THE PRISON SELL
Arizona changed how it sells prisoners to companies. The state raked in millions, but workers were neglected
Clothed in orange with elbow-high rubber gloves and large black masks, a line of workers along a conveyor belt pull lead from cathode-ray tubes.
At a construction warehouse, more workers in orange jumpsuits piece together wall frames for single-family homes until one shoots a nail into his knee with a nail gun.
At a canning factory, a worker attempts to fix a problem in the assembly line. Suddenly, his arm gets caught in the machinery and is almost sliced in half.
Because these workers are prisoners, they aren’t entitled to workers’ compensation or financial assistance. And it’s often too difficult and expensive for them to sue.
For the companies that employ them, that’s a key selling point.
In the past, prisoners might have learned metalworking, mechanic skills, woodworking and upholstery — trades that are still beneficial in a U.S. economy that has seen an exodus
of manufacturing jobs overseas.
But now, Arizona Correctional Industries — the state-run company that hocks incarcerated labor — is leasing hundreds of prisoners to twice as many private companies as it did 10 years ago.
That’s thanks to Brian Radecki, who took charge of ACI in 2010, deciding that the best way to profit from prisoners wasn’t to teach them how to make goods in prison shops, but to sell their labor to private companies instead.
A former marketing director justified the shift: he said selling prisoners instead of products enables ACI to generate revenues without the costs.
Since then — and save for a few high-tech sales and manufacturing jobs — ACI has shunted prisoners into monotonous, backbreaking and often dangerous work, while injuries and lawsuits have mounted.
Prisoner rehabilitation has taken a backseat to the pursuit of profits.
ACI has made millions — except during COVID when profits plunged — and private companies have benefited. They can access a captive labor force, which is required by law to work and doesn’t have the same rights as civilian workers. Prisoners can’t make official reports to the state about poor working conditions. They don’t get financial assistance if injured on the job, and if they try to opt out, they are punished.
To investigate how prison labor is used across the state, The Arizona Republic and KJZZ News spent 15 months combing through thousands of price quotes, emails, invoices, pay stubs, annual reports, lawsuits and government audits. Reporters interviewed more than 100 prisoners who currently work for the company or who worked for it in the past. Reporters also talked with executives of private companies that contract with ACI and a handful of ACI’s civilian employees, who could have lost their jobs if it was discovered that they spoke with the media.
Even though the information reviewed provides a first-of-its-kind glimpse into the inner workings of how the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry uses prison labor, The Republic and KJZZ could not get all of their questions answered. That’s because the Department of Corrections went out of its way to keep records hidden from the public, even going so far as denying reporters public data on prisoners, including how the state manages incarcerated people’s money.
In response, The Republic filed a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections. And it didn’t stop there.
The newspaper also developed a computer program that downloaded public prisoner profile data from the state’s own website. The tool allowed reporters from both news organizations to gather work, crime, and demographic information for incarcerated people from 1980 through 2022 and to evaluate trends in admissions over time.
From these efforts, The Republic and KJZZ found:
● ACI and its private company partners have benefited handsomely from changes Radecki implemented since taking over as CEO in 2011. ACI’s profits have more than doubled, while its partners have been able to count on a cheap and reliable workforce.
● ACI has long claimed that rehabilitating prisoners is one of its primary goals, but after Radecki took over, rehabilitation has become an afterthought and training more difficult to obtain, according to both prisoners and ACI staff. Unlike work in ACI’s manufacturing shops, jobs provided by ACI’s privatesector partners are repetitive tasks requiring little in the way of skills that could help prisoners obtain jobs after getting out. And when skilled positions open up, ACI tries to fill them with prisoners who already have those skills instead of with prisoners who need training.
● Many jobs offered by private companies are dangerous. The Republic and KJZZ documented at least 45 incidents in which prisoners were injured working during Radecki’s tenure. That’s by no means a complete list, and it’s not clear whether it represents an increase compared to Radecki’s predecessor because the Department of Corrections would not provide medical grievances filed by prisoners, claiming privacy rights. Prisoners don’t have the same rights as other workers. In most instances, they are unable to even submit complaints with the state safety department if they are in danger. Meanwhile, the Department of Corrections says that all work is voluntary, but it punishes prisoners for failing to show up or for quitting ACI jobs.
