Being imprisoned shouldn’t mean being enslaved

When Mayor Adams recently stated his intent to keep some form of “punitive segregation,” or solitary confinement, at Rikers Island and other jail complexes, I almost didn’t believe my ears. I was charged as an adult and sent to Rikers at age 16, where I stayed for more than a year. Later, still a teenager, I was re-incarcerated at a jail upstate, where I spent a total of 905 days in solitary confinement. I know all too well that the inhumane conditions in New York’s jails directly undermine the goals of safety and rehabilitation — goals that the new mayor has rightly put at the center of his criminal justice agenda.

If Adams truly wants to make our jails and streets safer, he should be working to improve conditions and opportunities for the incarcerated, not double down on practices like solitary confinement that have been shown to hurt the cause. This means, for one, expediting the closing of the complex at Rikers — a modern-day torture island where at least 15 people lost their lives in 2021 — as fast as possible.

But to truly improve the chances for rehabilitation statewide, lawmakers in Albany should address a more hidden, but no less consequential, practice in New York’s prisons: forced labor. Due to an insidious loophole in the 13th Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution, which abolished slavery except “as a punishment for crime,” today involuntary servitude is permitted throughout our nation’s prisons and jails. Which means the 13th Amendment, with that small exception, did not in fact eliminate slavery in America, but rather cemented it into perpetuity.

In New York State, many of the 30,000plus people incarcerated — a population that is 50% Black and 22% Hispanic — are forced to work, producing upwards of $53 million in annual revenue for the state through Corcraft, a division of the Department of Corrections. Yet the average detainee in New York State prisons earns just $0.65 an hour, without access to any federal or state worker protections.

Others, including myself when I was incarcerated, make only $0.16 an hour, the minimum wage in New York’s prisons, which hasn’t increased since 1992 even as the prices of commissary items have skyrocketed. By contrast, the current minimum wage in New York State is $13.20, meaning that, assuming identical hours, someone incarcerated making 16 cents an hour would have to work more than six years to make what someone working at a typical minimum wage job makes in just one month.

Incarcerated people are working for these wages while making products we all rely on: manufacturing license plates, answering calls to the DMV, even making the emergency hand sanitizer New Yorkers used to protect themselves at the peak of the pandemic. Imagine doing work critical to the health of communities, for 40 hours a week, on your feet all day, to only receive $5 in your account — enough money to buy toothpaste, a stamp to write a loved one, and two single ramen soups.

Is it all that surprising, then, that the recidivism rate in New York is 41% when we treat detainees as less than human, deprive them of any chance to accumulate savings, and provide limited quality education and training opportunities while incarcerated that will prepare them to transition to a job when released. If we care about safety and rehabilitation in our prisons, we must expand opportunities to people while they serve their time. Gov. Hochul’s recent call to reverse the ban on financial aid to those incarcerated, among other proposed reforms, is a promising first step.

We also need to create humane working conditions for incarcerated workers, which is why this month, a coalition of criminal justice and civil rights groups are launching #FixThe13thNY. The campaign will pressure New York lawmakers to pass legislation to ensure that incarcerated people in New York aren’t compelled or coerced to work against their will, such as state Sen. Zellnor Myrie’s “Abolish Penal Servitude Act,” and to raise the wages for detainees to $3 an hour consistent with a growing trend nationwide.

Raising wages and improving prison working conditions will help incarcerated people control their own future. Money earned while in prison can help the formerly incarcerated overcome the tremendous barriers to education, employment and housing they face upon release.

The vestiges of slavery can be seen in every facet of our criminal justice system. As the scholar Michelle Alexander has written, more Black men are behind bars or under the watch of the criminal justice system today than were enslaved in 1850.

In 2022, there is no excuse that actual slavery — in the form of forced prison labor, at close-to-nothing wages, under callous conditions — should be tolerated in the United States. New York lawmakers should affirm that such a practice is indefensible and not welcome in this state.

Guzman is a policy entrepreneur at Next100, a think tank for a new generation of policy leaders, and founder of the #FixThe13thNY campaign.