Stuff You Should Know - The Brutal History of Prison Labor

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

The idea of prison labor is relatively new in the annals of crime and punishment. And it's just as bad as you think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and you'll get all the info you need. And thank you. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeartRadio. 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&R, living it up in the South Seeds, 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. She might also just be in New York. It's one of the two.

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I mean, what better to chat about over what's probably going to end up being the holiday season when this is released than hard labor at prisons in that history. 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. Yeah, that's the good news. Right.

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 hung you or they cut your hand off or they 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 them to work? There's all sorts of benefits and upsides to this. And they said, well, what are they, Thomas More? He said, let me tell you, I'm glad you asked.

Yeah, and he basically, I mean, and we'll see this over and over again. 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 for probably no money or very little money these days. Right. The 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. 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 More wrote. Utopia, he wrote it in the 16th century, even into the American 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 into trouble, say, in

England, you would be sentenced to transportation either. Australia or the United States, maybe even Canada, if you were lucky. And I think 60,000 people before the American Revolution, while America was British colonies or were 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. Yeah, well, I'd 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 here, obviously. But most of these criminals were, you know, maybe not petty crimes, but pretty minor crimes, maybe theft, maybe vagrancy, 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 usually free labor, compared to what it cost to trade in the enslaved African market. Yeah, and we should say this early indentured servitude is what they called it.

it was aimed at white people exclusively in the colonies and then later on the early United States because if you, if the government intervened in a plantation owner, enslaved person's dynamic, then they removed the enslaved person and put them in jail. The poor white plantation owner was the one suffering there. He lost a laborer. So it was left entirely to the plantation owners to basically keep their, their slaves, punish their slaves, essentially. And if you've ever, have you ever seen 12 years of slave yet?

I'm still shamefully cannot bring myself to see that movie. 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 would not intervene. It was just strictly up to white people. Or it was just strictly directed at white people at first. Yeah. And you know what? That's a 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? It's a gloomy sight of. 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 good, like in an upsetting way, but like a well-made film. Oh, yeah, definitely. Everybody does an amazing job in it. Look at it like a classic novel that you just have to read before you die. Because I think that would be a good approach to it.

You know what? When I start Moby Dick finally, I'll watch 12 years of slave, and I'll just do both at the same time. I remember we talked about reading Moby 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 going to go with their interpret. Oh, wow. I like Bartleby the Scrivener, but I'm not sure I could take hundreds

and hundreds of pages of that writing. Yeah, well, you know, our mutual friend and friend of the show, Joey C.R. is going to be very upset to hear that. I'm sorry, Joey. So as far as these laborers, 90% of the ones that were, of those 60,000 that were sent to the states,

which is, I'm surprised it was, you know, 90%. They ended up kind of in two places, Maryland or Virginia, probably working in, you know, industry like, you know, the Industrial Revolution type stuff or on the farms, like tobacco farming, obviously, in Virginia. And it was terrible work. It was really brutal.

You know, you're talking maybe seven to 14 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 not a, it's not an easy transition. to make. Right. The ones that went back to England were like, I really miss the tasteless cuisine of home. Right. Back then, maybe, sure. It's come a long way. 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 is basically where they kept you while you were awaiting trial or sentencing or something like that, and then 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 was meant to give you quiet time to reflect on what terrible things you'd done and hopefully find God and come out of it a better person. And of course, it's not how it worked out.

But very quickly, after penitentiaries became a thing, prison labor became a thing, in really short order, actually, like decades, maybe. 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? Yeah, but I mean, like, yeah, it's just so easy to look right past it. It's its own thing. Yeah, for sure. 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 hard labor, like being committed to 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, we're just going to, 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 and 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. Yeah, yeah, they used them for that as well. And that, I think Sing Sing opened in 1828. So this is going on, like if prisons became a thing around the time of the American Revolution, like this, like I said, my point is 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, 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 owning a person and making them work until they died, essentially. That was 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 13th Amendment being passed. And I know you've seen 13th, the Ava DuVernay documentary. I have seen that. That's a great one, too. That's one of those, like, life-changing, perspective-changing, eye-opening-type documentaries. Yeah, and even if I hadn't seen it,

I would lie to your face right now. now. Okay. And all of our listeners, because there's no way you're going to double shame me. Well, how about this? If you, if you are lying right now and you go look for it, do not be confused by the, the documentary 13th that came out in 2025. Yeah, different thing. Yeah, it's about the, yeah, it's about the high pressure student exams in India. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure that's upsetting too. I'm sure. But the 13th Amendment is kind of what we're talking about here. And that's not only abolished slavery. It abolished involuntary service. 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 not only was it okay, it's enshrined in the Constitution that slave labor is legal in prisons. 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 in another name, basically. Right. Whereas that's basically what happened for a long, long time, you know, through that, through the loophole. And, you know, you mentioned loopholes at the beginning. There's been a lot of loopholes over the year.

