should
do away with prison labor, but they say it should
be the kind of labor that's going to help them
get jobs on the outside, where they learn valuable skills.
They should be paid fairly federal minimum wage at least
for the labor that they're doing, and they should also

(43:46):
get protections that any worker gets in the United States.
This to me is mind blowing. We have workers protections
out the yin Yang. Here in the US, we have OSHA,
we have the Fair Labor Standards Act. All of these
are meant to protect workers physically from injury and also
protect them from being screwed over by their employers, and

(44:06):
court after court after court has ruled that prison laborers
do not count for these protections. They're not classified as
employees because, as I saw it put, the prison owns
the prisoner's labor. The laborer doesn't own their own labor,
So how can an employee be in that situation? They can't.
Therefore they don't get any of these protections.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah. I mean, there was a lawsuit brought in Alabama
in twenty twenty four that was dismissed because they basically
were like, oh, this isn't forced labor. These are mandatory chores.
So it's just like depends on what you want to
call it. I guess. In twenty twenty one, there's an
international anti slavery nonprofit called walk Free in Australia who

(44:51):
produces what's called the Global Slavery Index. And the United
States is one of seventeen countries that use stadium posed
force labor, along with China and Russia and some other places.
And the United States is one of only six UN
member states that hasn't ratified the Forced Labor Convention of
nineteen thirty, which we considered. The Senate considered that nineteen

(45:14):
ninety one, like hey, maybe we should sign on to
this thing, and they said no, it really really conflicts
with subcontracting these prisoners out to private companies. So like,
let's not foul that.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah, we'll just we'll walk past that one.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
And like I think you mentioned Europe in the UN,
there's in Europe essentially the way that they treat prison labors.
What I was saying that in the US prison labor
reformed people are calling for and you mentioned Alabama in
that lawsuit about mandatory chores not prison labor. The reason

(45:52):
that lawsuit even came up is because Alabama, surprisingly is
one of seven states that in the last few years
has passed in their state constitution a ban on prison labor.
You're not allowed to You can't force prisoners to work.
They can. You can use prison labor, but you have
to pay them, and you can't coerce them with punishments.

(46:14):
Some of the punishments that prisoners face if they refuse
to work, they might be transferred to a higher security prison,
which is not what you want to happen to you.
Their family visits may get cut. There's all sorts of
punishments that can be meted out legally except in these
states under their constitution. But like you said, that lawsuit
where they were like, these aren't This isn't involuntary servitude.

(46:36):
It's mandatory chores. Yeah, they don't have any teeth right now.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
Yeah, Tennessee was in there too, sort of surprising. In Nebraska,
here's finally some numbers for you. And I love it
when they kind of put numbers like this, which is like, hey,
if you actually spent this in the long run, it
would be better for everybody. I love those stats, and
this is one of those incarcerated workers saves prison. Saves

(47:04):
prison is about fifteen billion dollars a year and produces
another two billion dollars in goods and services. And so
the Edgeworth Economics Group did a study a cost benefit
analysis last year and found that, hey, if they actually
use that money to pay incarcerated workers like an okay wage,
like maybe even just minimum wage, it would reduce a

(47:26):
burden on families to send money, which they don't have
a lot of money to begin with. Maybe they could
pay child support from prison and improve their earnings like
once they get out. And so they did the math
and they found out in the end, every dollar spent
on prisoners' wages would add up to a society wide
return of two dollars and forty cents to three dollars

(47:49):
and sixteen cents.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Man, that's pretty pretty good, ROI just for paying prisoners.
I know. I can't think of any better way to
end this one, can you?

Speaker 1 (48:01):
I got nothing else?

Speaker 2 (48:02):
I thought I heard you drop from Mike even No, No,
it's still up. Okay, Well, since Chuck said is Mike's
still good to go, I guess it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
It's hard to drop the Mike in a studio because
you got to unscrew it. I've got like a windscreen.
Two things have to get unplugged, and by that time
everyone's left the room.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
You know they gave you a windscreen. I didn't get
a wins Spring.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
I bought my own.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
I brought this from home.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
So who is this from? This is from Kimberly. Hey, guys,
thanks for keeping me company on long work trips, during chores,
and throughout my day to day life. I feel like
I'm listening to old friends. Like a lot of people
have said before, I appreciate how my worldview is challenged
and enlightened when I listened to the show. My weekly
trivia team also appreciates how I can answer some of
the most random questions thanks to the random facts, and

(48:51):
Kimberly sent in a great recommendation how crowds work. I'd
love to know more about how humans move through crowds.
How do we manage to avoid bumping into each each
other at airport, stadiums and other crowded places. How do
we avoid crowd crushes? I feel like we touched on
that now we have.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
On our Black Friday episode. In a couple we talked
about crowd crushes.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
Yeah, I think maybe just crowds would be a pretty
good idea.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
Yeah, really we could work in standing in line. Where
that came from, is that is that?

Speaker 1 (49:20):
Do people do that? I don't stand in lines.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
A lot of people do surprisingly and wait for their turn,
I think is what they call it their turn.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
I'm a line jumper, you know. People love those guys.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Yeah, right, All the key is to just not pay
attention to anyone behind you, pretend like they're not there.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
I had a guy at the airport recently, and you know,
boarding an airplane in the United States is just one
of the worst things that can happen, especially after I've
seen how they do it in Australia, which is to
say sybil and friendly. And this guy was standing behind us,
Me and Emily and Ruby like in the line really
to get like to get on not the crowd that
huh goes before they now, and he just like all

(50:01):
of a sudden just walked right around us and jumped
in front or tried to and I like sort of
just bodied up a little bit. Yeah, and you want
to see and in sensed human is I don't know
if it's all ten year olds. But my daughter when
someone tries to jump a line, she was furious. Did
you see that guy try to break in line? It

(50:23):
was like the almost no worse offense at that age.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Was he in your side? Did he hear say that?

Speaker 1 (50:29):
Wow? I don't think so, but I repeated it loudly,
so Emily could hear. Did you hear what Ruby just said?
She's calling out this guy behind us?

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Man, why would you do that?

Speaker 1 (50:38):
I don't know, It's just I don't know. I don't know, Josh.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
I mean, I get the drive to get on board
as fast as possible, to get some overhead space, so
they don't check your carry on bag because it's all
you have, and you don't want to stand around waiting
for it because you got to get out of the
airport as soon as possible. But you still don't walk
around people that you're.

Speaker 1 (50:58):
In my mind, I know, And we were in that
sort of you know, whether they do zones now, I
think we were zone one or two, So it wasn't
like we were at the back of the plane and
it was going to be dog eat dog for that space.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, maybe he just could not wait to get some pretzels.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Yeah, the Mustard anyways, sorry rant over?

Speaker 2 (51:18):
Was that the end of Kimberly's email too? Yeah, great idea, Kimberly.
I think we will do one on crowds eventually and
we will try, like heck to remember to credit you
with the idea because it was one hundred percent yours.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
If you want to be like Kimberly and give us
a great idea, we love that kind of thing, you
can send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
One of the other things that reformers say we need
to do is if you're in prison, in your laboring,
none of that money goes towards Social Security or Medicaid.
They suspend that, so you're not working toward whatever check
you're going to get in your retirement for however many
years you're working in prison. Yeah,