The Brutal History of Prison Labor

The idea of prison labor is relatively new in the annals of crime and punishment. And it's just as bad as you think. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:28Josh Clark?

  Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us. Jerry's on leave right now. She's having a little R and R, living it up in the South Seas, falling in love, spending a lot of time on the beach, writing people's names in the sand for mom.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:48Josh Clark?

  I assume that's what she's doing.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 2:52Josh Clark?

  She might also just be in New York. It's one of the two.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Right. Unless you get right on a beach there, Jones Beach.

• 2:58Josh Clark?

  I guess so, sure.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Coney Island.

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  I guess we should stop all the joking around, the horsing around Chuck, because this is a very serious episode, so let's just end that now.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, what better to chat about over what's probably going to end up being the holiday season, when this is released, than hard labor at prisons and that history?

• 3:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because I mean, if you think about prison labor, it's bad enough as it is, but when you really start to get into the nuts and bolts of it and all the loopholes that are abused and all of the ways that prisoners are actually treated in exchange for the labor, it's even worse than you would think it turns out.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the good news.

• 3:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and we'll get into the bad news for sure. But the thing that I was a little surprised about from the outside is that I would have thought that this was ancient, like the Sumerians doing stuff like this. And it turns out, no, Sumerians forward all the way into the Enlightenment period in Europe just killed people. They hung you or they cut your hand off or they put you in the stocks, maybe. The stocks were a non-lethal form of punishment and you would be ridiculed by your neighbors. And then a guy named Thomas More wrote a book called Utopia, and he said, there's a better way, people. There's an alternative to just killing people or cutting off their hands. What if

• 4:25Josh Clark?

  we just put them to work? There's all sorts of benefits and upsides to this. And they said, well, what are they, Thomas More? And he said, let me tell you. I'm glad you asked.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, he basically, I mean, and we'll see this over and over again, the, you know, the point has sort of always been, um, one, it can, uh, really threefold. One, it can deter people from committing crime if they see somebody, uh, manual laboring.

• 4:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  For probably no money or very little money these days.

• 4:53Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  The second is, uh, it can, you know, help rehabilitate that person and make them, you know, make them think about what they've done, basically.

• 5:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  And then the most obvious one is we can get them to do stuff for us for, for nothing.

• 5:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like we can really use that labor, especially if you put a bunch of people together and make them work for free, you can get a lot of stuff done. Uh, and that is a fairly new form of punishment. Um, it wasn't like immediately adopted after Thomas More wrote Utopia. He wrote it in the 16th century. Uh, even, uh, into the American Revolution and beyond, uh, there was not like a lot of government enforced punishment using prison labor. They were still crazy for the stocks. Um, but there were things regarding the colonies that, that did have to do with punishment that did result in your labor. And that would be if you got into trouble, say in England, you would be sentenced to

• 5:52Josh Clark?

  transportation, either Australia or the United States, maybe even Canada, if you were lucky. And I think 60,000 people, um, before the American Revolution, while, well, America was British colonies or were British colonies, were sentenced to transportation and showed up there and said, okay, what do you want me to do? I'm here to work.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I don't doubt if they said that, they were probably more told that, but, uh, they were known as the king's passengers.

• 6:18Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  And they, you know, the colonies, you know, the people in the colonies, they weren't that wild about this. Um, they were worried about, you know, sending convicted criminals here, obviously, but most of these criminals were, um, You know, maybe not petty crimes, but pretty minor crimes, maybe theft, maybe vagrancy.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  You know, depending on what the laws were and whatever weird English village you lived, you might have committed a crime against one of those. But they weren't sending over generally to the colonies, that is, like the worst of the worst.

• 6:48Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  If you were a plantation owner, or if you were an employer that maybe was near a prison, you were pretty psyched because that was very cheap, meaning usually free labor, compared to what it cost to, you know, trade in the enslaved African market.

• 7:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and we should say this early indentured servitude is what they called it. If it was aimed at white people exclusively in the colonies and then later on the early United States, because if you, if the government intervened in a plantation owner enslaved person's dynamic, then in the remove the enslaved person and put them in jail, the the poor white plantation owner was the one suffering there. He lost a laborer. So it was left entirely to the plantation owners to basically keep their slaves, punish their slaves essentially. And if you've ever, have you ever seen 12 Years a Slave yet?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  I still shamefully cannot bring myself to see that movie.

• 7:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, I get it. I totally understand your reticence, but it's the, the way that plantation owners punished slaves is depicted throughout in really brutal, honest fashion. And it's, it really drives home like what it was like. But you were left up to the guy that owned you legally doling out punishment based on his whim, essentially. The state would not intervene. It was just strictly up to white people, or it was just strictly directed at white people at first.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you know what? That's the kind of movie that you gotta watch that when it comes out and when it's in the zeitgeist, because that's never the movie when you're like, what do I want to watch tonight?

• 8:34Josh Clark?

  It's a gloomy sight.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Several years later, it's just not gonna happen. So I need to just, you know, it's like a history lesson. So I need to watch it. And I've heard it's, it's good, like in an upsetting way, but like a well-made film.