● When the coronavirus pandemic hit, it disrupted ACI’s lucrative prisoner leasing business. More than a dozen private sector clients halted operations, and ACI had to scramble to rebuild the manufacturing capabilities of Arizona’s prisons. Both sales and production faltered. Customers experienced long delays in obtaining products. Members of the sales staff quit, complaining of drastic cuts in their commissions.
● Top level executives looked for ways to get around federal trade laws barring prisons from selling products – made by prisoners earning less than the federal minimum wage – through private companies that do business out of state. According to emails obtained by The Republic, Radecki and Gail Fenkell, ACI’s deputy assistant director, entertained selling Arizona’s prison-made goods across the country through both Keefe Commissary Network and MyPillow, a bedding company made famous by its conservative celebrity CEO, Mike Lindell, a vocal supporter of the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen.
Neither Radecki, Fenkell nor representatives from the Department of Corrections would agree to a phone or sitdown interview and only would respond via emails.
Spokespeople for the agency said that the state follows all federal laws, including safety, wage and trade regulations. They denied any wrongdoing with regard to payment of low wages or excessive deductions from paychecks, and rebutted statements from prisoners that they are put in dangerous conditions inside the prison or at their work placements.
The Department of Corrections said the work ACI offers to prisoners addresses the state’s labor shortage, while insisting that prisoners receive valuable skills and money that they can spend on the outside once released.
“Along with providing a wide variety of available positions to those in our custody, ACI also builds upon the existing skills of those in our custody through continued experience and broader based knowledge,” the department said. “ACI inmates are also gaining valuable work skills in a number of in-demand job fields within the construction industry, including drywall installation, truss building, and wall systems, along with manufacturing wood beams, and metal fabrication.”
Under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, states can still force prisoners to work and they do not have to pay them a penny. In fact eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — do just that. Arizona happens to be a state that pays prisoners, but what it pays averages far less than the federal minimum wage.
Multiple prisoners interviewed said they know they are being exploited by the state and private companies that want to save on wages, insurance and taxes. Still, they maintain that working for ACI is better than being locked up in a cell all day doing nothing, or picking up cigarette butts in a prison yard for 10 cents an hour. And many prisoners who are lucky enough to get jobs in ACI that can pay up to $12 an hour say they have been able to leave prison with thousands of dollars in savings — giving them a leg up in their first step out of prison in renting a home, a car, or paying for a driver’s license.
Nevertheless, there is near universal condemnation by prisoners against the state. They claim ACI did not provide them with the skills they needed to make it on the outside. But more than anything, they say ACI needs to pay a fair wage.
“It’s really hard to be used and used and used,” said Marlo Kobylarek, a prisoner who worked for ACI for a year. “And it sucks because it should be for a greater good than a greater profit. But that’s all it is. It’s just a profit.”
‘It was all kind of hush-hush’
When Arizona became a state in 1912, it incarcerated nearly 100 people per year. At the time, all of them worked on building the state’s prison in Florence.
The goal was to save the state money, and unlike the Deep South, using prisoners as labor for private companies was seen as crass profiteering.
Even before Arizona became a state the idea of leasing prisoners to companies for day labor was frowned on. When a territorial governor proposed an earlier version of the practice, it never even received a vote.
But the public did see a benefit in prisoners working for the state. Hence, they plowed fields for their own meals, hammered the railroads, constructed train depots, built schools and courthouses, flattened highways, and erected county jails.
As the state’s prison population swelled in the 1980s and the decade that followed, Arizona regulated that prisoners had to work inside prisons to make sure the facilities were self-sustaining, and established their pay. Prisoners cooked meals, washed laundry, and cleaned bathrooms, all for the paltry sum of 10 to 35 cents an hour.
In the beginning, the elite few who managed to secure jobs at ACI concentrated mostly on manufacturing products in prison workshops. They made bunk beds, fencing and clothing for other incarcerated people; tables, chairs and storage cabinets for schools; couches, ottomans and mattresses for universities; security desks and lockers for law enforcement. Their pay ranged from 50 cents an hour all the way up to the state’s minimum wage.
But in 1995, ACI started to sell prisoners, themselves, to meet the labor needs of a select group of high-profile private companies such as Hickman’s Family Farms, the used car dealer Manheim, and the marketing business Televerde.
While the number of prisoners working for private employers gradually expanded in the ensuing years, the majority — 60% — of prisoners still worked in ACI’s manufacturing shops by the early 2000s.
