Chapter 1: What is the brutal history of prison labor?
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Chapter 2: How did Thomas More influence the concept of prison labor?
Right. We should get right on a beach there. Jones Beach?
I guess so, sure. Coney Island? 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's the good news.
Right. Yeah, 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 Moore 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 or What if we just put them to work?
There's all sorts of benefits and upsides to this. And they said, well, what are they, Thomas Morey? He said, let me tell you, I'm glad you asked.
Yeah. I mean, and we'll see this over and over again. You know, the point has sort of always been, one, it can, or really threefold. One, it can deter people from committing crime if they see somebody manual laboring.
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Chapter 3: What role did transportation play in early American prison labor?
They were probably more told that, but they were known as the king's passengers. And they, you know, the colonies, you know, the people in the colonies, they weren't that wild about this. They were worried about, you know, sending convicted criminals here, obviously. But most of these criminals were... You know, maybe not petty crimes, but pretty minor crimes, maybe theft, maybe vagrancy.
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. Right. 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.
Yeah, and we should say this early indentured servitude is what they called it. It was aimed at white people exclusively in the colonies and then later on the early United States because if the government intervened in a plantation owner-enslave person's dynamic and they removed the enslaved person and put them in jail, 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?
I still shamefully cannot bring myself to see that movie.
Yeah, I mean, I get it. I totally understand your reticence. But it's the way that plantation owners punished slaves is depicted throughout in really brutal, honest fashion. And 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.
Yeah. And you know what? That's the kind of movie that you got to 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? Like several years later, it's just not going to happen. So I need to just, you know, it's like a history lesson. So I need to watch it.
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Chapter 4: How did prison labor evolve after the Civil War?
But, you know, just like getting out of prison these days, it's not an easy transition to make.
Right. The ones that went back to England were like, I really miss the tasteless cuisine of home.
Right. Back then, maybe. Sure. It's come a long way.
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 you left the jail. Sure. 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 is meant to give you quiet time to reflect on what terrible things you've 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.
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?
Yeah. But I mean, like, yeah, it's just so easy to look right past it. It's its own thing.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the 13th Amendment on prison labor?
And even if I hadn't seen it, I would I would lie to your face right now. And all of our listeners, because there's no way you're going to double shame me.
Well, how about this? If you but I did see if you well, if you are lying right now and you go look for it, do not be confused by the documentary 13th that came out in 2025. Yeah. Which is about the yeah, it's about the high pressure student exams in India.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure that's upsetting too.
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.
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 and another name, basically. Right. Whereas that's basically what happened for a long, long time. Yeah. 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 going to exploit it, like for greedy purposes.
Yeah. Free labor? I thought that 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 perform hard labor rather than just being punished in other ways, that it was just an accepted thing. That, yeah, the loophole wasn't meant to be there. Yeah. But in the South, almost immediately, they put that to use.
We did an episode on the Black Codes back in January of 2022. 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. 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.
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Chapter 6: How does modern prison labor compare to historical practices?
There was a provisional governor named Thomas Ruger. And he leased like this is when the kind of the big sort of prisoner trade started where they were leasing prisoners to different states kind of back and forth. Like, hey, you've got a farm in your state that needs like a crop tended to. Well, let me lease you some prisoners from our state. Mm-hmm.
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. So $25 a prisoner, right?
Mm-hmm.
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 sick, they would just let them die, basically.
Right. And 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 prison's held accountable for. So that's essentially a longstanding thing in the United States. People like prisoners dying, even though 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.
Wow.
Wow.
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Chapter 7: What are the current working conditions for incarcerated individuals?
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 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, the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugar Land, Tennessee, which I guess is an appropriate place for it to be.
Where else?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: What reforms are needed for prison labor in the United States?
Are any federal prisons private or is that just state?
I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question.
I know. We never did one on the private prison industry, did we?
No. And we really should. It's on the list. They do this, too. And they they like the idea of them leasing out convicts for a for profit prison is just mind boggling.
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.
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.
Should we take a break? I think so. Yeah. I mean, since the feds can't hear us.
Yeah, right.
We might as well.
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