• 8:45Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, definitely. Everybody does an amazing job in it. Look at it like a classic novel that you just have to read before you die, because I think that'd be a good approach to it.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  You know what? When I start Moby Dick finally, I'll watch 12 Years a Slave and I'll just, I'll just do both at the same time.

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  I remember we talked about reading Moby Dick and a couple of people wrote in and they're like, Josh, do not waste your time. It is not worth reading. And I'm just gonna go with their interpretation.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 9:14Josh Clark?

  I like Bartleby the Scrivener, but I'm not sure I could take hundreds and hundreds of pages of that writing.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, our mutual friend and friend of the show, Joey Ciaran, is gonna be very upset to hear that.

• 9:25Josh Clark?

  I'm sorry, Joey.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  So as far as these laborers, 90% of the ones that were of those 60,000 that were sent to the States, which is, I'm surprised it was, you know, 90%, they ended up kind of in two places, Maryland or Virginia, probably working in, you know, industry like, you know, the Industrial Revolution type stuff, or on the farms, like tobacco farming, obviously, in Virginia. And it was terrible work. It was really brutal. You know, you're talking maybe seven to 14 years is your sentence. After your sentence, maybe you go back to England, maybe you have a shot at a free life in the new colonies. But, you know, just like getting out of prison these days, it's not a, it's not an easy transition to make.

• 10:10Josh Clark?

  Right. The ones that went back to England were like, I really miss the tasteless cuisine of home.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Back then, maybe, sure. It's come a long way.

• 10:20Josh Clark?

  So one of the, it has for sure. One of the other things that had to evolve for prison labor to become an actual thing in the United States was prisons themselves. Like, at the same time when they were still crazy about the stocks and indentured servitude, like, you had jails. You didn't have prisons. And a jail was just basically where they kept you while you were awaiting trial or sentencing or something like that. And then

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:43Josh Clark?

  you left the jail. The idea of going to a place to be held as a punishment in and of itself, that is prisons, that came later on, after the American Revolution. I think it was the Quakers that came up with the idea of the penitentiary, which was meant to give you quiet time to reflect on what terrible things you'd done and hopefully find God and come out of it a better person. And of course, it's not how it, how it worked out. But very quickly after penitentiaries became a thing, prison labor became a thing in really short order, actually, like decades, maybe.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I never thought about the root word penitent for penitentiaries. It was sort of one of those things where I was today years old, you know?

• 11:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but I mean, like, yeah, it's just so easy to look right past it. It's its own thing.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. But yeah, redemptive suffering is what they called it, and that was a big part of being in prison and committing, well, not committing to hard labor, like being committed to hard labor. Auburn Prison in New York was one of the sort of leading examples that set the way forward for what was to become the norm, where private businesses would lease prison buildings along with the prisoners and say, hey, we're just gonna, you've got this big building over here, you got lots of free labor, I'm gonna bring my machinery into here. And all of a sudden, the prison is part prison and part, you know, industrial plant for whatever company worked out whatever deal.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  And that provided a real model moving forward. I think Auburn, they, the prisoners of Auburn ended up building Sing Sing.

• 12:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, they used them for that as well. And that, I think Sing Sing opened in 1828. So this is going on, like if prisons became a thing around the time of the American Revolution, like this, this, like I said, my point is proven, this transition happened quickly.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:36Josh Clark?

  So by the time the Civil War came around, like this, it's called the Northern Model or the Auburn Prison Model, where you can rent a building, rent the inmates, and then set up shop there. That's what prison labor looked like, or else you were working for the prison, like say, building other prisons. That's what the North was doing. In the South, they were still quite hung up on the idea of chattel slavery and owning a person and making them work until they died, essentially. That was something that was really ingrained in the culture and was not an easy thing to give up despite having lost the Civil War and the 13th Amendment being passed. And I know you've seen 13, the Ava DuVernay documentary.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  I have seen that.

• 13:21Josh Clark?

  That's a great one, too. That's one of those like life-changing, perspective-changing, eye-opening type documentaries.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even if I hadn't seen it, I would, I would lie to your face right now.

• 13:32Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  And all of our listeners, because there's no way you're gonna double shame me.

• 13:36Josh Clark?

  Well, how about this, if you-

• 13:37Speaker 03

  But I did see it.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  If you, well, if you are lying right now and you go look for it, do not be confused by the, the documentary 13th that came out in 2025.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, different thing.

• 13:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's about the high-pressure student exams in India.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, I'm sure that's upsetting, too.

• 13:53Josh Clark?

  I'm sure, but the 13th Amendment is kind of what we're talking about here, and that's not only abolished slavery, it abolished involuntary servitude of all kinds, except one tiny provision, one little loophole, that said that if you're a convicted prisoner, you can be punished with slave labor. That's okay. And not only was it okay, it's enshrined in the Constitution that slave labor is legal in prisons.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, it's one of those things where it's hard to go back and imagine what the original framers intended, but I think most people agree that they didn't intend to just have, you know, enslavement in another name, basically.

• 14:35Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Whereas that's basically what happened for a long, long time, uh, you know, through that, through the loophole. And, you know, you mentioned loopholes at the beginning. There's been a lot of loopholes over the year, and anytime there's a loophole, somebody's gonna exploit it, like, for greedy purposes.