At that time, farms and factories still relied on migrant labor, or had to pay above the minimum wage to keep workers from leaving. But that rapidly changed between 2008 and 2011, when migrants began fleeing Arizona because of the state’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and tough-on-immigration laws.
“After (Sheriff Joe) Arpaio did his raids, a big exodus of people left the state,” said Salvador Reza, a civil rights leader in the Phoenix area. “It was a couple hundred thousand, but in reality it was maybe more.”
The labor shortage meant companies needed to scout out cheap workers for farms, construction, canneries, and manufacturing jobs, which was evident to Brian Radecki when he joined ACI in 2010 and took over as CEO the following year, insiders at the company said.
“Labor is always a challenge, and I’m sure (using prisoners) was a way to help alleviate that,” said Patty Emmert, marketing director at Duncan Family Farms, which began using prison labor two years before Radecki appeared on the scene. The incarcerated workers at the farm gleaned the fields of produce that couldn’t be sold, or was overgrown, that would eventually be donated to food banks.“It was just easier to use the prisoners instead of trying to deal with a workforce that never came back,” she said.
Before Radecki’s arrival, the company’s growth from contracting private companies like Duncan Family Farms was sluggish; the sales team only got a few new contracts each year, according to annual reports. But within five years, Radecki had doubled ACI’s stable of private sector clients.
Employees who worked at ACI said the shift was a necessity: Manufacturing, though important, was too expensive to maintain.
“There’s all this infrastructure we have to come up with,” said Clark DesSoye, a former chief marketing officer for ACI who was brought on by Radecki in 2013 to market ACI to private businesses. “The operation can run a sign shop with silk screening when everybody else in the world is using large platform digital printers, but those printers are expensive.”
Hiring trainers to teach new machinery or technology to a new batch of prisoners was costly, too. Prisoners and company employees said ACI relies heavily on incarcerated people teaching each other, turning training into a “game of telephone,” as one ACI employee put it, where after years of relying on prisoners to train one another, quality — and safety — became a consistent issue.
It was cheaper to just sell the prisoners.
DesSoye said before his arrival, deals with private businesses were kept silent: “It was all kind of hush-hush,” he said. It was his job to bring ACI into the mainstream as an active competitor in the labor market.
By selling prisoners to companies, DesSoye said, “there was more money to be made.”
Private companies that contract with ACI end up paying the minimum wage for the prisoners. But ACI only pays prisoners a portion of what it receives from the companies, pocketing the rest as profits and to cover its expenses.
Within that, companies pay ACI an 11% service fee, and hourly wages for the corrections officers who accompany the prisoners to the worksite.
Private companies get a reliable workforce, and they save by not having to pay prisoners for time off or for injuries if they get hurt on the job. They don’t have to pay federal and local taxes, and in some cases, they are even given access to prison facilities for cheap instead of having to rent warehouses.
To get the word out about prison labor, DesSoye began advertising.
Ads in the Phoenix Business Journal coaxed employers to hire prisoners if they were “unable to afford the associated expenses like FICA, workman’s comp and health insurance.”
At Waste Connections of Arizona in Apache Junction, Sales and Marketing Director Laurence Williams said he was excited to have a “captive workforce.” The free-market labor he hired often quit, or couldn’t do the job. Even with paying well above minimum wage, people didn’t like the backbreaking work of sorting through the city’s recyclables.
Radecki’s strategy was immediately more profitable than his predecessor’s. As more prisoners were sent to private companies rather than ACI warehouses, ACI experienced a multimillion-dollar windfall. Sales soared from $31.9 million in 2009 before Radecki came on, to $42.1 million in 2015, and went as high as $48 million in 2019, according to the company’s annual reports.
Meanwhile, average annual profits leapt from $1.7 million a year during the decade before Radecki to $4 million a year afterward, peaking at $6.7 million in 2019.
“It’s really hard to be used and used and used. And it sucks because it should be for a greater good than a greater profit. But that’s all it is. It’s just a profit.” Marlo Kobylarek A prisoner who worked for ACI for a year
‘I thought education trumped everything else’
Tianna Bowser arrived at Hickman’s Family Farms, tired and cold. It was April 2020, and the weather had cooled after a storm swept through from the California coast. On the farmland outside of Phoenix on Jackrabbit Trail, bereft of the city’s asphalt and steel that artificially heat the ground, the air was still crisp.
Hours before, Bowser was in her cell at the Perryville State Prison, trying to reason with her corrections officer. She was being moved but asked to stay at the prison so she could graduate. “You work at Hickman’s,” she remembers the lieutenant telling her. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in school.”
