Ending Prison Slavery on the Ballot in California, Nevada
On June 27, 2024, California’s General Assembly voted to put a measure on the November 2024 ballot that would amend the state constitution to prohibit any kind of slavery. Current California law mirrors the Thirteenth Amendment of the federal Constitution in making an exception to its slavery ban for those convicted of crimes, meaning prisoners can legally be forced to work, even when paid little or nothing.
Closing that loophole would put California on a growing list of states that have outlawed forced labor of incarcerated people. Currently, that includes Alabama, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont—though prisoners in Alabama and Colorado have had to file suit to enforce their rights, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, June 2024, p.1.] Nevada voters will also find a similar measure on their ballots in November 2024.
California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) made some 65,000 work assignments in 2021 to state prisoners, enough for about two-thirds of the 99,000 people then held by the prison system. Most jobs simply keep the prisons running—doing maintenance or staffing the kitchen—so they do not provide skills in high demand once a prisoner is released. But even those jobs that offer in-demand skills may not offer a prisoner the same future opportunities as an education, which many say their work assignments disrupt.
“When I wanted to take my on-site college courses to complete my degree, forced labor was prioritized over my rehabilitation,” former prisoner Lawrence Cox told a state Senate committee on June 18, 2024. Yet it was the degree, not anything learned in a prison job during the 17 years he spent in CDCR, which helped land his current position as policy fellow with the nonprofit Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.
Earlier efforts to end prison slavery in the state died when lawmakers saw the $1.5 billion estimated annual tab for paying prisoners minimum wage. What pushed this proposal onto the ballot was a shift in focus, from paying prisoners a fair wage to not forcing them to work at all. As a result, if the measure passes, state prisoners will be asked to volunteer for work assignments at the same current pay rate—30 to 40 cents hourly for most jobs, though prisoner firefighters can earn $5.80 to $10.40 per day.
Nevada state Sen. Pat Spearman (D-North Las Vegas), who co-sponsored the resolution that put the measure on that state’s ballot, said that failing to do so would have meant failing to accept a “very painful past.”
“And what you don’t face, you can’t fix,” she noted.
Source: CBS News, CalMatters
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