Incarcerated Workers Earn 13-52 Cents Per Hour While Producing $11 Billion in Goods and Services

Nearly 800,000 of the 1.2 million people in U.S. state and federal prisons work as prison laborers, earning between 13 and 52 cents per hour on average, while seven Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas — pay nothing at all for most prison labor. Why it matters: incarcerated workers produce at least $2 billion in goods and $9 billion in prison maintenance services annually at near-zero labor costs, so 70% of incarcerated workers cannot afford basic necessities like soap and phone calls from their wages, so their families must send money from outside to cover commissary costs averaging over $947 per person per year, so families already strained by the loss of a breadwinner sink deeper into debt, so formerly incarcerated workers re-enter society with no savings, no workplace protections experience, and depressed future wages (a 51.7% wage penalty amounting to $55.2 billion in lost earnings annually across the formerly incarcerated population). The structural root cause is that the 13th Amendment explicitly exempts prisoners from its prohibition on involuntary servitude ('except as a punishment for crime'), and incarcerated workers are excluded from minimum wage laws, overtime protections, the right to unionize, and workplace safety guarantees — creating a constitutionally sanctioned labor force with no bargaining power.