Counterpoint | Minnesota’s prison labor programs amount to modern-day slavery

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Imagine working full time for 32 years and having nothing to show for it. For more than three decades, I put in my eight hours per day but couldn’t buy birthday presents for my kids. I could barely afford soap, let alone save money for the future. Why would I work for 25 cents per hour? Because, in Minnesota, I was a slave.

A headline for a recent Karen Tolkkinen column asks: “Minnesota’s Constitution allows $1-an-hour labor for inmates. Should it?” While Tolkkinen raises the right issue, she fails to understand the scope and severity of the injustice that continues to stand because slavery is legal.

Let’s be clear: The affordable-housing program Tolkkinen showcases is not representative of most prison jobs. Only a small portion of the prison population gets paid $1 per hour. Everyone else makes far less. And, at the end of the day, you don’t even get that. Even if you’re earning 25 cents per hour, half of your paycheck is skimmed off by the state for fees and restitution — but they still turn around and charge you for everyday items at inflated prices.

Tolkkinen argues that prisoners benefit from on-the-job education, developing skills and learning trades we can leverage later. While I was inside, I was lucky and got certified as a welder (a program that no longer exists). But while my labor profited others, I haven’t reaped the benefits myself: I’ve been out 14 months and haven’t been able to get a job in the field. To assume the companies that profit from our prison labor will be the first to hire us on the outside is simply not true.

Still, we must work because of a policy called No Work, No Play — if you don’t have a job, you don’t leave your cell. And nearly all prison jobs profit private companies or pad the budget of the Department of Corrections; they don’t provide skills. Instead of perpetuating the billion-dollar corrections machine, taxpayers should demand incarcerated people get minimum wage and real jobs so we can be set up for success once we’re out.

To say that communities benefit from this system of slavery is absurd. Slave labor is a primary driver of recidivism — if we were paid fairly when we were locked up, we’d have financial stability when we got out. According to a study published in Criminology and Public Policy, people with secure finances on release from prison are 4.6 times less likely to reoffend. That adds up to big savings for taxpayers, too: The Minnesota Reformer reports that, for every 1% reduction in recidivism, Minnesotans save $63 million per year.

If we got real wages, we’d be able to support our kids and our families while inside, so we’d have strong relationships when we return home. Based on DOC job data, slave wages steal over $100 million per year from our poorest families and communities, while the state Department of Health reports that 1 in 6 children in Minnesota will have an incarcerated parent.

If we were empowered as employees rather than dehumanized as slaves, we’d have a chance at the personal rehabilitation that prison is supposed to provide. We’d pay victims restitution and give them a chance to heal. We’d be primed to start our own businesses and create new employment opportunities for others; in fact, ending slavery in Minnesota would create an estimated $500 million each year in economic development, according to the End Slavery in Minnesota Coalition.

This isn’t a “murky” choice, as Tolkkinen suggests. It’s simple right and wrong. Slavery is a violation of basic human rights that has no place in Minnesota — a state that prides itself as the first to join the Civil War to abolish chattel slavery in 1861.

Eight other states, including Alabama and Tennessee, have removed this loophole in their constitutions that allows slavery, and state Sen. Bobby Joe Champion and state Rep. Dave Pinto are carrying a bill to do that here in Minnesota. But we must go beyond that. The Bill to End Slavery in Minnesota, authored by state Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten and state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, would end slavery in practice: reclassifying people in prison as employees, ending forced labor while ensuring minimum wage and basic employee protections.