• 14:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, free labor. I saw that the, the reason that they included it in that amendment was because it was just such a no-brainer that you would want the ability to, um, to care, to perform hard labor rather than just being punished in other ways, that it was just an accepted thing, that, yeah, that loophole wasn't meant to be there. But in the South, almost immediately, they put that to use. Um, we did an episode on the Black Codes back in January of 2022.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:18Josh Clark?

  Another very eye-opening topic. And those only lasted like a year or two, and it was basically, they criminalized being a free black person in the South.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:27Josh Clark?

  And so they could pick you up and they could arrest you with something. If you couldn't prove on the spot that, say, you had a job, you'd be arrested for vagrancy, you'd be taken to jail, and then you could be leased out as a slave to a local plantation owner, doing the work you were doing before you were freed by the 13th Amendment legally because of that loophole in the 13th Amendment.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe to the same plantation where you were previously held.

• 15:52Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of times. That's a great episode. People should go back and listen to that.

• 15:57Josh Clark?

  Agreed.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  That, you know, the Black Codes went away with the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And the 14th Amendment, which is ratified in 1868, made equal rights and protections, you know, you know, the law everywhere, basically. But, you know, there were still ways to make things happen, especially in the South. And especially, as it turns out, shamefully, in Georgia. Georgia kind of led the way. In 1868, there was a provisional governor named Thomas Ruger. And he leased, like, this is when the kind of the, the, the big sort of prisoner trade started, where they were leasing prisoners to different states, kind of back and forth. Like, hey, you got a, you've got a farm in your state that needs, like, a crop tended to?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Well, let me lease you some prisoners from our state. And Georgia led the way early on with 100 black prisoners being leased to William Fort of the Georgia and Alabama Railroad for 2,500 bucks. So 25, that's $25 a prisoner, right?

• 17:00Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  But here's the thing. It's like, hey, you're paying us to lease these prisoners to you. So now, not only are we getting money for that, but now they're your responsibility. But your responsibility didn't really mean anything. Like, 16 of those prisoners died in the first year. And as you'll see, a story that, you know, is going to be repeated over and over. That was, you know, one of the biggest problems with all of this is like, basic medical care was not provided and decent food. And certainly, like, you know, if somebody was, was sick, they would just let them die, basically.

• 17:34Josh Clark?

  Right. And that, that still happens today. I mean, not quite to that dramatic a degree, but when people die in custody in prison, there's not a lot that the prisons held accountable for. So that's, that's essentially a longstanding thing in the United States. People, like, prisoners dying, even though they're, they haven't been sentenced to death. So I think you said that Georgia was making some pretty good money off of this, starting in the 1860s. I read, this started to, like, other states were like, oh, that's a really good idea. By 1898, convict leasing made up 73% of Alabama's state revenue.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 18:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Which is really saying something.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a staggering stat.

• 18:18Josh Clark?

  Right. And then when reconstruction ended, the federal government just basically said, hey, we really just want to be on good terms with the southern elite again, so we're just going to leave you on your own and withdrew from the South. Black people were in really terrible positions, really vulnerable positions. And at that time, prison labor stepped up. Incarceration stepped up, but prison labor also did it as well. And it was nothing compared to what you would, the work you would be put to in the North. It was essentially slavery all over again. But again, this time, the fed, the feds, the union wasn't going to come down and push anybody around at the end of a bayonet because this was all agreed upon in the 13th Amendment.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, like up North, if you were working prison labor, you might work an eight or a nine hour day. In the South, it was routinely 12 to 16 hours or just however long they felt like you needed to work to get whatever job done.

• 19:16Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  There's anecdotal evidence, at least like during the cotton harvest, like before the cotton harvest, that the plantation owners would call up the sheriff and say, hey, why don't you make some more arrests? We need some guys. And, you know, a lot of these pretextual arrests were happening where it was just like, you know, they would just cook something up and arrest you and you have basically no rights and no, no representation. So it's just a way to, to stock the, the industry or the farm or the field with workers.

• 19:47Josh Clark?

  Right. So that was like plantation owners, local plantation owners. Like you said, you could have been a former slave who was arrested for something as stupid as mischief and put back to work on that same plantation essentially as a slave. They would also, like corporations got in on this as well. Like you said, the railroad, there was a company in Alabama called the Schloss, Schloss Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in Jefferson County, Alabama. That's where their mines were. They had a 10% death rate from the least convict labor that they got from the state. And there was a sugar company. Imperial Sugar Company in Sugar Land, Tennessee, which I guess is an appropriate place for it to be.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Or else.

• 20:29Josh Clark?

  A lot of people died when Texas leased them, every single state prisoner it had in 1878 to help in the sugar fields. People were dying of things like malaria. Like you said, they weren't, they weren't given any kind of medical care at all. They were fed just the minimum amount to keep them alive and have energy enough to work. And this was just par for the course in the South.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I was bagging on Georgia because that's our home state or my home, home state. But Louisiana has kind of from the beginning been one of, certainly one of the worst offenders. In the 1870s and 80s, they built the New Orleans Pacific Railway with prison labor. About 140 people died. And when you look at some of the incarceration rates, and especially incarceration rates for black males in the United States today, Louisiana leads the way. And also with some of the worst, you know, working conditions for forced labor.

• 21:29Josh Clark?

