The 25 states that have sued the Trump administration over its latest effort to impose tariffs on dozens of countries correctly pointed out that the claim that those countries haven’t sufficiently cracked down on goods made with forced labor is the administration’s pretext to reimpose tariffs the Supreme Court struck down.
On top of that, the Trump administration’s claim that tariffs are needed to punish those 59 countries and the European Union, which it says are too permissive of forced labor, is also hypocritical. I write this from Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades and is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.
Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades, is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.
I have seen guards attack a man for his refusal to chop grass. I have seen countless others pepper sprayed for refusing to perform work details. Some of my college classmates were expelled from religious and educational programs for failing to show up for prison-mandated work. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are behind bars in this country. More than half of them, approximately 1.2 million, are held in state or federal prisons, where work is compulsory.
The Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which Congress ratified in 1865, abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. That exception continues to be exploited by individual states and by corporations. Prison administrators nationwide have legally used incarcerated people for forced labor, both for prison operations and for-profit purposes. More than two years ago, The Associated Press launched a series that traced forced prison labor to the supply chains of some of the country’s most prominent companies.
If President Donald Trump’s attempt to impose tariffs on those other countries were really motivated by an opposition to forced labor, then we would expect him to show concern for people forced into labor in the United States. But there’s no indication that he cares.
In May, a federal judge in neighboring Louisiana agreed with four people incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections had acted “with deliberate indifference to the health and safety of incarcerated persons” forced to work that prison’s “farm line,” but the judge said a 5th Circuit ruling that made it harder to prove a case of cruel and unusual punishment meant he couldn’t grant the plaintiffs any relief. Trump would object to that ruling if the idea of forced labor offended him.
Prisons nationwide are using forced labor to grow crops or to manufacture products like furniture and textiles. Angola, as the Louisiana State Penitentiary is more commonly known, used to be a plantation worked by enslaved Africans and their descendants, and as a farm, it is almost entirely self-sustaining. According to a recent statistic, 74% of the incarcerated men at Angola are Black. Men on the prison’s “farm line” earn nothing the first three years. After that point, they can earn 2 to 4 cents an hour.
That’s more than people incarcerated here in Texas get. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, we’re one of five states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida and Georgia are the others — where incarcerated people forced to work get nothing. Of the states that do pay, according to that group, incarcerated people get 86 cents to $3.45 per day.
Men on the prison’s “farm line” earn nothing the first three years. After that point, they can earn 2 to 4 cents an hour.
In 2019, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Global Human Rights Clinic, state prisons in Texas had at least 121,167 incarcerated workers assigned to duties related to agriculture, maintenance, food service, laundry and other unit support details.
That report found that these workers are often forced to perform their mandatory job requirements in substandard and hazardous work conditions. Again, for zero pay.
Those assigned to agribusiness operations harvest some of the same crops — like cotton — that enslaved people once did. They work under an armed guard on horseback, following the “same marching orders as their predecessors,’ the Texas Observer reported.
In 2022 alone, Texas prisons raked in $58 million from sales of industrial products — such as soap and stainless steel tables — produced through forced labor. That sum was completely separate from the reported $51 million in earnings that same year from agriculture.
Incarcerated workers have a long history of inhumane treatment for any type of work stoppage. In 1908, Frank Pinkard received 39 lashes after refusing to continue digging a ditch in Texas. Other incarcerated workers were killed for disobeying work orders, according to historian Robert Perkinson, author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.”
Today, incarcerated workers are threatened with all types of punishment for failing to perform job assignments. In multiple states, the punishment is indefinite, long-term placement in solitary confinement, which requires confiscation of all personal property. Privileges like family visitation, telephone calls or the good-time credits needed for release can be stripped away. Commissary, entertainment and recreational access can be suspended.
Incarcerated individuals in Florida are informed in their orientation handbook that they do not have the option to refuse work assignments. Oregon’s Constitution mandates 40-hour work weeks for everyone incarcerated. Refusing to work in Illinois could cost an incarcerated person access to warm food.
Even by Trump’s “do as I say, not as I do” standards, the hypocrisy of him turning a blind eye to the forced labor all around him while declaring a need to make other countries do better is galling.
If tariffs are an appropriate response to countries looking away from forced labor, then other countries would be justified in placing tariffs on us.
The post How Trump’s professed opposition to forced labor sounds to those of us in prison appeared first on MS NOW.
