By David Joseph Meister
When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, Southern secessionists saw a threat to the institution on which their wealth and social order depended: slavery. Their pecuniary interest in an involuntary workforce was inseparable from their commitment to White supremacy. They said so themselves.
In its February 2, 1861, declaration of causes for secession, Texas asserted that the governments of the slaveholding states “were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity,” and that Black people “were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependant race.” Their continued subordination was presented as a condition of their tolerable existence in the country. This was the justification offered by the people defending the institution.
The Civil War destroyed the Confederacy. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. But it left an exception: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
For people determined to preserve an involuntary workforce, that exception offered an opening. Freedom could be defeated by criminalization.
After emancipation, Southern states adopted Black Codes that restricted the lives and labor of newly freed people. Vagrancy laws helped turn unemployment and poverty into grounds for arrest. Through convict leasing, prisoners were supplied to private employers, generating revenue while placing Black labor back under coercive control. The legal machinery changed. The appetite for cheap labor survived.
Disenfranchisement supplied another means of control.
Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment contains an exception concerning voting restrictions imposed for participation in rebellion or other crime. The Supreme Court would later rely on that language to uphold felony disenfranchisement. An amendment associated with citizenship and equal protection thus also supplied constitutional support for excluding people with criminal convictions from the electorate.
The racial objectives of Southern voting restrictions were hardly concealed. At Virginia’s constitutional convention of 1901–1902, delegate and state senator Carter Glass described the goal as “the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.” His statement concerned the convention’s broader disenfranchisement program, which sought to suppress Black political participation.
The two mechanisms reinforced each other. Criminalization could supply captive labor, while disenfranchisement could strip those subjected to the system of the political power to challenge it. Force them into labor and rob them of the vote against it.
Fast forward more than a century. Surely evolving standards of decency would have made this arrangement intolerable.
Yet the racial disparity remains stark. In 2023, non-Hispanic Black Americans made up approximately 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, but approximately 32.6 percent of people serving sentences longer than one year in state and federal prisons. The population percentage is calculated from the Census Bureau’s estimates of 42,313,088 non-Hispanic Black residents and 334,914,895 total residents. The prison percentage is calculated from the figures in Table 10 of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Prisoners in 2023 report.
Those figures alone do not explain every conviction or establish the motive behind every sentence. They do demand scrutiny of a system whose historical use as an instrument of racial control is documented.
And the captive workforce remains.
A 2022 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic estimated that roughly 800,000 people worked in American prisons. Among incarcerated workers surveyed, 76 percent reported facing punishment if they declined or were unable to work. The report described average hourly pay for non-industry jobs ranging from 15 to 52 cents in states that paid, while seven state prison systems paid nothing for most prison work.
Calling a job a privilege does not make the labor voluntary. A person who faces punishment for refusing an assignment has no meaningful bargaining power. The institution controls the worker’s confinement, discipline, and access to ordinary life. It also controls the job.
Nor is prison labor confined to manufacturing goods for outside businesses. The report found that more than 80 percent of incarcerated workers performed general prison maintenance. It estimated that prison labor produced at least $9 billion in maintenance services and $2 billion in goods annually. Kitchens, cleaning, laundry, and other institutional work help sustain the very facilities that confine the workers.
This is a subsidy extracted from people who have little power to refuse it.
Meanwhile, the courts have preserved substantial room for disenfranchisement.
In Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24 (1974), the Supreme Court rejected an Equal Protection Clause challenge to California’s disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions who had completed their sentences and parole. The Court treated Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment as affirmative constitutional support for the practice.
That authority is not unlimited. In Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222 (1985), the Court invalidated an Alabama disenfranchisement provision enacted with racially discriminatory intent and having a discriminatory effect. States do not have unrestricted constitutional permission to use criminal convictions as a pretext for racial exclusion.
But another avenue of challenge met resistance in Hopkins v. Watson, 108 F.4th 371 (5th Cir. 2024). Sitting en banc, the Fifth Circuit rejected an Eighth Amendment challenge to Mississippi’s lifetime disenfranchisement for certain felony convictions. The majority concluded that the challenged disenfranchisement was not punishment subject to the amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Consider the consequence. A person can finish a criminal sentence and still remain excluded from the political process. Release from custody does not necessarily mean restoration to full civic participation.
Together, coerced labor and political exclusion create an extraordinary imbalance of power. The institution can demand a prisoner’s work while the political system can deny that prisoner a vote.
The prison industrial complex should be judged against that imbalance. Public safety ought to be its justification and its measure of success. Yet a system organized around maintaining institutions can develop interests that conflict with reducing the need for them.
A prison can remain funded, staffed, and operational without demonstrating that it has prepared people to live successfully outside its walls. Keeping an institution running is not the same accomplishment as reducing criminal behavior.
This critique does not require pretending that every corrections employee has the same motives. It requires asking whether institutional incentives reward rehabilitation, or merely continued confinement. When preserving jobs, contracts, and facilities becomes an argument for keeping prisons open, the people confined inside them risk becoming the means by which the institution preserves itself.
Honest wages would force a more honest accounting.
Paying incarcerated workers fairly would increase the visible cost of labor that prisons now obtain cheaply or without wages. It would require legislators and taxpayers to confront expenses currently shifted onto the captive workforce. Whether that pressure would produce reform is a political question. But cheap labor should not be allowed to disguise the cost of incarceration.
Restoring voting rights would address the other side of the arrangement. A ballot would not guarantee humane conditions or sensible policy. It would give people subjected to the system a formal means of holding its political overseers accountable.
If rehabilitation is the purpose, meaningful training, fair compensation, and preparation for life outside prison should be central to the work. If citizenship carries responsibilities, it should also carry a voice.
The public deserves a corrections system measured by the harm it prevents and the lives it helps rebuild. Prisoners deserve to be treated as people whose labor has value and whose citizenship matters.
An institution that depends on their work while excluding their voices should not be permitted to call that arrangement rehabilitation.