  That's another thing too, that you mentioned, like they built the railroad or say they mined something that was turned into a product that people use. They don't think about, I'm sure they didn't think like, oh, this railroad is really nice. The prisoners who built it really did a good job. That actually still carries on today. Like a lot of people don't realize that the stuff they're buying from a big box retailer was made somewhere down the line by a convict who was essentially leased out to that company to make those products. It still goes on today.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the chicken on your plate in your house might have come from a chicken farm that had, and you know, these are people that are sort of the work release programs we're going to talk about later, where they leave the prison to go work for like a private industry. And a lot of times it might be like a chicken farm, or they may work at a DMV call center or something like that. So, yeah, the person you talk to on the phone might be, you know, incarcerated.

• 22:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is quite surprising. But Chuck, don't call it convict leasing, even though essentially it's so much the same thing that basically just the people's clothes changed. That's what's going on today still. Supposedly, in the 1930s, thanks to the New Deal, America became enlightened enough that we moved on past convict leasing. We didn't do that kind of stuff anymore. Not at least to private industry. Prison labor, working for the prison or working for the state, that was still A-OK.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was, you know, sort of 50 years before that is when wage workers started complaining. Like, prisoners obviously were complaining. Families might be complaining, but they're not going to get very far. But once wage workers got unions involved, they're like, hey, you know, we want these jobs. We want to, you know, make a little bit of money ourselves. And that's when it finally started to change a little bit. And I think eventually that led to that New Deal era law prohibiting interstate trade and prison-made products. But in 1934, the Federal Prison Industries was created. It's now known as Unicor. And that is, you know, still a big program. It employs people that are incarcerated in our federal system,

• 23:43Speaker 03

  not state prisons again, and obviously not private prisons. Are federal, are any federal prisons private? Or is that just state?

• 23:51Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  I know. We never did one on the private prison industry, did we?

• 23:57Josh Clark?

  No, and we really should.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  It's on the list.

• 23:59Josh Clark?

  They do this too. And they, they like the idea of them leasing out convicts for a for-profit prison is just mind-boggling.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. But yeah, and with Unicor, they're making things for the federal government. Like, a lot of times, you know, military fatigues or furniture, stuff like that.

• 24:17Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah, yeah. And if you are a government agency, you have to go to Unicor first to see if they have what you want. Then you order for them then. And so even still today, like, companies complain like, these guys, it's unfair competition, you know? They have like unpaid labor making these products so they can sell it for whatever. And the feds are basically like, we can't hear you.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Should we take a break?

• 24:41Josh Clark?

  I think so, yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  I mean, since the feds can't hear us.

• 24:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, right.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  We might as well.

• 24:45Josh Clark?

  We might as well.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  All right. We'll be right back with more on prison labor.

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• 26:52Josh Clark?

  Okay, so when we left off, like convict leasing was dead in the North, thanks to labor unions. The South has long been considered kind of anti-worker, so labor unions never really got a foothold here. So it took a little longer for convict leasing to go away. But again, that doesn't mean that there was no such thing as prison labor. They just kind of directed them to state-owned stuff. A really good example of this is a parchment farm in Mississippi, part of parchment state penitentiary. It's a 20,000 acre farm where in the early 19 teens, with a 90% black prison population, prisoners were put to work on this farm.

• 27:36Josh Clark?

  And one of the reasons it got so famous very quickly,

• 27:42Josh Clark?

  in addition to just the scope of what was going on, was they used a trustee system. They spelled it trustee as in T R U S T Y, where some of the worst, most violent convicted felons that were prisoners there were given rifles and said, you guys make sure this other 80% of your fellow prisoners do the work the way we want them to.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a really interesting system.

• 28:06Josh Clark?

  It really is. It seems risky, you know?

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wanted to look more. I'm going to look more into that just for my own edification. But because I'm curious that that dynamic is, I don't know, it seems like it would create a really dodgy dynamic.

• 28:19Josh Clark?

  It would, but it also reminded me of, what is the Quentin Tarantino anti-bellum slavery movie? Django Unchained.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, Django.

• 28:29Josh Clark?

  Remember he posed as a black slaver?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 28:32Josh Clark?

  That's kind of how I took it to kind of be like.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you're probably right. Chain gangs is something that, you know, you've seen in like movies and stuff. Like I was watching Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Again, the other night.

• 28:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I forgot they have that in there.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  And there was, you know, chain gang scenes in that. And that was another type of sort of very public penal labor, because they were put in place to build roads in the South in the 1920s. You know, hard laboring all day again in the South, out in the hot sun on that blacktop, 10 to 15 hours a day. But they were chained together. That's why they were called chain gangs. They were chained to their ankle. They stayed chained when they walked to the job. They stayed chained as they slept in their bunks that were close to one another. And again, the conditions were abysmal. Terrible food. They were beaten. They were tortured. I think there was this one investigation. This wasn't a chain gang, but this was Tucker Farm in Arkansas.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Where they found that the staff stripped prisoners naked at the prison hospital and put electric shocks to their testicles and penis. Women prisoners were also subjected to work in the fields, not as much as men. They were the main labor force, but women were put to work as well.

• 29:50Josh Clark?

  Have you ever read a beloved Toni Morrison novel?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  I feel like I have to say yes.