And anytime there's a loophole, somebody's going to exploit it, like, for greedy purposes. 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 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.

But in the South, almost immediately, they put that to use. We did an episode on the Black Codes back in January of 2022. 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 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 13th Amendment legally because of that loophole in the 13th Amendment. 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. Agreed. That, you know, the Black Code, went away with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment, which is ratified in 1868, made equal rights and protections, 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 1868 there was a provisional governor named Thomas Ruger. And he leased, like this is when the kind of the big sort of prisoner trade started where they were leasing prisoners to different states, kind of back and forth. Like, hey, 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 100 black prisoners being leased to William Fort of the Georgia

and Alabama Railroad for $2,500. So $25, that's $25 a prisoner. Right? But here's the thing. It's like, hey, you're paying us to lease 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 16 of those prisoners died in the first year. And as you'll see, a story that 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. certainly like you know if somebody was was sick they would just let them die basically right and that 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 that the prisons held accountable for um so that's that's essentially a long-standing thing in the united states people like prisoners dying even though they're they haven't been sentenced to death so i think you said that georgia was making some pretty good money off of this

starting in the 1860s, I read this started to, like other states were like, oh, that's a really good idea. By 1898, convict leasing made up 73% of Alabama's state revenue. Wow. Yeah. Which is really saying something.

Yeah, that's a staggering stat. Right. And then when Reconstruction ended, the federal government just basically said, hey, we really just want to be on good terms with the Southern elite again, 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. Incarceration 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's, the union wasn't going to come down and push anybody around at the end of a bayonet because this was all agreed upon in the 13th Amendment. Yeah, like up north, if you were working prison labor, you might work an eight or nine hour day in the south. It was routinely 12 to 16 hours or just however long they felt like you needed to work to get whatever job done. Right. 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, 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. So that was like plantation owners, local plantation owners. 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 Schloss-Schieffield Steel and Iron Company in Jefferson County, Alabama. That's where their mines were. They had a 10% 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 it to be. Where else? A lot of people died when Texas leased them every single state prisoner it had in 1878 to help in the sugar fields. People were dying of things like malaria.

Like you said, they weren't given any kind of medical care at all. They were fed just the minimum amount to keep them alive and have energy enough to work. And this is just par for the course in the South. 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 certainly one of the worst offenders. In the 1870s and 80s, they built the New Orleans Pacific Railway with prison labor. About 140 people died. And when you look at some of the incarceration rates and especially incarceration rates for black males in the United States today, Louisiana leads to the way, and also with some of the worst, you know, working conditions for forced labor. 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's really nice. The prisoners who built it really did a good job. Right. That actually still carries on today. Like, a lot of people don't realize that the stuff they're buying 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. 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 DMB call center or something like that. So, yeah, the person you talk to on the phone might be, you know, incarcerated. Yeah, which is quite surprising. But Chuck, don't call it convict leasing, 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 1930s, thanks to the New Deal, America became enlightened enough that we moved on past convict leasing. we didn't do that kind of stuff anymore.

Not at least a private industry. Prison labor, working for the prison or working for the state, that was still A-OK. Yeah. I mean, that was, you know, sort of 50 years before that is when wage workers started complaining. Like, prisoners obviously were complaining. Families might be complaining, but they're not going to get very far. But once wage workers got unions involved, they're like, hey, 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 in 1934, the federal prison industries was created. It's now known as Unicor. And that is, you know, still a big program. It employs people that are incarcerated in our federal system, not state prisons again, and obviously not private prisons. Are any federal prisons private, or is that just state? I don't know.

I don't know the answer to that question. I know. We never did one on the private prison industry, did we? No, and we really should. That's on the list. They do this, too, and they like the idea of them leasing out convicts for before-profit prison is just mind-boggling. Yeah, for sure. But, yeah, with Unicorn, they're making things for the federal government, like a lot of times, you know, military fatigues or furniture, stuff like that.

Right. Yeah, and if you are a government agency, you have to go to Unicor 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. Should we take a break? I think so, yeah. I mean, since the feds can't hear us. Yeah, right.

