Inequality
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Why are there prisons?
When people are found guilty of committing a crime, a judge will decide how they should be punished. Sometimes they are allowed to live in their own homes and they have to pay a fine or serve their communities, but sometimes they are incarcerated, which means they are ordered to live in a jail or a prison. During this time, they cannot leave and they have to follow the rules of the facility.
Jails and prisons are called correctional facilities because they are meant to help correct the person’s behavior so that person does not commit any
more crimes. But as a criminologist – someone who studies crime and prisons – I often wonder how people decided that incarceration was a good way to “correct” people.
There is a long history of using jails and prisons as punishment for breaking the law, and to keep communities safe. But there is also debate about how well those systems work, how fair they are and how to improve them.
Jail vs. prison
Although jails and prisons are similar, they usually have different purposes. Most of the people living in jail have not been convicted of a crime yet and are waiting for the court to decide if they are guilty. A person who is found guilty can be sent to live in the jail as punishment, but they typically stay for less than one year.
If the judge sentences someone to be incarcerated for a longer period of time, that person is normally sent to a prison in another part of the state. Sometimes the prison is far away from their home, and it can be difficult for their families to visit.
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Longer sentences
In the 1970s, there was an increase in the number of crimes reported in the United States, and many people were scared. They thought that society would be safer if more people were sent to prison. The size of the prison population increased from around 200,000 people in the 1970s to around 2 million people in recent years.
People started spending very long periods of time in prison, and more people were given life sentences, meaning that they could never return home. Before, those punishments had been reserved for very serious crimes, but new laws passed during this time made them more common.
Prisons became overcrowded, which spread resources more thinly, including programs to help prisoners prepare to return to society. More people wound up committing crimes again after they returned home.
Improving prisons
People who study correctional facilities, like me, have found many problems to fix. Some have to do with the large number of people in prisons. Many nondangerous people wind up serving time there, when they could serve a different punishment and receive therapy in their communities instead.
Another major problem is racial discrimination. Many researchers have found that Black, Hispanic and Native American people are more likely to be sent to prison than people from other racial and ethnic groups, even if they were convicted of the same crimes.
This can cause a lot of serious problems for their families and communities.
Societies might always need to incarcerate some people who have committed serious crimes or who pose a danger to others. Perhaps the system can become safer, fairer and more successful in punishing crimes while rehabilitating.
14 cents an hour
Prison systems have long championed the work of incarcerated persons in emergencies and disasters as a demonstration of the value of prisons to local communities and the state.
State prison systems often have internal policies that guide the use of incarcerated persons to assist with disaster operations. For example, the Alabama Department of Corrections’ administrative regulations dictate that in the event of a disaster, “the major support of the [department] will be manpower” including the use of “inmate labor.”
In addition, state laws across the U.S. often specifically state that incarcerated workers may be assigned to work in disaster conditions.
For example, Georgia allows for incarcerated workers to be required to work in conditions that may jeopardize their health if an emergency threatens the lives of others or of public property. Meanwhile Colorado passed legislation in 1998 that created the Inmate Disaster Relief Program under which the state can “form a labor pool” to “fight forest fires, help with flood relief, and assist in the prevention of or clean up after other natural or man-made disasters.”
As with wildfire programs, incarcerated workers are looked to in times of disaster primarily because they are a low-cost substitution for civilian workers. Incarcerated workers are paid very low wages averaging between US$0.14 and $0.63 an hour. And some states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Texas, don’t pay incarcerated workers at all.
The cost of inmate labor is offset through federal subsidies. FEMA’s public assistance program provides states with “funding for prisoner transportation to the worksite and extraordinary costs of security guards, food and lodging.” This provides a significant financial incentive to use incarcerated workers for disaster labor. After Hurricane Michael in 2018, FEMA awarded the Florida Department of Corrections $311,305 for debris removal.
Exploitation and harm
Some advocates for prisoners’ rights have begun drawing attention to the vulnerability of incarcerated workers in disasters. After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice program published a guidebook called “In the Eye of the Storm” to help communities make disaster response and recovery processes more equitable.
The guidebook includes suggestions for how to advocate specifically for worker protections for incarcerated persons. Community members are encouraged to ask about whether the incarcerated workers have received relevant training and adequate protective equipment and if their participation in the work is voluntary.