• 29:58Josh Clark?

  You should read that too, if you have.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  No, I haven't read that.

• 30:00Josh Clark?

  It's very good, but it's mind-bogglingly good, actually. But there's a few scenes about the chain gang and just what it would have been like. One of the main characters spent time on a chain gang. And I mean, you said it was brutal work and they were building roads. Like, a good example of what chain gangs did, if you were building a road, you were using like, human labor to build roads. This was before they had machinery.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:29Josh Clark?

  Like, road-building machinery. It just didn't exist. So, you used human beings to do this stuff. If you ran into, say, in Georgia and you were building a state road, if you ran into a chunk of stone mountain that was popping up out of the ground where you wanted your road to go, well, you would just set a bunch of convicts to work on it with sledgehammers and eventually, they're gonna wear it down to nothing if you give them long enough and work them hard enough. That's what people did on chain gangs. That's just what life was like. And, again, you were working outside, so you weren't protected in any way, shape, or form. You were fed meagerly. You were working as hard as anyone's ever worked in their life with the minimum amount of nutrition, the minimum amount of rest.

• 31:11Josh Clark?

  And if you put all that together, especially if you think about it accumulating, it's a brutal, brutal form of prison labor.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it was a racist framework. I know we're talking a lot about the racism involved. There were white labor camps and stuff like that, of course, too. Sometimes they looked like Paul Newman, even.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  But it was very much a racist framework wherein the threat of violence, the threat of torture, they felt was like a necessary component to, you know, quote unquote, keeping guys in line.

• 31:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, one of the other things too is there was a certain amount of usefulness to letting these chain gangs get these horrible reputations because the reach of these things reached out beyond the inside of prisons into the outside world. Because if you were black and you were looking for a job and you could be arrested for not having a job and put onto a chain gang and you knew it, you would accept all sorts of terrible working conditions and low pay because at least that was better than being put on a chain gang, which if you didn't accept this job and got caught without a job, you would end up on a chain gang anyway. That was another really kind of insidious effect that they had.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you know, it's not like this kind of thing was being, you know, there were no exposes being written in newspapers about chain gangs. You might drive by one and that's how you knew they existed. But little by little, what went on with these chain gangs started to kind of leak out, especially all over the South. There are a couple of famous examples. In 1932, there was a white northern veteran who was a convict, obviously, named Robert Burns. He published a book called I Am A Fugitive From A Georgia Chain Gang, exclamation point. That's why I read it that way. That kind of got the word out a little bit. There was a movie adaptation.

• 33:08Josh Clark?

  Have you seen it?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it, have you?

• 33:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Really?

• 33:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's really, yeah, for some reason, I don't know where Yumi found out about it, but she, it's one of her well-liked movies. I don't want to say it's one of her favorite, but she showed it to me.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  What year was that?

• 33:23Josh Clark?

  The movie?

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:25Josh Clark?

  I thought you were asking when I saw it. 1932, I believe, or 1930?

• 33:31Josh Clark?

  Five? Something like that.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  I don't watch a lot of movies from that era.

• 33:35Josh Clark?

  But Chuck, you should. This one, it has 8.2 on IMDb and that's a pretty, pretty high rating. It's really good. It's a good movie.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Well, in 1947, some more news leaked out when a black civil rights activist named Bayer Druston, and I know we've talked about Bayer Druston before. He was on a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for civil disobedience. And a series of articles that he wrote came out in the New York Post.

• 34:02Josh Clark?

  Did you read those?

• 34:04Speaker 03

  I read some of, I read like, you know, snippets from it just to sort of get an idea.

• 34:08Josh Clark?

  Oh, I was just kidding.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I looked into some of it, but I didn't like sit around and read them.

• 34:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I got you. Yeah, no, I was just trying to get you again.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  But the 50s and 60s, like because of the New York Post and because of that movie that Yumi loves came out, 50s and 60s is kind of when chain gangs basically went away. Although, you know, if you lived in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 90s, you know, they tried pretty hard. What was that guy's name? The sheriff there?

• 34:38Josh Clark?

  Joe Arpaio?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but he made big news, a lot. And he was one of the guys trying to push for the reinstatement of the chain gangs.

• 34:49Josh Clark?

  Did not, did not happen though, because again, America lost its taste for chain gangs in the first half of the 20th century and the idea of bringing them back was not something that you would want to do. Even beyond that, not bringing back the chain gangs, prison labor got to be more and more, or I should say less and less brutal. How about that? Because I, the other way I could have put it is more and more less brutal and that just doesn't make sense.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Well, we took a late break, so it wasn't too long ago, but I feel like we should go ahead and get our second one under our belt.

• 35:23Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  All right, we'll be right back and talk about the modern era of mass incarceration.

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• 36:23Speaker 05

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• 37:32Speaker 03

  All right, we've covered mass incarceration quite a bit, certainly in our prisons episode. But here's a stat for you. Over a 36-year period, from 1970 to 2008, the population of the United States rose by about 50%, and the population of incarcerated prisoners rose by 700%.

• 37:58Josh Clark?

  That's crazy.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  So we entered the mass incarceration era.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Uh, big time over about a 36 year period. Thanks to, um, well, thanks to a lot, but namely thanks to Nixon, Reagan and Bill Clinton.

