City Council Resolution Seeks to Roll Back Prison Labor
City Council member Christopher Marte (right) is sponsoring a resolution that aims to ban the use of prison labor in New York State. This measure calls upon the State legislature to enact a proposed amendment to the State Constitution “to allow incarcerated persons the right to refuse to work while in prison,” and “to forbid forced labor of incarcerated individuals in any state prison, penitentiary, jail or reformatory.” Known as the No Slavery in New York Act, the proposed amendment is co-sponsored by State Senator Brian Kavanagh and Assembly member Grace Lee, both of whom also represent Lower Manhattan.
As Mr. Marte’s resolution notes, “while the U.S. Congress ratified the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865, ostensibly abolishing slavery, the 13th amendment language, ‘except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted’ has been criticized by civil rights and criminal justice groups for creating a loophole that has led to incarcerated individuals being exploited.”
New York’s Constitution goes a step further, explicitly banning the use of prison labor by for-profit entities, but that language contains an exception, allowing the State itself to go into this business. Currently, prisoners who work for Corcraft (the State’s prison labor corporation) are paid between 16 cents and 65 cents per hour (roughly equivalent to current wages for unskilled labor in Rwanda), to manufacture license plates, highway signs, janitorial supplies, office and classroom furniture, textiles, mattresses, and file cabinets. These products are sold to county and municipal governments around the State, which are legally required to buy from Corcraft, giving the company an effective monopoly. This operation earns the New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision more than $50 million per year.
Mr. Marte’s resolution adds that Corcraft “capitalizes on a vulnerable population that is a captive labor force,” and that prisoners are compelled to work by “coercion through the threat of punishment and through deprivation.”
A second bill under consideration in Albany (also co-sponsored by Senator Kavanagh and Assembly member Lee) would boost wages paid to State prison inmates who work for Corcraft to $3.00 per hour. Even at this increased rate, such workers would be paid at an 80 percent discount to the minimum wage outside of prison.