People often tell me I hold one of the best jobs an incarcerated person can have at New Jersey State Prison. But I don’t share that sentiment. While I’m sitting in the back of the classroom, red pen in hand, grading a stack of papers, I feel overworked and underpaid.
As a teaching assistant, my roster consists of 21 students with a wide range of education backgrounds. Some dropped out of high school over 20 years ago and have since forgotten how to do long division. Some speak English as a second language. Others — like many people behind bars in the U.S. — are functionally illiterate. I work independently with each of them to assess their skill levels, structure lesson plans for them, and assign and grade their homework, all in an effort to get them prepared for the GED test.
Among our responsibilities as TAs, we have to teach in the protective custody and administrative segregation units. These are restrictive units, which means the students there have limited privileges and freedom of moment. Because they aren’t allowed to come to the school area, we go to them — and that’s no small thing. As soon as we get to the restrictive unit, we are forced to strip butt naked, then stand there while a guard searches for contraband. This degrading process happens four or five times a day.
Because these students are in the restrictive units for disciplinary issues, they are deprived of human contact and access to TV or recreation. That pent-up energy can make them unruly, and some of them harass the TAs as a source of entertainment.
“Paralegal, I need to see you! They denied my appeal!” one might yell.
Or: “Yo! Come here! I need to speak to you! It’s important!”
It’s a chaotic scene, everyone screaming at once, their voices overlapping and making it hard to distinguish what is being said. I try my best to ignore the profanity and name-calling, but it irritates me to my core.
TAs have to maintain composure and function as de facto mental health therapists, social workers, mentors and legal advisors, among many other professions for which we are not certified or paid. These are aspects of the job that will never be seen or appreciated by the parole board, or by the people who write our checks.
In exchange for these duties, I am compensated with a laughable wage of $1 per hour for five hours of work, five shifts a week, for a total of about $1,300 a year. In comparison, the civilian teachers in the New Jersey Department of Corrections are paid between $53,000 and $108,000 per year, depending on geography and credentials. Rather than hire enough teachers to properly educate the amount of students enrolled in school, the prison administrators take advantage of our cheap labor. The difference in our workload is minimal, but the difference in our pay scale is massive.
“We are under-appreciated and underpaid,” said Jorge Alvarado, an incarcerated co-worker of mine in the education department. “We save the Department of Corrections a lot of money and we aren’t fairly or properly compensated for it.”
Alvarado pointed out that even the students make more money than they do. Students are paid $1.50 per hour for a two-hour session, or $3 per day, according to our prison’s inmate handbook.
Some would argue that pay inequality like this exists in the workplace in society. I understand that, but people in society aren’t facing wage disparities on the same level that incarcerated people are. I don’t expect to have equal pay with a teacher who has earned a master’s degree, but I do expect the pay rate to fairly reflect the workload.
As incarcerated individuals, our jobs don’t come with any worker safety protections either. If I am injured on the job, I won’t receive worker’s compensation from the Department of Corrections. We aren’t given any sick days — or vacation days, for that matter. If I don’t show up for my job, I will be punished, which in turn will affect my chances of parole. Punishments can include five days of lost privileges — no recreation, no TV — and up to 10 days in administrative segregation, a form of solitary confinement.
We also don’t have the right to unionize. Any coordinated effort among incarcerated individuals to advocate for change tends to get labeled “gang activity” and is subject to disciplinary action. And if they want to force us into overtime, they can do so without our consent. Again, refusing work risks punishment.
If it weren’t for the fact that the job allows me to be out of the closed confines of the cell for five hours a day, I would’ve quit a long time ago.
I’ve held this job for 10 years. If I spent all of those extra lonesome hours in the hellhole I call a cell, I would’ve lost my mind by now. Those five hours break up the monotony of being locked down for 23 hours every day. I feel compelled to work because the only alternative is to wither away in this 4-by-7-foot cell.
The truth of the matter is that in New Jersey prisons, as in most prisons across the country, you are forced to work for next to nothing or suffer the consequences. Remind me again what it’s called when you are forced to work and not properly compensated?
