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$11 Billion
Nearly 800,000 incarcerated people work in U.S. prisons. They produce over $2 billion in goods and over $9 billion in services annually. The services are primarily prison maintenance, which means incarcerated people clean, cook, do laundry, and maintain the facilities that hold them.
800,000 workers. $11 billion in annual output. Average pay is 13 to 52 cents per hour. Seven states pay nothing.
Seven state prison systems pay nothing for the majority of prison work. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. In states that do pay, the average is 13 to 52 cents per hour for non-industry jobs. The government then takes up to 80% of those wages for “room and board,” court costs, restitution, and fees that fund the prison system itself.
70% of incarcerated workers surveyed said they could not afford basic necessities like soap, phone calls, or stamps with their prison wages.
The Coercion
This is not voluntary employment. 76% of incarcerated workers face punishment including solitary confinement if they refuse to work. The ACLU’s “Captive Labor” report, produced with the University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, documented the systematic coercion that makes prison labor functionally involuntary.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” That exception is the legal basis for a system where hundreds of thousands of people work for pennies or nothing under threat of solitary confinement.
Who Benefits
More than 80% of prison laborers do prison maintenance work. They are subsidizing the cost of their own incarceration. The $11 billion in annual output offsets what it would cost to hire paid workers for the same jobs. Without prison labor, the cost of operating the prison system would be visibly higher, and the political case for mass incarceration would be harder to make.
Some incarcerated workers produce goods for private companies or work in prison industries that sell products on the open market. These programs operate with labor costs near zero and no obligation to provide benefits, workplace safety standards, or market-rate wages.
The Scale
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. Of those, 800,000 work. They generate $11 billion. Seven states pay them nothing. 76% face solitary if they say no.
That is not a rehabilitation program. It is an economic system built on captive labor.
Read more on the Civil Rights hub and the Alabama prison crisis brief.