In November, Californians voted to keep using forced labor in the state’s prison system.
This will be old news to many by the time it’s read, but it still is, and was, devastating and wrong.
Just more than 53% of voters voted against Proposition 6, while a little less than 47% supported the end of indentured servitude in the Golden State. Proposition 6 would have prohibited the state from being able to hand out work assignments as punishment and to discipline people who refuse to work.
If passed, the state would have set up a volunteer work assignment program, which could have allowed people to receive time off their sentences in exchange for working.
California will continue to operate under its old system, where about 40,000 of the state’s 90,000 incarcerated people work a variety of prison jobs — most of them earning less than 74 cents per hour, according to CalMatters.
The state considered a similar initiative in 2022 that would have raised the pay for incarcerated people to $15 an hour, in line with the state minimum wage at the time, but that also failed to pass, mostly due to concerns over the $1.5 billion cost to the state.
As Prison Journalism Project writer Steve Brooks wrote in 2022: “With its recent vote, California’s government has effectively declared this truth to be self-evident: Not all of us are created equal.”
Now, two years later, Californians have voted the same way again. I find it curious that such a blue state continues to allow the closest thing the U.S. has to slavery at this time.
If you don’t believe the rules need to change, consider this statistic from the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in California, which says that the state government and private companies “generate and save, collectively, at least one billion dollars each year” from our prison labor. And for our work, we are paid cents.