“I told them that I thought education trumped everything else in the prisons. Like, if you’re in education programming, that comes first before anything else,” Bowser said. “But they told me the job at Hickman’s was more important.”
This was clear evidence of ACI’s new way of doing things. Prisoners said corporate profits were the company’s primary concern — prisoner rehabilitation a distant second.
If Bowser had quit — choosing school over Hickman’s — she said she would have faced a major ticket. That would have meant losing visitation rights, phone call privileges, or worse: She might have been precluded from working for three to six months — an extreme
punishment in a prison system where the ability to earn a little extra money every month can keep prisoners from going hungry.
Now, she was face-to-face with her home for the foreseeable future: a metal warehouse with wall to wall bunks made by other prisoners, and set up by them.
Bowser and 139 other women fumbled in the dim light, looking for their items and throwing them on beds to claim a space. Within days, the portable toilets — placed next to where the women slept — began to fill up. Excrement stewed inside the warehouse for days before being emptied. Women would wrap their heads in extra linens while they slept to block the smells.
Corrections officers brought in fans to circulate fresh air, but instead of respite from the smell and heat, the fans just stirred up dust, bacteria, dirt and chicken feces. Making matters worse, drinking the water on site was always a gamble since the prisoners said water fountains had a large sign cautioning it wasn’t potable, and shouldn’t be consumed if pregnant.
Hickman’s denied having water issues, and corrections officials responded in a statement that “each work crew has unfettered access to clean, cold drinking water, including those working at Hickman’s Family Farm.” But multiple prisoners say that is not true, and many complained of having stomach issues while working on the farm.
“It was a nightmare,” Bowser recalled. Movement isn’t all that strange in prisons; people often get shuffled around to different yards or prison blocks. But at that time, the pandemic had shut down operations across the state. Prisoners were limited to walking between their cells and cafeteria halls, or rare fleeting moments of opportunities to exercise outdoors or shower, or go to the commissary to buy necessities.
The shutdowns caused tension, anxiety, and fear inside the prisons. For the owners of Hickman’s Family Farms — which used hundreds of prisoners for cheap, dependable labor — the concern was about their bottom line: They needed prisoners back to work on the farms immediately.
Behind closed doors, the farm’s owners and state corrections officials worked out a solution where prisoners would live on site at the farm — something that the company wanted to turn into a permanent situation as early as May 2020, according to emails gathered by KJZZ News.
This trade-off came at the expense of rehabilitation for prisoners, some of whom have come forward to say they were forced into their jobs, despite the Department of Corrections claiming the jobs are voluntary.
One prisoner at Perryville, who asked not to have her name mentioned, didn’t even apply for her job at Hickman’s. She said she had to quit after three months because the company wouldn’t transfer her to the day shift so she could stay in college.
But by quitting, the woman received precisely the punishment that Bowser feared: “They put a six-month hold on me so I can’t get another job,” the woman said. Records gathered by The Republic confirmed that she didn’t get another ACI job until five months after she quit.
Prisoners are well aware of the consequences for not working, and many don’t push back.
“One thing we as incarcerated individuals lack is control,” said another prisoner, who currently works for ACI and didn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation. “We generally don’t control what we eat, where we sleep, or any of the basic things in life a normal adult has control over. So, when an authority like ACI gives you some control and really nice perks — an office job with a computer, coffee, nice chairs — you’ll do whatever they want you to do so you can keep your job.”
But there are some who still push back. Since 2010, Corrections has written up 177 ACI workers for missing work or refusing program participation. That number is a possible undercount, as the Department of Corrections has refused to give The Republic and KJZZ official data showing disciplinary cases.
Based on the computer program built by The Republic, the two newsrooms found that one man who refused to work was placed in a disciplinary yard where fights often broke out. Another woman was banned from working at all for 60 days after refusing to work, which cut off her ability to buy food or sanitary products from the prison store. Another man claimed he got thrown into solitary confinement for a day after refusing to work a bakery job.
“It was just easier to use the prisoners instead of trying to deal with a workforce that never came back.” Patty Emmert Marketing director at Duncan Family Farms
Prison as a labor camp
When ACI needs someone with a certain skill, such as welding, or the ability to refurbish a prison door or make custom patio furniture, they see whether prisoners already possessed those skills before incarceration.
