Prison slavery is the common name for the forced, nearly unpaid labor that incarcerated people in the United States perform under threat of punishment, and it is still legal because the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, left one exception in place: involuntary servitude is permitted “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”1Constitution Annotated. Amdt13.S1.1 Prohibition Clause That clause has allowed compulsory prison work to operate for more than 160 years, producing billions of dollars in goods and services while the workers themselves sit outside almost every labor protection the rest of the country takes for granted.
The Constitutional Exception That Makes It Legal
The whole legal structure rests on that single sentence. Where ordinary labor law begins with the premise that a worker is a free person selling their time, prison labor begins with the premise that the worker has been convicted and can be compelled. Courts accepted this early and have never meaningfully walked it back. An 1871 Virginia decision, Ruffin v. Commonwealth, described a convicted person as “the slave of the state.” The phrasing is archaic; the underlying rule still runs.
Both federal and state governments can require work as a condition of confinement. The federal Abolition Amendment, which would strike the punishment exception entirely, has been introduced in multiple sessions of Congress but has not advanced to a vote.2U.S. House of Representatives. Congresswoman Nikema Williams Reintroduces the Bicameral Abolition Amendment to Finally End Slavery Passage would require two-thirds approval in both chambers and ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures.
What Happens If an Incarcerated Person Refuses to Work
The word “slavery” turns on compulsion, and the compulsion here is formal. In federal prisons, refusing a work assignment is a moderate-severity disciplinary offense. A first refusal can cost up to 25 percent of available good conduct time or up to 30 days, whichever is less. Repeat refusals can mean forfeiture of up to 45 days of credit, disciplinary segregation for up to six months, and loss of commissary, phone, and visitation privileges.3Federal Bureau of Prisons. Inmate Discipline Program Losing good-time credit directly extends a sentence. The choice to work is a choice in name.
What Incarcerated Workers Are Paid
Pay inside prisons bears no resemblance to wages outside. The work splits into two broad categories.
Facility Maintenance
Most prison labor keeps the facility itself running: cooking, laundry, mopping, grounds work. In several states, this work is entirely unpaid. In federal prisons, regular non-industry jobs pay between $0.12 and $0.40 per hour.4Federal Bureau of Prisons. UNICOR A full eight-hour day at the top rate earns $3.20. Because these tasks serve the institution rather than producing goods for sale, courts and regulators treat them as non-commercial, which keeps them outside labor regulation entirely.
Correctional Industries
A smaller segment manufactures products for government buyers. Federal Prison Industries, operating as UNICOR, is a government-owned corporation that employs incarcerated people to produce office furniture, electronics, textiles, and other goods sold to federal agencies. These jobs pay between $0.23 and $1.15 per hour.4Federal Bureau of Prisons. UNICOR They are also the most sought-after assignments; roughly 25,000 federal inmates sit on a waitlist, and only about 8 percent of eligible inmates participate.
Federal law requires at least 15 percent of each UNICOR worker’s compensation to be set aside in a fund for release-related costs.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 4126 – Prison Industries Fund; Use and Settlement of Accounts After a multi-year sentence, the reserve often amounts to a few hundred dollars.
Why Minimum Wage and Antidiscrimination Laws Don’t Apply
Incarcerated workers are excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law that guarantees a minimum wage and overtime pay for nearly everyone else. Courts have built the exclusion deliberately. In Vanskike v. Peters, decided in 1992, the Seventh Circuit held that a prisoner working inside the prison under a corrections assignment simply is not an “employee” under the FLSA, because the relationship is custodial rather than employment.6Justia Law. Daniel Lee Vanskike v. Howard A. Peters, III Multiple circuits have reached the same conclusion through somewhat different reasoning, and a genuine split persists in how courts analyze the question.
When courts examine the substance, they use an “economic reality” test that looks at who controls the schedule, who sets the pay rate, and whether the worker can be hired or fired. Every factor points to institutional control, which the courts read as confirming a custodial relationship. The result: an incarcerated worker cannot sue for back wages or minimum wage under federal law, no matter how many hours they work.
The gap extends past wages. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has taken the position that incarcerated people are generally not “employees” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and has stated that if work “is based on incarceration, it is not covered by Title VII or other employment discrimination laws.”7U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. EEOC Informal Discussion Letter A narrow exception exists when an outside employer in a work-release program discriminates. For the vast majority of prison work, no federal antidiscrimination law applies.
Safety and Injury Compensation
Some protection remains for workplace safety, but it is thinner than what any civilian worker receives. Under federal regulations, inmates performing work similar to private-sector jobs are considered covered by OSHA’s safety standards for federal workplaces. The Bureau of Prisons treats only written complaints about workplace safety issues (not general living conditions) as formal complaints warranting investigation, and incarcerated workers do not receive all the rights that other federal employees have under those regulations.
When an injury does happen, the federal system is governed by 28 CFR Part 301. An injured worker can receive lost-time wages at 75 percent of their standard hourly rate while recovering. For permanent injuries, awards follow the federal employee workers’ compensation schedule but are calculated against the federal minimum wage rather than actual earnings.8eCFR. Inmate Accident Compensation A permanent injury priced at $7.25 an hour produces a very small award. This system is the exclusive remedy for injured federal inmates, which means no standard workers’ compensation claim and no tort lawsuit for workplace injuries.
High-Risk Work: Firefighting
The distance between the risks and the protections shows most clearly in high-risk assignments. At least 14 states use prison labor for wildland firefighting, with California alone deploying around 2,000 incarcerated people across dozens of fire camps. These workers perform the same physically grueling work as professional firefighters on active fire lines. Pay runs to single-digit dollars per day for non-fire duties and modestly more during active deployments. Some states offer sentence reductions as a primary incentive, with credits of two days off for each day on a fire assignment. Deaths have occurred both during active fires and in training.
The firefighting certifications earned in prison camp programs generally do not transfer to post-release employment. People who want to continue the work professionally often have to retrain from the beginning while also facing the barriers of a criminal record. Recent legislative efforts to close that certification gap have moved slowly, with opposition from professional firefighting unions.
Taxed as Workers, Excluded From the Credit for Workers
Wages too small to live on are still large enough to tax. The IRS treats income earned while incarcerated as taxable income, typically reported on a W-2 or 1099. Prison wages, however, cannot be counted toward the Earned Income Tax Credit, the federal government’s largest anti-poverty program for working people.9Internal Revenue Service. Reentry Myth Busters – Federal Taxes The same legal system that says an incarcerated person is not an “employee” for wage purposes still treats them as a taxpayer at filing time.
State Efforts to Close the Loophole
A growing number of states have moved to remove the punishment exception from their own constitutions. In 2022, voters in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont approved amendments eliminating language that permitted slavery or involuntary servitude as criminal punishment. Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah passed similar amendments in earlier years, and Nevada voters have also approved such a measure.
The on-the-ground effect has been uneven. Research into Colorado’s 2018 amendment, one of the earliest, found little observable change in how prison labor operates. Facilities continued assigning work, and penalties for refusal stayed in place. Litigation testing mandatory work requirements under the new state provisions is still developing, and the distance between what a state constitution says and what a corrections department does day to day has proven difficult to close through ballot measures alone.