• 38:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Nixon's war on drugs, Reagan's tough on crime thing. Clinton trying to wrestle the tough on crime.

• 38:20Josh Clark?

  I guess moniker away from the GOP. And I guess it was part of the Democrats platform every year until 2008. And when it was quietly removed and not coincidentally, 2008 is the year that the peak incarceration happened, like you said.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, now we're about, uh, that went from 1.6 in 2008 to about 1.3 million incarcerated individuals in the United States now.

• 38:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because America's become softer and gentler.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Uh, about 600 of every 100,000 people in the US are incarcerated. Uh, that is a higher rate than any other country in the world, except Cuba, Rwanda and El Salvador. And Louisiana, once again, leads the way at a, uh, 1,000 per 100,000. And the rate of, uh, for black Americans is 900 per 100,000.

• 39:10Josh Clark?

  Can I talk about El Salvador for a second? Cause I looked into their incredibly high incarceration rates.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Sure. Do they do prison labor?

• 39:19Josh Clark?

  I didn't check that out, but I got this other stuff about it. How about that?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 39:24Josh Clark?

  So they, uh, have essentially established an authoritarian crackdown on gangs. Um, and in 2015, their, their, uh, murder rate was 103 people per 100,000 population, which means every year more than 1% of their population was murdered. So they cracked down on, on gangs and just started throwing everybody in jail. And between 2015 and 2022, their murder rate went from 103 per 100,000 to 7.8 per 100,000. Which you're like, okay, that's actually, I mean authoritarian crackdowns on gangs and prisons is not very tasteful, but at least they got results.

• 40:07Josh Clark?

  Here in the United States, we don't have the same excuse for that level of, um, rise in incarceration. Our homicide rate in 1955 was 4.5 in 2020.

• 40:20Josh Clark?

  Four, it was like five. It's remained relatively flat, give or take a few, a few points like here or there over the years. So there's no reason why our prison population should have increased 700%. It just, there's no reason for it.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:37Josh Clark?

  Unless you expand crimes, especially nonviolent crimes like drug possession and really throw the book at people, which is what happened during that time.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. As far as prison labor goes, most of the people in state and federal prison these days do some kind of prison labor. I think out of the 1.3 million-ish, that's about 800,000 as of a few years ago. The ones who don't are probably either too old or have some sort of disability or health problem that won't allow them to. About 80% of those workers are working for the prison. So, you know, when you work in the cafeteria or you work in the laundry or something like that, that's about 80% of it. And most of the rest are kind of what we were talking about earlier. Government-run operations, maybe you do laundry for a public hospital, maybe work in that DMV call center.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  About 2% of total prison workers in the federal prison system work for Unicor still. And I was curious about the, the whole license plate thing, you know?

• 41:41Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Sort of trope, but most of that doesn't happen at prisons anymore because it's just cheaper to have, you know, robot machinery do that kind of thing. But it, it's still a thing in some states and I know Utah is one of them. It's called the UCI operation and they call themselves Platebusters. And they make them all, even the specialty like Ski Utah Plates and the Olympic Plates and stuff like that, they're making them all still.

• 42:08Josh Clark?

  I saw that there's like a longstanding kind of jokey observation that prisoners in New Hampshire make their license plate and on the license plate it says, "Live free or die."

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:20Josh Clark?

  And that's actually true and they still do today at the state prison in Concord, the prisoners in New Hampshire make those license plates.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I imagine making those and making Ski Utah Plates or, I don't know, adds a little salt to the, to the situation, you know?

• 42:34Josh Clark?

  For sure. I like that, that saying.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  A little salt to the situation? Well, I didn't want to say wound. That's, no one likes that word.

• 42:43Josh Clark?

  Um, no, it's not a very pleasant word.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Uh, some of these prisoners do dangerous work too, though, you know? It's not all just like sort of hourly, easy stuff.

• 42:52Josh Clark?

  No, no, I mean, like, again, you're, you're engaged in forced unpaid labor. So you go where they tell you to go. I know in California, you might end up fighting wildfires. And this is one of the highest paying jobs, as we'll see. It, you get two to $5 a day, plus $1 an hour. When you're actively fighting wildfires in California, that's something they can make you do if you're a prisoner.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, saving the, uh, saving the houses of the wealthy.

• 43:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  And, but not always wealthy, to be fair.

• 43:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah. No, but there are a lot of wealthy people in California, to be sure.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and not only firefighting, disaster recovery sometimes, uh, lead paint removal. Uh, I think there's around 5% of the incarcerated workforce, which is about 40,000 people, work for private industries still.

• 43:42Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Uh, and that a lot of times is like the work camp that I was talking about. So they may, they may work at a fast food restaurant, or maybe like a, work on the custodial staff at a well-known hotel chain.