At the same time, training for jobs considered to be skilled craftwork — HVAC repair, electrical or woodworking — had slowly been replaced under Radecki’s tenure by placement in jobs at private companies that involve unskilled tasks like sorting through trash, disassembling hazardous materials on a conveyor belt, or canning food.
A decade before Radecki came on, only 1,400 prisoners worked for ACI, the majority in its manufacturing shops, according to department records. Only about 540 worked for private companies, such as Hickman’s Family Farms or Televerde.
By the end 2019 — nearly a decade after Radecki’s start date — the number of prisoners working inside ACI swelled to nearly 2,000, with more than 1,200 working for private companies.
Records show that in 2019, 439 prisoners were engaged in farming or food processing and packaging for private companies. They picked tomatoes, milked cows, packed eggs in cartons, canned peppers and packaged animal feed.
Another 322 prisoners worked in recycling and light manufacturing. They separated garments or trash on conveyor belts. They welded metal trailers, detailed used cars sold at auction, and reclaimed aircraft parts.
Just over 150 incarcerated people labored in construction, helping install drywall, or manufacturing wooden trusses.
Most of the rest worked at phone banks, generating sales leads for hightech companies or raising money for veterans groups and other organizations.
But while ACI’s private sector partners got a low-cost, stable workforce out of the arrangement and ACI pulled in millions in profits, prisoners rarely got what they needed. Obtaining skills or education on the job, according to several ACI staff members who left in the past year, was only possible if it didn’t impede profitability.
Prisoners said the same.
Chad Lawrence, who is imprisoned at the Eyman prison complex, worked at ACI for only five weeks, but said that was long enough for him to understand “it was a place I didn’t want to be.”
Unlike claims by ACI that prisoners must apply and are not forced into positions, he said he didn’t apply for the job. In fact, Lawrence said he doesn’t qualify to work for the company because he is considered a flight risk. Prisoners who are classified as close custody are considered too dangerous to work for the company, and in 2009 Lawrence was accused of escaping.
Lawrence didn’t want to work a manual labor job. He said he had “extensive experience in administrative systems like Excel, processing purchase orders, event organization” and other technology. If anything, he thought, he would be able to build on those skills or learn new ones to get hired for a job once he was released.
Instead, he was forced into a job doing powder coating at the metal factory.
“It’s easy to put someone in a job lifting things or sanding things down with an air-powered hand sander,” he said. “ACI in theory is supposed to provide ‘vocational rehabilitation,’ but in reality if you don’t know the skills they require to make a profit, they will not make time to teach you them.”
Lawrence said he asked to become an apprentice and shadow the people using drafting software for blueprints of projects being made.
“I asked if I could spend half my day shadowing one of the inmates who did drafting so I could learn how to do that,” he said. “He was apologetic but unwavering in his position that they don’t train drafters.”
When he asked to be trained in another software that multiple manufacturing industries, including ACI, used, they again denied him.
“They’re not going to spend money training me unless they absolutely need to,” Lawrence said.
That tracks for a number of prisoners who said they were forced into jobs that suited ACI’s manufacturing needs. Department memos directly order corrections officers to place people where they are most qualified and needed: Engineers get put onto electrical duty; chefs or line cooks get assigned to the bakery; carpenters are placed in woodworking.
Other prisoners have written to The Republic saying they were given no choice but to work in the ACI warehouses making tables, sorting fabrics, baking bread, or other manufacturing jobs to meet the ongoing needs of clients ordering products. If they refused to work, they say they were threatened.
‘I won’t be able to make a living’
Before he was in prison, Jermaine Pledger worked as a carpenter. He described his body prior to incarceration as muscular and athletic.
“It’s like a noodle now,” he said. ACI used his strength and job history to assemble frames for Superstition Components, a construction company that builds walls for residential homes. But in 2019, he tore his bicep on the job and required surgery, according to medical documents.
Even though the state, on paper, was supposed to give Pledger medical care, he said he still hasn’t had surgery. Recently, a federal judge ruled in another case against the state, saying medical care inside the state’s prisons was so bad, it violated prisoners’ constitutional rights.
“I won’t be able to make a living when I’m released from prison,” he said, describing how he can’t shave, brush his teeth, or do other simple daily activities.
Pledger filed a lawsuit against Superstition Components for damages. He is just one of a handful of prisoners who might be lucky enough to be able to see their cases move through the court system.
The company could not be reached to respond to claims Pledger made against them.