We might as well. We might as well. All right. We'll be right back with more on prison labor. Hey, Harry Potter fans. Huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions are all being released on Audible on a monthly basis. And Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is already. out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and is Baltimore, Riz Ahmed as Snape, and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand

new musical score. And the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform nine and three quarters. And it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizardry even more magical. Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out, and the next installments in the series

will be released every month until all seven are out. Go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. Lines and Times with Spencer Graves on the IHAR Radio app is a podcast designed for hunters and fishermen to enjoy success.

I like the idea of like, hey, put me on a big deer, you know, hey, there's a big deer out here. He's doing this. be looking for this deer. But I also love doing it on my own. I love going out there and saying running my cameras. I love patterning the deer. I like showing up at the right time checking the wind, knowing what stand I need to be in, and then whenever it all comes together and it happens, that's the most satisfying thing ever. So when you do it on your own, it's like, I then can hang my hat. But if I had somebody say, hey, pull up on these dots and catch them right here and you're going to win. And then when I go win, it's like, I then. Yeah, that's cool. I won the tournament.

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called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast? When we were making the show,

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Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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 Parchman State Penitentiary. It's a 20,000-acre farm where in the early 19 teens, with a 90% black prison population, prisoners 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 TRU-S-T-Y, where some of the the worst most violent convicted felons that were prisoners there were given rifles and said you guys make sure this other 80% of your fellow prisoners do the work the way we want them to yeah that's a really interesting system it really is it seems risky you know yeah i wanted to look more

i'm going to look more into that just for my own edification but uh because i'm i'm curious that that dynamic is uh i don't know it seems like it would create a really dodgy dynamic it would But it also reminded me of, what is the Quentin Tarantino Antebellum slavery movie? Jango and Jane. Oh, yeah, Jango. Remember he posed as a black slaver? Uh-huh. Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's kind of how I took it to kind of be 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 Obrother Whart Bell again in the night. Oh, yeah, I forgot they have that in there. And that was. you know, chain gang scenes in that. And that was another type of, uh, sort of very public penal labor, uh, because they were put in place to build roads in the south in the 1920s. Um, you know,

hard laboring all day, again in the south, out in the hot sun on that black top, 10 to 15 hours a day. Uh, 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, uh, the, uh, conditions were abysmal. Terrible food. They were beaten. They were tortured. I think there was this one investigation. This wasn't 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 their testicles and penis. Women and prisoners were also subjected to 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. Have you ever read a beloved Tony Morrison novel? I feel like I have to say 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 mind-bogglingly good, actually. But there's a few scenes about a chain gang and just what it would have been like.

One of the 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 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 going to wear it down to nothing. If you give them long enough and work them hard enough. That's what people did on chain gangs.

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 think about it accumulating, it's a brutal, brutal form of prison late. Yeah. And I mean, 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 like a necessary component to, you know, quote unquote, keeping guys in line. 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 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 was another really kind of insidious effect that they had. Yeah, but, you know, it's not like this kind of thing was being, you know, there were no exposés 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, uh, essentially. especially all over the south. There were a couple of famous examples in 1932. There was a white northern veteran who was 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. Have you seen it? I haven't seen it. Have you? Yeah.

Really? Yeah, for some reason, I don't know where you found out about it, but she was one of her well-liked movies. I don't want to say it's one of her favorite, but she showed it to me. What year was that? The movie? Yeah.

I thought you were asking me when I saw it. 1932, I believe, or 1935? Something like that. I don't watch a lot of movies from that era. But, Chuck, you should. This one, it has 8.2 on IMDB, and that's a pretty high rating. It's really good. It's a good movie.

Well, in 1947, some more newsle out when a black civil rights activist named Bayard Rustin, and I know we've talked about Bayard Rustin 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. Did you read those? I read some of, I read like, you know, snippets from it just to sort of get an idea. Oh, I was just kidding. I don't know. I looked into some of it, but I didn't like sit around and read them. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, no, I was just trying to get you again.

Gotcha. But the 50s and 60s, like because of the New York Post and because of that movie that Yumi loves came out, 50s and 60s is kind of when chain gangs basically went away, although, you know, if you lived in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 90s, you know, they tried pretty hard. What was that guy's name? The sheriff there. Joe Arpaio.

Yeah, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but he made big news a lot. Yeah. And he was one of the guys. trying to push for the reinstatement of the chain gangs. Did not happen, though, because again, America lost its taste for chain gangs in the first half of the 20th 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. How about that? Because the other way I could have put it as more and more less brutal, and that just doesn't makes sense? 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. Hey, Harry Potter fans. Huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions are all being released on Audible on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is already

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I like showing up at the right time, checking the wind, knowing what stand I need to be in. and then whenever it all comes together and it happens, that's the most satisfying thing ever. So when you do it on your own, it's like, I then can hang my hat. But if I had somebody say, hey, pull up on these dots and catch them right here and you're going to win, and then when I go win, it's like, yeah, that's cool.

