‘It’s Just Dressed Up Slavery’: America’s Shadow Workforce Rises Up Against Prison Labor

Dismantling the myths that drive an exploitative multi-million-dollar industry.

As soon as Stewart Anderson stepped foot inside the Lorton Reformatory, a Virginia prison, he knew he’d have to work for negligible pay in order to endure his 20-year sentence. At Lorton, prison labor was voluntary. But prison food was difficult to swallow, and Anderson wanted to supplement his diet with commissary items: peanut butter, noodles, dried fruit, and Kipper Snapper, a brand of fish in a can.

“It was more of a volunteer thing than it was forced labor, but it was tantamount to the same thing,” the D.C. native, who was convicted for assaulting a police officer, told ThinkProgress. “The system systematically forces you to work without ‘forcing you to work.’ Poor quality of food drives you to take on a prison job that pays you an average of 32 cents an hour, and you worked an average of five, six hours a day.”

Because he was able to read and write well, Anderson was always assigned to clerical work — answering phones and keeping inventory of products made by fellow prisoners. He was hellbent on avoiding the grunt work that most people have to do behind bars: scrubbing floors, cooking, sewing clothes, manufacturing license plates for the general public. He was equally determined to develop and hone skills he could use to employ himself when he got out. All the while, he was under no illusion that the purpose of the work was to train people like himself for the day they re-entered society.

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