• 43:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and a lot of these bigger businesses have policies where they don't use leased convict labor like this. But they also sometimes can't do a thing about it. Like if their supplier, part of the supply chain is that, like, like companies don't know who's painting the patio furniture that they're selling. Like, they just don't know. And that the company painting the furniture might be using leased convict labor. Or they, um, their franchisees can use leased convict labor and the corporate office can't do anything about it because they don't

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:27Josh Clark?

  own those stores. So it still does happen, even though large corporations in the US tend to have policies against that. And in fact, have policies that, um, that they put in place to hire felons, like preferential hiring of felons. Um, still, it washes out to where there's plenty of leased convict labor today in private businesses.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, we've talked about money a little bit here and there, like, you know, no pay. And, you know, sometimes there is pay, sometimes there isn't. There's no federal law that says that someone has to be paid for work if they're a prisoner.

• 45:02Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  On the state level, it depends on the state, but you know, a lot of them pay nothing at all. I think the average pay for a prisoner in the US is 52 cents an hour, and that was like, three years ago, so I doubt if it's gone up that much. Who knows? Maybe it's gone down. Almost always under a dollar an hour. You may get like, minimum wage if you work one of the really hazardous jobs in a pretty forward-thinking state. But then the prison can turn around and say, "Yeah, but we're gonna take most of that paycheck to cover like, room and board," or maybe to provide restitution to your victims, if it was a financial thing.

• 45:41Josh Clark?

  Exactly. So like, even if you're off making federal minimum wage at KFC, as you know, as a prisoner, as part of your prison labor, you're ending up with pennies on the dollar per hour, after they deduct all that stuff from you. So, that's why that average for all prison workers is 52 cents an hour, because they deduct so many things. That's why it's essentially convict leasing. That person goes out, works, they get paid, and the prison says, "We're taking this X amount of your pay for our own use."

• 46:16Speaker 03

  That has to go into the private prison, like, financial, you know, success rate, right?

• 46:22Josh Clark?

  Precisely. That private prisons are able to do that, they probably deduct way more, but the other problem with it too, is that they're at the same time getting tax breaks for leasing out their convicts to use in the outside world. So they're getting like, fees and tax breaks. It's quite a racket, from what I can tell.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, while the basic needs a lot of times of these prisoners aren't even being met, still some pretty bad conditions as far as medical treatment goes and food. I think Olivia helped us with this, she did a great job, but she found one woman named Carla Simmons, who is an incarcerated- In a woman's prison, and she wrote last year, and this is right here in Georgia, that prisoners aren't paid. And she said, the food is so bad that they, people try to get work assignments where they can dig through the trash to eat the guards' meals, like the portions that they threw away.

• 47:16Josh Clark?

  Good God.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  In 2024.

• 47:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. One of the other things, too, is that, I mean, people point to this and say, like, okay, yes, we agree that prison labor is in and of itself a good thing. Like, Thomas, Thomas More was right. Like, you can, there is redemption in labor. We're not saying do away with it, but it needs a lot of reforms. These are the people who are like, well, reform-minded about the whole thing. There's basically no one saying we should do away with prison labor. But they, they say it should be the kind of labor that's going to help them get jobs on the outside, where they learn valuable skills. They should be paid fairly, federal minimum wage at least, for the labor that they're doing. And they should also get protections that any worker gets in the United States.

• 48:04Josh Clark?

  This, to me, is mind-blowing. We have workers' protections out the yin yang here in the U.S. We have OSHA, we have the Fair Labor Standards Act. All of these are meant to protect workers physically from injury, and also protect them from being screwed over by their employers. And court, after court, after court, has ruled that prison laborers do not count for these protections. They're not classified as employees, because as I saw it put, the prison owns the prisoner's labor. The laborer doesn't own their own labor. So how can an employee be in that situation? They can't. Therefore, they don't get any of these protections.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, there was a lawsuit brought in Alabama in 2024 that was dismissed because they basically were like, oh, this isn't forced labor, these are mandatory chores.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  So it's just like, depends on what you want to call it, I guess. In 2021, there was a, there's a international anti-slavery nonprofit called Walk Free in Australia, who produces what's called the Global Slavery Index. And the United States is one of 17 countries that use state-imposed forced labor, along with China and Russia and some other places. And the United States is one of the, one of only six UN member states that hasn't ratified the Forced Labor Convention of 1930, which we considered, the Senate considered that in 1991, like, hey, maybe we should sign on to this thing. And they said, no, it really, really conflicts with, with subcontracting these prisoners

• 49:37Speaker 03

  out to private companies. So like, let's, let's not foul that.

• 49:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we'll just, we'll walk past that one.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:44Josh Clark?

  And like, I think you mentioned Europe and the UN, there's, in, in Europe, essentially, the way that they treat prison labor is what I was saying that in the US prison, prison labor reform people are calling for.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:59Josh Clark?

  And you mentioned Alabama in that lawsuit about mandatory chores, not, not prison labor. The reason that lawsuit even came up is because Alabama, surprisingly, is one of seven states that in the last few years has passed in their state constitution, a ban on prison labor. You're, you're not allowed to, you can't force prisoners to work. They can, you can use prison labor, but you have to pay them and you can't coerce them with punishments.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 50:29Josh Clark?

  Some of the punishments that prisoners face if they refuse to work, they might be transferred to a higher security prison, which is not what you want to happen to you. Their family visits may get cut. There's all sorts of punishments that can be meted out legally, except in these states under their constitution. But like you said, that lawsuit where they were like, these aren't, this isn't involuntary servitude, it's mandatory chores.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:53Josh Clark?

