Californians escaping devastating wildfires confront a grim irony: seeing their 21st Century homes and livelihoods being defended by slaves, firefighting prisoners forced by the state to fight fires under life-threatening conditions for any hours demanded. They don’t have the core human dignity to legally reject the work without retaliation. Surprise turns to outrage when people learn that in “progressive” California — whose incarceration rate of 494 inmates per 100,000 far exceeds many nations the U.S. calls “authoritarian” — inmate firefighters are just the surface of a massive system of forced labor. California’s Prop 6, a referendum on an amendment to the state constitution, aims to dismantle this injustice.
Led by the formerly incarcerated, like Paul Briley, Executive Director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Prop. 6, appearing on the ballot Nov. 5, would amend the California constitution’s forced labor clause, giving prisoners the right to refuse work without retaliation by prison or jail officials.
Today inmates, largely Black, Brown, and Indigenous, work in menial jobs — cleaning, building maintenance, food processing — for as little as 8 cents an hour, sometimes for no wages at all. Even after weeks of work, they can barely afford basic necessities like soap. State prisons and jails, sometimes in collaboration with corporations like Home Depot, Walmart, and McDonalds, benefit from this exploitation to the tune of $11 billion annually. Former prisoners have exposed how correctional officers coerce them into this labor with threats of a “one-fifteen” disciplinary write up, a “modern day whip,” as Briley explained in an interview with Liberation, that could jeopardize their parole prospects or extend their sentences.
The brutality of this system is amplified by California’s restitution debt practices. The state takes 55% of prisoners’ already meager wages if they owe restitution. The interest on this debt often balloons, leaving prisoners worse off despite years of garnished wages. Briley compared this to the exploitative sharecropping system that indebted Black people in the post-Civil War South. “My friend owed $5,000 restitution when he was sentenced. Now after 12 years working while incarcerated, he owes like $10,000.”
California, the fifth-largest economy in the world, is home to thousands of unhoused people who sleep rough on Skid Row Los Angeles and under the freeways criss-crossing the San Francisco Bay Area. Policies shaped by billionaire landlords and developers ensure that affordable housing remains scarce, while the poor are pushed into informal economies to survive. Many of these poor people are then funneled into jails and prisons. Once behind bars prisoners’ wages are so low compared to their survival cash needs that Briley noted an incarcerated friend called work assignments paying 35 cents an hour “salary jobs.”
Free-world workers in California understand that this exploitation also threatens their own labor conditions. Prisoners are prohibited from organizing into unions, and the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause does not apply to them. This leaves prisoners without even minimal protections under labor laws like OSHA. The existence of super-exploited workers in the prison system undermines the rate of compensation for non-prisoners in a perpetual race to the bottom.
Prison activists stress that the fight against legalized slavery is about more than just wages and working conditions — it is about human dignity. Paul Briley said, “The Constitution itself was not meant to address people’s wrongs. The legislative intent was to address [certain] people’s rights. Prison should be about rehabilitation. Not exploitation. This is not about who’s wrong, it’s about what’s wrong.”
After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment in essence transferred the right to own a person from the individual to the state, creating a system whose victims are often jailed, as Briley explains, “because society has failed to provide a solution to the problems they endure.”
Despite repeated outcry at repugnant working conditions beginning more than 100 years ago and continuing to today, 16 states, including California, still permit forced labor, and every federal attempt to remove the slavery exemption from the constitution has failed to reach the 38 state threshold necessary to amend the 13th Amendment. Previous attempts in California to adjust the state’s stance on prison labor have either died as bills in the legislature or were limited to efforts to ensure prisons, CALPIA and firms they contract with are bound by state minimum wage laws – which also failed.
However, some states, such as Tennessee in 2022, have succeeded in amending their constitutions to retract the language permitting slavery for those convicted of crimes. In Nevada, a referendum on Question 4, which has language similar to Proposition 6, will also be held this November. These two referendums present a powerful opportunity to combat legal, state-sponsored slavery.
All progressive and revolutionary people should vote yes on Proposition 6 to support, show solidarity with, and build power amongst a super-exploited segment of the working class.
Feature image: Bureau of Land Management. CC BY 2.0