The Department of Corrections in its contracts with companies requires that they follow all federal safety guidelines, and in an emailed statement said that it has procedures to make sure there are safety guidelines in place. But the department could not provide proof that inspections have been done to show workers are kept safe.
It’s impossible to know how many people are injured at any of ACI’s warehouses or private businesses. Incident reports that are meant to be submitted when there are accidents on job sites don’t always get reported.
And because prisoners don’t have the same rights as other workers, they can’t submit safety complaints with the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health.
Still, at least eight companies that do business with ACI have been fined and issued citations for health and safety violations, including a citation of someone dying on the job. None of the citations involve prisoners.
Grievances filed by prisoners — and dismissed by prison officials — show that incarcerated workers have at times made multiple attempts to warn staff about unsafe working conditions, including saw blades being loose, not being allowed to work with gloves while using dangerous machinery, or being told not to use heavy-duty gloves while handling power blades.
“Our biggest problem in framing is that we work with nail guns, but they never gave a class on how to properly use this gun,” one prisoner said, explaining his frustrations with trying to warn cor
rections officers about safety hazards. “In other words, guys are constantly shooting themselves, mostly in the hand. In September, one guy shot himself in the kneecap.”
And while prisoners, like Pledger, can file civil lawsuits to get compensation for their injuries, filing fees and other court costs are prohibitively expensive.
Only 17 prisoners have been able to file civil lawsuits against ACI businesses since 2013. That’s still three times as many as were filed during the 10 years before Radecki took over. The recent lawsuits included one by a prisoner who alleged that he fell from the top of a SWIFT Transportation truck after he had to climb a homemade ladder in 2019.
SWIFT in court records denied that workers were required to use a homemade ladder, and would not comment on other allegations until further discovery was made. The case was eventually dismissed in favor of SWIFT.
Another prisoner’s entire arm got pulled through a grinder at Fiesta Canning Co., owned by Macayo’s Restaurants. A female prisoner lost her finger while working at Hickman’s Family Farms in 2020.
Both Hickman’s and Fiesta Canning Co. denied all the allegations, but eventually settled their cases out of court.
None of the prisoners in the lawsuits are entitled to workers’ compensation benefits, and they are not eligible for unemployment or disability if they end up not being able to work upon release.
Dozens of other prisoners have said they have been injured on the job. Records show that four smashed their hands or nearly cut off their fingers. One dislocated his shoulder, another dropped a pipe on his foot. One worker fell off a roof and landed on cement, injuring his hip and head. And a half-dozen reported accidentally jabbing needles into their fingers, arms and chests while trying to vaccinate flapping chickens at the Hickman’s Family Farms.
Yvette Gamez, who worked at Hickman’s, said she lost feeling in her left hand completely since working at the farm. She said the “numbness in my hands I was experiencing was not subsiding. It was so bad.”
Meanwhile, private companies that contract with ACI have been vigilant in trying to ward off litigation. The state Legislature is entertaining a bill that would limit payouts to prisoners injured or killed at an ACI job by limiting the evidence they are permitted to present.
Among the bill’s supporters is a nonprofit group Partners to Reduce Recidivism, in-part run by Billy and Glenn Hickman, who are among the owners of Hickman’s Family Farms.
The egg ranch, alone, had nine civil injury lawsuits filed against it since 2019, all brought by prisoners who described suffering from injuries as a result of their jobs while incarcerated.
When DesSoye, ACI’s former chief marketing officer, was told of some of the claims by workers at Hickman’s, as well as the company’s attempts to lobby against workers’ rights, he said he was unaware.
“That does trouble me,” he said. “I’m disappointed to learn that.”
Promises not kept
In March 2020, Radecki’s lucrative prisoner leasing business came to a sudden halt when COVID-19 forced prisoners to stay in their cells.
By the following year, ACI had lost 17 clients and 600 fewer prisoners were working for private companies.
Revenues and profits would have plunged immediately were it not for a $16 million contract between ACI and its authorizing agency — the Department of Corrections — to refurbish prison doors. But once that contract terminated in 2021, ACI revenues sank from $46.5 million to $32.3 million and profits from $5.5 million to $695,000.
In an effort to reboot the prison’s manufacturing shops, Radecki hired Fenkell as ACI’s deputy assistant director in charge of sales and she immediately conducted an overhaul.
Fenkell ordered salespeople to bring in new clients just as businesses were being forced to shut down or reduce capacity because of the pandemic.