Incarcerated workers are deeply embedded throughout emergency management in the United States. Yet so much attention remains focused on the most visible and well-known programs, their role – and the potential for exploitation and harm – in many other disasters remains overlooked.
Criminologists around the world argue that the prison system is not working In fact it dioes the opposite it dehumanises and when you come out you are more dangerous than before. Some also argue that they are doing this in purpose so they keep the population to the max as too much money can be made from the prisoners.
I argue that there are more criminals outside prison than in prison. There are politicians rotten from corrupion yet they walk the streets free, they should be inside behind bars and not the ones there are in now.
Prison then vs. prison now
In the past, people were not sent to jails and prisons as a legal punishment. Instead, these places were used to contain people who were suspected of a crime, to keep them from escaping before their punishment was decided.
If they were found guilty, sometimes they were punished with physical pain, such as being whipped. Sometimes they were forced to work without pay or for very low wages.
Others might be sent far away from their communities and not allowed to come back. The most serious punishment was execution, and many people were killed for their crimes.
Over time, most countries decided that these types of punishment were cruel or ineffective, so they started using jails and prisons as places where people could be punished by losing their freedom for a specific amount of time. Judges could give some people longer sentences if their crimes were more serious, and shorter sentences if their crimes did not deserve a long punishment
People expected that some prisoners would learn a lesson from their prison experience. If they were scared of going back to prison, hopefully they would be less likely to break the law in the future. Some prisons tried to “rehabilitate” people by giving them an education, job training or therapy that might help them prepare to return home.
Disaster work is often carried out by prisoners
Efforts to beat back wildfires ravaging Western states in the U.S. have been hampered this year by depleted numbers of “orange angels” – incarcerated workers deployed as firefighters.
Their lower numbers coincide with the early release for eligible prisoners and the quarantining of others to combat the spread of COVID-19.
The potential impact that having fewer prisoners to draw upon highlights the crucial role that incarcerated workers play in disaster response. While many people are aware that prisoners work to help contain wildfires in California and elsewhere, less well known is the role incarcerated workers play as a labor source across a variety of disasters throughout the country.
As a social scientist, I study the impact of disasters on incarcerated populations. I recently co-authored a study on the role of incarcerated workers in state emergency operations plans – the primary emergency planning documents for state governments.
We found that 30 out of the 47 states analyzed, including California, Texas and Florida, had explicit instructions to use prisoners for emergencies and disasters.
Furthermore, we identified at least 34 disaster-related tasks that states assign to incarcerated workers. Delaware, New Jersey and Tennessee were not included in our analysis as their plans were not publicly available.
These include work that requires minimal training such as making sandbags, clearing debris, handling supplies and caring for pets for evacuees. But it also includes roles that require specialized training like fighting fires, collecting and disposing contaminated animal carcasses and cleaning up hazardous materials.
Some of these tasks put incarcerated workers at risk of injury or ill health.
Forced labor
Not all disaster work is voluntary for incarcerated persons. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows for incarcerated persons to be compelled to participate in labor without their consent as part of their punishment. That applies to disaster work too.
The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment “forbids knowingly compelling an inmate to perform labor that is beyond the inmate’s strength, dangerous to his or her life or health, or unduly painful.” However, in the context of disasters, it is challenging to know whether or not the situation or the environment is truly safe. And little is known about the training prisoners receive.
If incarcerated persons refuse to participate, they may face serious consequences, such as being sent to solitary confinement, the loss of earned time off their sentences or the loss of family visitation.
Deaths of incarcerated firefighters are reported alongside those of civilian firefighters, and there is no way to accurately track the number of prisoners who have died or been injured during disaster-related work. However, there are known examples of fatalities.
In 2003, the South Dakota Department of Corrections “Emgency Response Inmate Work Program” was scrutinized after a 22-year-old man, Neil Ambrose, was electrocuted by a downed power line while cleaning up debris after a storm.
Ambrose reportedly expressed prior concerns about the hazardous work but was told he would be charged with “disrupting a work zone” and would be sent to solitary confinement if he did not participate.
Later, the correctional officer in charge of Ambrose and those on the work crew was found responsible for his death in that he knew the downed power line was a safety threat. It was also later shown that the only training Ambrose had received was a short video on safely operating chainsaws.