  There's, they don't have any teeth right now.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tennessee was in there too, sort of surprising, and Nebraska.

• 50:59Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Here's, you know, finally some numbers for you, and I love it when they kind of put numbers like this, which is like, hey, if you actually spent this, in the long run, it would be better for everybody.

• 51:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  I love those stats, and this is one of those. Incarcerated workers saves prison, saves prisons about $15 billion a year.

• 51:20Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  And produces another $2 billion in goods and services. And so, the Edgeworth Economics Group did a study, a cost-benefit analysis, last year, and found that, hey, if they actually use that money to pay incarcerated workers, like, an okay wage, like, maybe even just minimum wage, it would reduce the burden on families to send money, which they don't have a lot of money to begin with.

• 51:44Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Maybe they could pay child support from prison and improve their earnings, like, once they get out, and so, they did the math, and they found out, in the end, every dollar spent on prisoners' wages would add up to a society-wide return of $2.40 to $3.16.

• 52:04Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 52:06Josh Clark?

  That's pretty, it's pretty good ROI, just for paying prisoners.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  I know.

• 52:12Josh Clark?

  I can't think of any better way to end this one, can you?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Uh, I got nothing else.

• 52:17Josh Clark?

  I thought, I thought I heard you drop your mic even.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  No, no, it's still up.

• 52:21Josh Clark?

  Okay, well, since Chuck said, "Is Mike still good to go?", I guess it's time for Listener Mail.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  It's hard to drop the mic in a studio, because you gotta unscrew it.

• 52:30Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I've got like a windscreen, two things have to get unplugged, and by that time, everyone's left the room, you know?

• 52:36Josh Clark?

  They gave you a windscreen? I didn't get a windscreen.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  I bought my own.

• 52:41Josh Clark?

  I brought this from home.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  So, who is this from? This is from Kimberly. "Hey, guys, thanks for keeping me company on long work trips, during chores, and throughout my day-to-day life. I feel like I'm listening to old friends, like a lot of people have said before. I appreciate how my worldview is challenged and enlightened when I listen to the show. My weekly trivia team also appreciates how I can answer some of the most random questions, thanks to the random facts." And Kimberly sent in a great recommendation, how crowds work.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  I'd love to know more about how humans move through crowds. How do we manage to avoid bumping into each other at airports, stadiums, and other crowded places?

• 53:17Josh Clark?

  That's a great one.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  How do we avoid crowd crushes? I feel like we touched on that, no?

• 53:20Josh Clark?

  We have on our Black Friday episode and a couple others. We've talked about crowd crushes.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think maybe just crowds would be a pretty good idea, Kimberly.

• 53:29Josh Clark?

  We could work in standing in line, where that came from.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Is that, is that, do people do that? I don't stand in lines.

• 53:37Josh Clark?

  No, a lot of people do, surprisingly.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 53:40Josh Clark?

  And wait for their turn, I think is what they call it, their turn.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  I'm a line jumper, you know, people love those guys.

• 53:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, right. The key is to just not pay attention to anyone behind you, pretend like they're not there.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  I had a guy at the airport recently, and you know, boarding an airplane in the United States is just one of the worst things that can happen, especially after I've seen how they do it in Australia, which is to say civil and friendly. And this guy was standing behind us, me and Emily and Ruby, like in the line, really, to get, like, to get on, not the crowd that goes before they announce it. And he just like, all of a sudden, just walked right around us and jumped in front, or tried to. And I like, sort of just bodied up a little bit.

• 54:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  And you want to see, and since human is, I don't know if it's all 10-year-olds, but my daughter, when someone tries to jump in line, she was, she was furious. Did you see that guy? He tried to break in line. There's like, almost no worse defense at that age.

• 54:40Josh Clark?

  Was he in earshot? Did he hear her say that?

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think so, but I repeated it loudly so Emily could hear. I said, "Did you hear what Ruby just said? She's calling out this guy behind us."

• 54:51Josh Clark?

  Man, why would you do that?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  I don't know, it's just, I don't know, I don't know, Josh.

• 54:56Josh Clark?

  I mean, I get the, the, the drive to get on board as fast as possible, to get some overhead space so they don't check your carry-on bag, because that's all you have. And you don't want to stand around waiting for it, because you got to get out of the airport as soon as possible, but you still don't walk around people that you're in line behind.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  I know. And we were in that sort of, you know,

• 55:18Speaker 03

  they do zones now. I think we were zone one or two. So it wasn't like we were at the back of the plane and it was going to be dog eat dog for that space.

• 55:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Maybe he just could not wait to get some pretzels. The mustard ones.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Anyway, sorry. Rant over.

• 55:32Josh Clark?

  Was that the end of Kimberly's email to you?

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:36Josh Clark?

  Great idea, Kimberly. I think we will do one on crowds eventually. And we will try like heck to remember to credit you with the idea because it was 100% yours.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 55:46Josh Clark?

  If you want to be like Kimberly and give us a great idea, we love that kind of thing. You can send it off to [email protected].

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 56:14Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordibility. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 56:46Speaker 09

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 56:59Speaker 10

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency Treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. ZOLAR is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolar.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about ZOLAR.

• 57:42Speaker 10

  This is an advertisement for ZOLAR paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.