I attended the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Program Wednesday night. In light of the call to action issued by the event’s organizers, and by Dr. King’s advocacy of social justice, I thought I would write about a little known aspect of LSU, the use of inmate labor.
When King was killed in Memphis, he was there not to demand the right to sit at a lunch counter, but to support striking garbage workers who were demanding respect on the job and a wage that would allow them to live in dignity. It is in this direction, defending not only the civil but also the economic rights of all people, that King was moving when he was taken from us. Perhaps we can pick up where he left off.
Maybe you’ve seen the prisoners working on campus cleaning up after football games or tending to our oak trees. They seem innocuous enough, assuming you can find them. You see, LSU brings them to campus at times when there aren’t many students around to see them. Could it be that LSU would like to keep their presence here as little known as possible? If so, why would that be?
Prison labor is nothing new in Louisiana. It started with the end of slavery. Powerful interests were afraid of potential political power of newly freed black people. They sought to return society to its condition before the war, but could not simply reinstitute slavery. They used many means, including segregation, disenfranchisement, intimidation, lynching and the state penitentiary at Angola.
Angola was a plantation masquerading as a prison. It combined the back-breaking labor and violence of the slavery system with new concepts of prison management and business efficiency. It made fortunes for those who administered it and leased out its inmates to build levees and railroads around the state. In some years, one fifth of the prisoners died from overwork, neglect and abuse. The life expectancy of a new Angola prisoner was just six years.
The prison system had a chilling effect on any attempt of black people to defend their rights. Those who survived their sentences were thoroughly inoculated from any notion that they could lead independent lives, much less pursue political power. Prison labor was a powerful tool of social control in the hands of the leaders of the Jim Crow South, reinforcing the ideas of white supremacy and the plantation economy.
Today, while conditions in American prisons have improved somewhat, prison labor is booming. American prisoners do everything from making blue jeans to taking airline reservations. In Louisiana, prisoners do agricultural labor, manufacturing, and work for state institutions, including our university.
Crews of inmates cumulatively work 600 hours a week on LSU’s grounds. They are short time, nonviolent and non-sexual offenders. LSU pays them by feeding them lunch at the McDonald’s on State Street. This “in-kind” wage averages between 50 cents and $1 an hour. Nor do inmates get health insurance, retirement or vacations. They don’t have the right to speak out or organize themselves to get better conditions. This is the definition of sweatshop exploitation, and we make big money from it. LSU spends $100,000 each year on inmate labor and saves $300,000 in labor costs. That’s a three to one return on our investment.
Nor does this just exploit inmates. It robs law-abiding people of decent jobs. It also threatens all workers’ rights to collectively bargain because inmates can’t join unions or go on strike.
Prisons are just like video poker, lotteries and casinos. All of them are sold to Louisiana citizens as sources of jobs and free money. LSU plays into this idea by thinking it can save money and improve education by using cheap prison labor, but it doesn’t reduce costs, it just shifts them around. We don’t pay prisoners’ medical expenses, the prison does, or it simply doesn’t treat their illnesses. We reduce our own tax base by not providing jobs with decent pay that can support local businesses. The prisoners don’t get job training that would allow them to get good jobs and maybe send themselves or their children to LSU.
Prison labor is a shameful legacy of slavery and an ongoing injustice. The people who clean our campus are human beings and should be treated as such. They deserve real job training through their work at LSU. The profits earned by the inmates could easily fund this. The inmates, once released, could eventually get regular jobs here and over time the use of inmate labor could be phased out. In the meantime, everyone working on our campus, including inmates, deserves the minimum wage. We keep spending money putting people in prison that should be spent on educating children and helping the sick, the elderly and working people. It’s time to move in a different direction.