by ADRIANA BELMONTE
This is part 2 of Yahoo Finance’s Illegal Tender podcast about the for-profit prison industry. Listen to the series here.
Mass incarceration has proven to be a business opportunity as the U.S. prison population increased by 500% over the last 40 years.
There are currently almost 2.3 million people behind bars, with the prison industry generating upwards of $80 billion a year. Much of that money is made from incarcerated individuals and their families.
“There is a tremendous amount of financial exploitation and predation on the part of corporations on all people who are incarcerated and their loved ones, regardless of the facility operational structure,” Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, said on Yahoo Finance’s Illegal Tender podcast.
‘There are industries making money off of people losing their freedom in this country’
Tylek explained that money is made in numerous ways within the prison system: construction, architecture, design, maintenance, telecommunications, healthcare, and more.
At the same time, people incarcerated make significantly less than minimum wage. In October 2019, while wildfires were blazing across the San Bernardino area of California, people incarcerated through the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation were put to work as firefighters, making $1 an hour. (The mean wage for firefighters in California was roughly $81,580 at the time.)
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, incarcerated individuals make earn an average of $0.14 per hour. (The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.)
“There aren’t enough jobs for everybody,” Amy Fettig, executive director at The Sentencing Project, said. “People want to work. They want to make whatever small amount of money they can in order to buy shampoo or pay for a phone call so they can talk to their child. But these are all at astronomical prices because of the monopoly power, and because quite frankly, there are industries making money off of people losing their freedom in this country.”
At the same time, prisoners still have to buy things: At current prison wages, it would take roughly 40 hours of work to afford the price of two tampons at $5.55. (That’s was the price as of 2016, according to a document from the Board of Prisons.) Other essential items available at prison commissaries are also sold at relatively exorbitant prices.
“These are folks who make cents on the dollar,” Fettig said. “Women in Colorado were actually using two weeks of wages in order to buy a single box of tampons. … They are not given tampons. Now, more and more states are passing menstrual equity laws that recognize that government institutions, like prisons and jails and public schools and housing shelters should provide basic hygiene items because most of these people are completely indigent, and that they should be available on demand.”
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