Lawmakers in Albany are considering establishing a minimum wage for incarcerated people that could result in a dramatic pay increase for their work inside New York state prisons.
If approved, the state would set the base rate at half the state’s minimum wage — which currently is between $15.50 and $16.50. On average, incarcerated people in the state currently are paid 35 cents an hour, according to the bill’s co-sponsor, Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs. Some make as little as 10 cents an hour.
“That means our lowest paid workers can't afford a box of spaghetti at the commissary on a full day's work,” Gibbs, D-Manhattan, said at a press conference on Tuesday. “That's not okay.”
The bill, called the Prison Wage Act, is a part of a series of bills that advocates say would end unfair wage and labor practices in New York’s prisons. Lawmakers have deemed the measures necessary to turn the No Slavery in New York Act — another bill being considered — into a full reality by banning the near-zero compensation rates that are currently in place and helping individuals become financially prepared upon their eventual release.
A third bill, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Jessica Ramos from Queens and Assemblymember Crystal Peoples-Stokes from Bufalo, would cap prices for items, such as sanitary products and produce, from being sold more than 3% what they were bought for.
The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that prison workers produce more than $2 billion in goods each year, and more than $9 billion in prison maintenance services. In New York, prison workers hold a range of jobs —from making state license plates and chairs used in the state Capitol buildings, to answering hotline calls for the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
But some lawmakers argue that incarcerated people have not been compensated nearly as much as they should. And they are at times put in solitary confinement and punished in other ways if they refuse to do the work, Gibbs said, or are unable to do so on a given day.
“Slavery is over, but it only occurs inside these walls,” Gibbs said.
Gibbs is pushing his bill alongside the No Slavery in New York Act, which would close a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows slavery as a punishment for crime.
The bill would prevent incarcerated people from being “compelled or induced to provide labor against such individual’s will by force.” Assemblymember Demond Meeks, D-Rochester, who cosponsored the bill, said banning forced labor practices in prisons would continue the abolition work that early advocates, such as the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, pushed for.
“It wasn't about just abolishing slavery in its current form. It was about abolishing slavery in every form,” Meeks said. “So just because a person is convicted of a crime doesn't mean that they should be forced to involuntary servitude.”