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I'm Ashley Reifeld, and I'm the host of the women's skateboarding podcast. Good luck with that. Good luck with that is a skateboarding podcast that is part cultural record, part news brief, mostly group therapy, and a place to talk about the past, present, and future of women and gender expansive skateboarding. This week, me and my co-host, Nora Vasconcelos, and Alex White, we have Bobiana Delphino on the show, a professional skateboarder from Florida whose grit was forged in a family of athletes. Tune in to hear how she broke into the boys club,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we've covered mass incarceration quite a bit, certainly in our prisons episode. But here's, a stat for you, over a 36-year period from 1970 to 2008, the population of the United States rose by about 50 percent, and the population of incarcerated prisoners rose by 700 percent. That's crazy.

So we entered the mass incarceration era big time over about a 36-year period thanks to, well, thanks to a lot, but namely thanks to Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Yeah, Nixon's War on Drugs, Reagan's 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 2008 when it was quietly removed. And not coincidentally, 2008 is the year that the peak incarceration happened, like you said. Yeah, now we're about, that went from 1.6 in 2008 to about 1.3 million incarcerated individuals in the United States now. Yeah, because America's become softer and gentler.

About 600 of every 100,000 people in the U.S. 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 1,000 per 100,000. and the rate of, for black Americans, is 900 per 100,000. Can I talk about El Salvador for a second? Because I looked into their incredibly high incarceration rates. Sure. Do they do prison labor? I didn't check that out.

But I got this other stuff about it. How about that? Sure. So they have essentially established an authoritarian crackdown on gangs. And in 2015, their murder rate, was 103 people per 100,000 population, which means every year more than 1% of their population was murdered. So they cracked down on gangs and just started throwing everybody in jail.

And between 2015 and 2022, their murder rate went from 103 per 100,000 to 7.8 per 100,000. Which you're like, okay, that's actually, I mean, authoritarian crackdowns on gangs and prisons is not very, very tasteful, but at least they got results. Here in the United States, we don't have the same excuse for that level of rise in incarceration. Our homicide rate in 1955 was 4.5. In 2024, 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 reason why our prison population should have increased 700%. It just, there's no reason for it. Yeah.

Unless you expand crimes, especially nonviolent crimes like drug possession, and really throw the book at people, which is what happened during that time. 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 1.3 million-ish, it's about 800,000 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 80% of those workers are working for the prison. So, you know, when you work in the cafeteria or you work in the laundry or something like that, that's about 80% 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 DMV call center. about 2% of total prison workers and the federal prison system worked for Unicor still and I was curious about the whole license plate thing

you know, the sort of trope but most of that doesn't happen at prisons anymore because it's just cheaper to have robot machinery do that kind of thing but it's still a thing in some states 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 still. I saw that there's like a longstanding 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.

Yeah. I imagine making those and make. making ski Utah plates or, I don't know, adds a little salt to the situation, you know? For sure. I like that saying. A little salt to the situation? Well, I didn't want to say wound.

No one likes that word. No, it's not a very pleasant word. Some of these prisoners do dangerous work too, though. You know, it's not all just like sort of hourly, easy stuff. No, no. I mean, like, again, 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.

You get $2 to $5 a day plus $1 an hour when you're actively fighting wildfires in California. That's something they can make you do if you're a prisoner. Yeah. Saving the houses of the wealthy. Yeah. But not always wealthy, to be fair. Yeah. No, but there are a lot of wealthy people in California, too.

you be sure. Yeah, not only firefighting, disaster recovery sometimes, lead paint removal. I think there's around 5% of the incarcerated workforce, which is about 40,000 people work for private industries still. Right. And that a lot of times is like the work camp that I was talking about. So they may work at a fast food restaurant or may be like a work on the custodial staff at a well-known hotel chain. Yeah. And a lot of these bigger businesses have policies where they don't use least convict labor like this. But they also sometimes can't do a thing about it. Like if they're 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 don't know. And that 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 U.S. tend to have policies against that. And in fact, have policies that they put in place to hire felons, like preferential hiring of felons. Still, it washes out to where there's plenty of least convict labor today in private businesses. Yeah. 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.

On the state level, it depends on the state, but a lot of them pay nothing at all. I think the average pay for a prisoner in the U.S. is 52 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, but we're going to take most of that paycheck to cover like room and board or maybe to provide restitution to your victims if it was a financial thing. Exactly. 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, 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 52 cents an hour because they deduct 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 for our own use. That has to go into the private prison like financial success rate, right?

