“Modern-day slavery:” How Minnesota’s prison labor pipeline begins before conviction

One of the lies taught about American history is that slavery was abolished roughly 161 years ago with the end of the Civil War and the introduction of the 13th and 14th amendments. But that is not the full truth, and many incarcerated people in Minnesota know it.

The pipeline that feeds prison labor in this state begins long before a conviction. Over 40% of the pre-trial population in Minnesota jails are Black, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In Hennepin County alone, that figure jumps to 65% of the jail population, according to the Hennepin County data dashboard, as of May 28th. Once convicted, many are funneled into work programs that pay as little as 50 cents an hour, a system critics say is not rehabilitation but exploitation.

“As soon as you’re convicted of a crime, that status of slave is your new status. That’s your new title,” said Max Graves, a former incarcerated worker and member of the End Slavery Minnesota Coalition. “When Abraham Lincoln said slavery was abolished, he left that loophole open and there were things like Black codes and Jim Crow that led to mass incarceration. I was a product of that. You could see it clear as day that they would rather have us on a plantation, working and exploiting us for free labor.”

More than 8,000 people are held in Minnesota state prisons. Of that population, approximately 1,300 are employed through some type of work program. The primary contractor is MINNCOR, which has employed incarcerated workers through various contracts since 1994. Pay starts at 50 cents an hour and can reach $2 an hour, with a small number of workers earning roughly $13 an hour through the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program.

“Correctional industries provide a means to minimize incarcerated person idleness and reduce costly disruptive behavior, thereby significantly contributing to the maintenance of a safe and secure environment for both staff and incarcerated people,” the MINNCOR website states.

Brody Katka, communications specialist for the Department of Corrections, said MINNCOR receives no taxpayer support. “MINNCOR must cover all costs, including but not limited to staff wage and benefit costs, workers compensation, utilities, square footage, administrative support and overhead costs, along with equipment and supplies,” Katka said.

Critics say that framing obscures the human cost.

“The punishment for my crime was supposed to be confinement, but the exploitation of my work is what really made me feel less than human,” Graves said. “Because I’m a man working real hard, putting in a lot of hours knowing that the DOC is getting paid, but I’m only bringing in 25 cents, and my kids need me.”

Chauntyll Allen, executive director of the End Slavery in Minnesota Coalition, said the system fails incarcerated people on both ends, inside prison and after release.

“It definitely damages the individual and it actually releases a worse human back into society than the one that we gave the DOC,” Allen said. “None of them feel like they’ve gained any skills that are employable. They feel really devalued and they don’t feel like they’re really preparing themselves to be productive parts of society.”

The barriers follow people out the door. “They go back to try to get a job and they’re like, ‘No, you have a felony, we won’t employ you,'” Allen said. “So it’s OK when they can pay 75 cents an hour for these people who have felonies to do the work, but when it comes time to pay them adequate wages for it, then they don’t want to hire them.”

Black and brown incarcerated individuals are the most affected, making up 39% of the prison population despite representing only 7% of the state’s overall population. Outside prison walls, the unemployment rate for Black Minnesotans is 2.6 times higher and the poverty rate 3.3 times higher than those of white Minnesotans.

The system reaches into families as well. “This hits us twofold,” Allen said. “When you remove somebody out of a household, that creates a single-parent household and doing that forces them to rely on the state.” She noted that basic hygiene necessities such as deodorant can cost three times the regular price inside prisons. “Now you have a single-parent household with the responsibility of an adult who’s dealing with exacerbated prices and a child who has lots of needs. It extracts resources out of the family and out of our communities that we could be using to better our communities.”

Graves said the pre-trial stage is where the pressure begins, and where reform could have the greatest impact. Many people awaiting trial are pressured into plea deals or accept work assignments as a way to reduce their time in jail, he said.

“Reforming pre-trial detention wouldn’t force people into making unthoughtful decisions,” Graves said. “When people are forced into a situation, it becomes very desperate. I think that if we do something about pre-trial detention to make it easier for an individual to actually fight for his life properly, instead of being forced into a situation like pleading out, I think it would just give more of a fair, equitable stance on how we fight for our rights and the way the legal system supports its citizens.”

The End Slavery Coalition introduced two bill packages in the last legislative session. HF335/SF3536 would eliminate the slavery clause in Minnesota’s constitution. HF5104/SF5277 would change the definition of “employee” to explicitly include incarcerated people, granting them basic workers’ rights including federal minimum wage, currently $7.80 an hour.

Neither bill has passed. As of May 26, 908 incarcerated people currently work for MINNCOR. The department does not track the demographic information of its workers, according to Katka.

Allen says the path forward requires both legislation and public education.

“The reason why this hasn’t been addressed in all of these years is because it’s just become part of the practice and the foundation of America,” she said. “It’s really the bottom part of capitalism and really how this country was built from the beginning. So when we think about slavery and how the people that got so rich so fast in this country, how that happened was based on free labor.”

She put it plainly.

“We won the Civil War, freedom came, and they released everybody out of the plantations. But nobody talked about the push to put people back into the plantations, and there wasn’t any fight for that.”

Izzy Canizares is a freelance journalist and contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.