Zachary Crockett
speaker
79 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Zachary Crockett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This isn't just any sign plant. It's located inside Franklin Correctional Center, a medium security prison in Bunn, North Carolina. And Barnes is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. He's one of around 800,000 incarcerated people with jobs in America's prison system.
They grow crops, repair roads, fight wildfires, and manufacture a surprising number of the products we encounter in daily life, from office furniture to reading glasses. It's estimated that more than $11 billion worth of goods and services every year can be traced back to workers who are mostly paid pennies per hour for their labor, or even nothing at all.
We wanted to learn more about how prison labor became a central part of the economy. And we found out that the story goes back to the founding of our country. Around the world, work has long been used as a form of punishment. The U.S. colonies under British rule were no exception. Britain shipped over criminals and sold them to farms in Virginia and Maryland.
They worked in the fields alongside enslaved people. And together, their labor sustained our early agrarian economy. As America's justice system evolved, we began to send convicts to prisons.
Laura Appelman is a professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. She's researched the history and economics of prison labor.
When the 13th Amendment was passed after the Civil War, banning slavery and other forms of unpaid labor, a notable exception was carved out.
Across the South, thousands of emancipated slaves were locked up for petty offenses. They were forced to grow crops on penal farms. Later, they were shackled together in chain gangs that built roads for government contractors. These practices persisted for many decades, and eventually, they morphed into a larger and more institutional system.
But today, more than a million people are incarcerated in America's federal and state prisons. Housing and feeding them is very expensive. The median cost per person is around $64,000 a year. That cost falls on the state, and ultimately taxpayers. The government offsets these costs by putting prisoners to work as much as possible.
At the majority of prisons, you'll find them doing a lot of the internal labor. They cook the meals in the cafeteria, do laundry, clean the buildings, and maintain the grounds. But they also work in government-run prison factories, like the sign plant at Franklin Correctional Center. Louis Southall is the prison warden. He oversees the 300 incarcerated men who live there.
Almost all of those men have a job, whether it's sweeping floors or mowing the lawns. But according to Southall, only the best workers get to work in the sign plant.
While the sign plant is on prison grounds, it's actually run by a separate entity called Correction Enterprises. It's a part of the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, and it has 27 production facilities across the state, all almost entirely staffed by prisoners. Again, here's Lee Blackman, the plant manager who we met earlier on the factory floor.
Correction Enterprises uses prison labor to make dozens of products. Employed prisoners sew the linens used in prison beds. They process canned peas and beef patties for prison cafeterias. They manufacture air fresheners, hand soap, motor oil, prescription glasses, picnic tables, and license plates. Last year, Correction Enterprises sold $121 million worth of goods.
Almost all of those sales were to government agencies in the state of North Carolina, many of which are required to shop through the company.
By using prison labor, Correction Enterprises is able to offer the government prices that are well below market rate. At a typical business, labor accounts for around 25 to 35% of the cost to produce goods. At Correction Enterprises, it's only around 2.5%. That's less than $3 million in labor costs on $121 million in sales. Blackman says the benefits of those savings trickle down.
But that frugality is only possible because prisoners aren't protected by most employment laws. Again, here's law professor Laura Appelman.
For incarcerated workers, pay depends on the type of job they have and where they work. Most jobs pay somewhere between 13 cents and 52 cents an hour. In some states like Kansas, prisoners are paid around 5 cents an hour. And in others, like Alabama and Mississippi, prison jobs don't pay at all.
Almost every state in America has its own version of correction enterprises. And prisoners often do much riskier work than building furniture and spacing out letters on highway signs. Some prison jobs are part of work-release programs that send incarcerated men and women to the outside world.
At the height of the pandemic, prisoners transported dead bodies to morgues and disinfected medical supplies. After a hurricane or an oil spill, they're dispatched to clean up the mess. And when wildfires break out, they're airlifted into the heart of the forest. Federal prisons have their own system for taking advantage of cheap labor.
The government-owned Federal Prison Industries, or FPI, has more than 60 work facilities across the country. It manufactures around 300 products, boots, jumpsuits, tools, medical supplies, body armor, even electronic components for guided missiles, which it sells to the Department of Defense. But prisoners don't just do work for the government.
Sometimes the state leases out their labor to companies in the private sector.
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