Precisely. Private prisons are able to do that. 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. 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, and this is right here in Georgia, that prisoners aren't paid. And she said the food is so bad that 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 20, 24. 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 you can, there is redemption in labor. We're not saying do away with it, but it needs a lot of reforms. These are the people who are like, well, reform-minded about the whole thing. There's basically no one saying we should do away of 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 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 U.S. 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 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. Yeah. I mean, there was a lawsuit brought in Alabama in 2024 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 2021, there's a, there's a international anti-slavery nonprofit called Walk Free and Australia who produces what's called the Global Slavery Index. And the United States is one of 17 countries that used state-imposed forced labor, along with China and Russia and some other places. And the United States is one of the, one of only six UN member states that hasn't ratified the forced labor convention of 1930. which we considered, the Senate considered that in 1991, like, hey, maybe we should sign on to this thing.

And they said, no, it really conflicts with subcontracting these prisoners out to private companies. So, like, let's not foul that. Yeah, we'll just, we'll walk past that one. Yeah. And like, I think you mentioned Europe in the U.N. There's, in Europe, essentially, the way that they treat prison labor is what I was saying that in the U.S. prison labor reform people are calling for. Right.

And you mentioned Alabama in that lawsuit about mandatory chores, not prison labor. The reason 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. Right.

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, it's mandatory chores. Yeah.

They don't have any teeth right now. Yeah, Tennessee was in there, too, sort of surprising in Nebraska. Here's, you know, 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. Right. I love those stats, and this is one of those. Incarcerated workers saves prison. Saves Prisons about $15 billion a year.

Man. And produces another two billion. 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 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 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 $2.40 to $3.16. Man, that's pretty good R-O-Y, just for paying prisoners. I know. I can't think of any better way to end this one, can you? I got nothing else. I thought I heard you dropped from Mike even. No, no, it's still up. Okay, well, since Chuck said, is Mike still good to go?

I guess it's time for listener mail. It's hard to drop the mic in the studio because you've got to unscrew it. I know. I've got like a windscreen. Two things have to get unplugged. And by that time, everyone's left the room, you know. They gave you a windscreen? I didn't get a windscreen.

I bought my own. I brought this from home. 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 listen 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 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 other at airports, stadiums, and other crowded places? How do we avoid crowd crushes? I feel like we touched on that, no? We have on our Black Friday episode and a couple of others we've talked about crowd crushes. Yeah, I think maybe just crowds would be a pretty good idea, Timberley.

We could work in standing in line where that came from. Is that, do people do that? I don't stand in lines. A lot of people do, surprisingly. Then wait for their turn, I think is what they call it, their turn. I'm a line jumper. You know, people love those guys. Yeah, right.

The key is to just not pay attention to anyone behind you, pretend like they're not there. 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 civil and friendly. And this guy was standing behind us, me and Emily and Ruby, like in the line, really, to get on, not the crowd that goes before they announce it. and he just like all 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 an incensed human is I don't know if it's all 10 year olds but my daughter with someone tries to jump a line she was she was furious did you see that guy you tried to break in line it was like almost no worse defense at that age was he in your shot did he hear or say that well I don't think so but I

repeated it loudly so Emily could hear. I said, did you hear what Ruby just said? Nice. She's calling out this guy behind us. Man, why would you do that? I don't know. It's just, I don't know. I don't know, Josh.

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've got to get out of the airport as soon as possible. But you still don't walk around people that you're in line behind. I know. And we were in that sort of, you know, 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. Yeah. Maybe he just could not wait to get some pretzels. The mustard. Anyway. Sorry. Rant over. Was that the end of Kimberly's email to you?

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 100% yours. That's right. 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.com. 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. One of the other things that reformers say we need to do is if you're in prison and you're laboring, none of that money goes toward 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. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product,

With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. The show was ahead of its time to represent a black family in ways the television hadn't shown before.

Exactly. It's Talma Hopkins, also known as Aunt Rachel. And I'm Kelly Williams or Laura Winslow. On our podcast, welcome to the family with Telma and Kelly, we're re-watching every episode of Family Matters. We'll share behind-the-scenes stories about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in some special guests to spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If one of us wins, we all win. I'm Ashley Rayfeld, the host of the podcast. Good luck with that. Good luck with that is a skateboarding podcast about the past, present, and future of women and gender expansive skateboarding. In our show, we'll talk with skaters like Bobby Delphino on pushing style, culture, and the conversation forward.

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