Californians may get the chance to end forced labor
When Amika Mota arrived at the California Institution for Women in 2008, she refused to work in the first prison work program she was assigned to.
She wasn’t being defiant or lazy. Later during her 7-year sentence, she worked as a jailhouse lawyer and paralegal, as well as a firefighter from 2012 to 2015 at the Central California Women’s Facility’s firehouse in Chowchilla.
She refused to work her first assignment, Mota says, because the head of the program was abusive to other inmates.
Mota was punished for her refusal, she says.
For a time she lost access to visitation and phones and couldn’t see or talk to family or friends. She also wasn’t allowed to buy from the commissary, so no more snacks or hygiene items. And, for good measure, she was put in “the hole” for 45 days, she said in an interview this week.
Now Moto is out and works as an advocate in the Bay area. She speaks out against forcing incarcerated individuals to work for little or no pay, saying it unfairly gives jails and prisons more power over them.
“When we talk about involuntary servitude, it is not just about 38 cents per hour,” Mota said, referring to her firefighter pay. “It’s not just their ability to pay us low
wages, but to actually prevent access to family, communications ... They can add time to our sentence. Those are realities people on the inside are dealing with.
“You could be punished for wanting to be educated or go to school or do something else other than clean the toilets to keep their institution running.”
Today Mota, policy director at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, openly discusses her experiences as an inmate and a firefighter.
Her first experience at forced labor strikes at the heart of an issue California voters could wrestle with as soon as the 2022 election.
A bill dubbed ACA 3 moved out of the State Assembly’s Public Safety committee earlier this week. It aims to amend California’s Constitution with a ballot measure that would completely ban involuntary servitude — something that is currently allowed under Article 1 of the state Constitution if that servitude is being used to punish a crime.
If ACA 3 gets approved in the Assembly and Senate and is passed by California voters, our state would join several others that have banned such labor in prisons and jails over the last five years, including Colorado, Nebraska and Utah. At least 12 other states also have similar legislation or ballot measures in progress, according to the Abolish Slavery Network, a national coalition working to abolish all involuntary servitude.
Many advocates equate involuntary servitude to slavery. They rightfully point out it involves forced labor for the profit of government or private companies, and they note its origins trace back to when many cities and states passed laws after slavery’s abolition to reenslave people and ensure a steady supply of forced laborers and chain gangs.
We should end involuntary servitude or, at a bare minimum, seriously consider it.
The current system incentivizes the state to keep people incarcerated — even if they are safe enough to be released to their communities —because their incarceration provides a service or, in some cases, a profit to the state.
California Senator Sydney Kamlager, a Los Angeles Democrat leading efforts to adopt ACA 3, asserted during the Public Safety Committee meeting Tuesday that incarcerated labor provides an economic boon much like slavery did.
“Involuntary servitude for a crime, a vestige of those (slavery) times, remains an economic engine for this country and for California,” Kamlager said. “The minimum estimated value for incarcerated labor in our prisons and jails annually is $2 billion.”
Mota says this is about the structure of our penal system.
“The idea that we are saving the state $2 billion a year, it’s in exchange for our freedom,” she said. “I don’t know how we can’t talk about the state as an actor with power and force, that’s hard at work at keeping us inside.”
There are some who will claim that we don’t really have involuntary servitude, or slavery, because incarcerated people are “volunteering” for the work programs.
That on its face is not exactly true, because you can’t genuinely volunteer if the alternative for not volunteering is to face significant punishment, such as not seeing your family or getting tossed into isolation.
Also, because the current system relies on forced labor for meager compensation — sometimes as little as 8 cents an hour — it is akin to slavery. And I don’t say this lightly.
People who want to maintain involuntary servitude have even acknowledged that economic benefits are part of their reasoning, along with the fact that California has become over-reliant on their labor to meet certain state needs.
For example, under nowVice President Kamala Harris’s leadership, California’s Attorney General’s office fiercely prevented efforts to release non-violent offenders early to relieve prison overcrowding. Her office argued, in part, that
“Involuntary servitude for a crime, a vestige of those (slavery) times, remains an economic engine for this country and for California.” California State Sen. Sydney Kamlager • D-Los Angeles
releasing non-violent offenders would reduce how many inmate firefighters were available, “a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”
I understand that there are some people who will look at this issue and not care because of the population of people impacted. I can already imagine the comments and emails I’ll get about how we “need to be tough on crime.”
Our justice system — at least in theory — isn’t supposed to be purely punitive or about vengeance. It is supposed to be about justice and rehabilitation. I’m not sure you can really deliver the latter if you repeatedly treat people as less than human.
Banning involuntary servitude also doesn’t mean all work programs must cease to exist; it just means they can no longer be “involuntary.”
Beyond that, this isn’t just about incarcerated people; it’s about us and who we believe ourselves to be. Are we people who strive to offer opportunity for all and who fight to protect every person’s dignity?
We sure like to claim we are. So we need to prove it and show some measure of care for our incarcerated residents.