New York Can’t Sanitize its Prison Labor Problem
Do you know if your hand soap, file cabinet, or those hamburger patties in your freezer were made in prison?
Responding to increased demand for hand sanitizer amid the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s Gov. Cuomo unveiled a new hand sanitizer on Monday that is 75% alcohol, features a “very nice floral bouquet scent,” and is “made conveniently by the state of New York” — specifically, inmates at the Great Meadow max-security prison upstate.
Turns out, state and federal prisoners make a LOT of everyday products — literally tens of thousands of them. While Great Meadow specializes in janitorial, personal care and vehicle maintenance chemicals, other New York prisons make furniture, license plates, textiles, highway signs, eyeglasses, mattresses and much more. The inmates earn on average about $0.65 an hour for their labor, and their products are sold to other prisons, public schools, state, local and municipal government agencies, and certain nonprofits.
In New York, Corcraft is the brand name for these products, and the Division of Correctional Industries generates about $50 million a year from their sales. But each state has its own. In my home state of Pennsylvania, for example, Big House Products (if you think the name is bad, check out the logo) are made in 19 of the 26 prisons across the state. They employ about 200 “citizen” employees and over 1,500 inmates to manufacture over 3,000 products (including church pews). Federal prisoners, meanwhile, might work for UNICOR, whose tagline is: “We’re life changing.”
Prison factories often bill themselves as a service that provides incarcerated men and women with valuable job-training skills. “Learning to wake up on time, get to work on time, get to work every day … work with others, learning how to take instruction and criticism,” is how it’s explained on Lockup Lowdown, the podcast of the PA Department of Corrections.
But others — including inmates and their advocates — call it forced labor, “prison slavery” and an “institutional descendant of slavery.” A recent NY state assembly bill points out that the inmates “cannot form unions, do not have a right to workers’ compensation if they are injured on the job, and are required to participate in programs as assigned which, if they refuse, could lead them to face disciplinary measures such as solitary confinement and loss of good-time credits.”
A big challenge facing many formerly incarcerated people is a lack of cash or savings to cover basic living needs after their release. And with prison wages as low as 16 cents an hour in New York, it can be a challenge simply to afford commissary items like extra soap or shampoo (which are, incidentally, sometimes made by other prisoners) let alone save enough for a post-release cushion.
This legislative session, New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie re-introduced a prison minimum wage act similar to the assembly bill. It aims to raise the minimum wage to $3 an hour for inmates. Though Cuomo says he supports a wage bump, the bill is currently stalled in committee.
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