Prison profiteering exploits whole communities, not just the incarcerated

This excerpt, taken from a longer conversation between Mansa Musa and Antonio Hayes, has been edited for length and clarity. 

Mansa Musa: Recently, I spoke to State Senator Antonio Hayes from the 40th district of Baltimore City about a bill he sponsored around prison labor in Maryland. The bill was designed to regulate Maryland Correctional Enterprise (MCE), which is the prison industry in Maryland, around the preferential treatment they receive for contracts, be it furniture, tags, clothing, or cleaning chemicals. The bill aimed to regulate how much money they were getting from free prison labor.

Antonio Hayes: Prison labor brings in anywhere near $50 million a year in business. So they perform everything from furniture making to license plates. They have inmates working on poultry farms and agriculture. The variety of services that they offer has expanded dramatically since its inception. If you are a state agency, you are required by state procurement law to purchase from MCE as long as they have the product. So that’s why they’re able to bring in that type of revenue. 

Mansa Musa: You hear stuff about prison: the conditions in prison, the medical facilities in prison, the lack of food, parole, probation. But very rarely do you hear someone say, “Well, let me look at the industry or the job that’s being provided to prisoners.” Why’d you look at this particular direction?

Antonio Hayes: So I’ve been supporting a gentleman back home in Baltimore who has an organization called Emage, E-M-A-G-E, Entrepreneurs Making And Growing Enterprises. So the brother had reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m manufacturing clothing, but I hear the correctional system is teaching brothers and sisters behind the wall these skills. I’d like to connect with them. So when brothers and sisters return to the community, I’d like to hire them.” So I said, “Excellent. Let me reach out to Corrections.

In doing so I discovered MCE — Maryland Correctional Enterprises and when I looked into why MCE existed I found out that they had a procurement law in the state, a preferred provider status. So, I began to research their existence and how much money they were generating, discovering that, here in the state of Maryland, MCE was generating revenue of upwards of fifty-something million dollars a year. Whereas, the individuals who were incarcerated, the individuals who were doing the work, were getting paid no more than $1.16 a day. 

So that alarmed me, one, the fact that MCE had a monopoly because they were eliminating opportunities for other individuals to participate in the economy. And then two, they had an unfair advantage, because they were essentially paying wages that were far less and their overhead was so much cheaper because they were taking advantage of the status of people who are incarcerated.

Mansa Musa: Before becoming Maryland Correctional Enterprise, it was State Use Industries. But from your research, was Maryland Correctional Enterprise created as an institution by the private sector for the sole reason to have access to the label?

Antonio Hayes: The federal government at some point had made it against the law to transfer prison-made goods across state lines. This evolved as a result of the abolition of the 13th Amendment, which is the abolition of slavery and individual. Hence, they lost a workforce that they would’ve had. So there was a need to supplement that workforce, and the way they did that was through the loophole in the constitution that said that slavery was illegal except for those who were being incarcerated due to being convicted of a crime. But in Maryland and other states, I think they needed a way to create an artificial audience because they didn’t necessarily have an audience to make the purchases to make it sustainable. So what they did was they put this ‘preferred provider’ label on it through state procurement so they could create an audience and customer base to support the work that they were doing.

During my last visit, I met three individuals. If you combine their sentences, they had a hundred years. Some of them were life sentences, and some of them were never coming back to the community, ever. And I know to some degree, you need something for these individuals to do. But what I’m told anecdotally is the people who most likely will have these opportunities are people who have very long sentences. Because from a labor perspective, going back to the 13th Amendment, it’s more predictable that they will be around for a long time. As opposed to just the opposite, using this as a training opportunity, so when they reintegrate back into society, they will have a better chance of being successful and a productive member of society.

Mansa Musa, also known as Charles Hopkins, is a 70-year-old social activist and former Black Panther. He was released from prison on December 5, 2019, after serving 48 years, nine months, 5 days, 16 hours, 10 minutes. He co-hosts the TRNN original show Rattling the Bars.

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