Commissions were slashed for salespeople who sold to old clients. Only those who brought in new contracts received higher compensation. Some salespeople said they saw their annual paychecks sliced by tens of thousands of dollars.
“She kept saying: ‘We need new product! We need new clients!’” said a former ACI salesperson, who agreed to speak anonymously for fear of losing his current job.
He said it felt comparable to a doorto-door vacuum cleaner sales job, but he was trying to sell prison goods. “You need a table? We can do that. A chair? We can do that. A fence? We can do that!” he said.
Another current ACI worker, who also agreed to speak anonymously for fear of losing his job, described the office after Fenkell arrived as “uncomfortable,” and “chaotic.”
The upshot: A handful of salespeople quit under pressure, saying they felt demoralized in their jobs.
The Department of Corrections would not make Fenkell available for comment, nor comment on the accusations of a toxic work environment. Instead, they said in an email that, “since order-taking is an essential function of customer service representatives, organizational change was implemented for greater efficiency and the customer service team was specifically assigning order-taking responsibilities.”
For a few months in 2021 and for the first time in more than a decade, the number of prisoners working in ACI’s manufacturing shops exceeded the number of prisoners farmed out to private companies. And while Fenkell pushed harder for new manufacturing sales, prison warehouses couldn’t keep up with demand.
In one instance, Randy Rogers, a business owner who used ACI to make parts for furniture he sold at his store, Olde Mercantile in Gilbert, said it would take months to get small projects completed that would normally have taken a week or two. He eventually stopped using ACI.
An ACI salesman with knowledge of the contract said that he wasn’t sure why there was a backlog, but that Olde Mercantile wasn’t alone. “There was a whole bunch of orders that were outstanding for over two years,” he said. “ACI hadn’t completed them, and had no intention of doing it because they didn’t want to or didn’t know how to.”
The Department of Corrections didn’t acknowledge issues with supply chains, but it did say that the COVID pandemic caused issues with hiring, and it had to figure out a new way to restructure in order to be more productive.
Anxious to turn around ACI’s deteriorating fortunes, Radecki and Fenkell discussed ways to get around federal trade laws by making products for businesses that sell outside Arizona.
Federal law allows prison-made goods to be sold to other government agencies, but ACI had been finding a workaround to that law for years by selling to private companies doing business with state agencies.
The U.S. Department of Justice would not say if ACI’s practice potentially violated federal law and the company says it complies with all applicable laws. But labor law professor Michael Selmi at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said that the contract he reviewed between ACI and another company goes against the intention of the federal trade law, which is to keep private companies from profiteering from out-of-state prison labor.
Among those businesses ACI considered doing business with, according to emails: Keefe Commissary Network, one of the nation’s largest private suppliers of prison goods sold at commissaries, and MyPillow, the bedding company.
Department of Corrections officials deny doing business with MyPillow, and said that all business with Keefe is done within the state, or that they only sell prisoner-made pillows out of state to other state prisons.
But emails collected by The Republic show Fenkell actively pursued Keefe to do more business out of state as early as August 2020, and continued to push that business a year later.
Keefe was “open to distributing our products in other states,” Fenkell wrote to Radecki, discussing a business call she had made with Keefe’s team in St. Louis. “We need to identify when/how that is possible and they need to approach other state agencies for permission when the time comes. Our procurement team here will look into all the possible ways we CAN have Keefe sell outside of AZ.”
A year later, emails showed that Fenkell and her team proposed partnering with MyPillow for a limited edition “My Prison Pillow.” That deal, according to the Department of Corrections, never materialized.
For many of employees and prisoners, the fallout from coronavirus has been a long due comeuppance for ACI’s focus on profits over prisoner rehabilitation.
Prisoners say they were sold a program that claimed it would help them. Instead, they found a state-run company that took advantage of them, and punished them if they sought fair treatment.
Even former employees who have since soured on ACI still believe that many prisoners get a benefit from being out of their cells and enjoy being out in the free world. But there is a similar resounding aggrievement that the toll of the pandemic, along with treating prison labor as a commodity rather than a possible form of rehabilitation, pushed many to the brink of leaving.
“We market this as a training program, and reducing recidivism rates — that’s our main sales pitch,” said an ACI salesperson who left the company last year. “But they’re not looking at this as a training program anymore. They honestly don’t care about the inmates, they’re just using them as workers.”