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[ID] => 7316
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[post_date] => 2024-10-21 11:04:00
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Why you should pay attention to California's Proposition 6 this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.
When you’re incarcerated in California and the prison system says you have to work, you can’t say no. It’s the law.
Some prison jobs are basic, like cleaning the showers or the mess hall. Other assignments are more dangerous, such as in 2020, when women at a Chino prison in San Bernardino County said they spent as many as 12 hours a day during the COVID-19 outbreak stitching masks they were forbidden from wearing. Injuries are common, with everything from cuts and bruises and carpal tunnel syndrome all the way up to amputations of fingers and hands. Sometimes, the risks are even higher. When she was incarcerated, Leesa Nomura of Koreatown, Los Angeles, remembers other women crying in fear when ordered to join the prison crews fighting the state’s wildfires, a dangerous and occasionally deadly assignment with pay topping out at $10.24 a day. That’s on the high end. Some prison assignments pay as low as eight cents an hour.
“How do you want your neighbor to come home from prison? You want them to come home beaten down and broken by a system that doesn’t care about them?” asks Nomura, a membership organizer for the nonprofit California Coalition for Women Prisoners. “Something that is breaking down their bodies, that is breaking down their internal resolve over time? Involuntary servitude to a system that is totally, 100% benefiting off of them at cents on the dollar?”
The fundamental power of every worker against dangerous or unfair working conditions is the right and the ability to quit. But on the inside, work stoppages are “serious rule violations” on par with trying to escape. To advocates, that’s why prison work has a likeness to an older practice, especially given that a vastly disproportionate share of prisoners are Black.
“Slavery is slavery, whether you are on the plantation picking cotton, or doing work at the CCWF [Central California Women's Facility] or at San Quentin,” says Katie Dixon, Policy & Campaign Coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
On November 5, Golden State voters could complete the unfinished business of 1865, when states like California followed the lead of the U.S. government in banning chattel slavery but not forced prison work under the 13th Amendment after the Civil War. Approval of Proposition 6 would remove the “involuntary servitude” exemption in California’s state constitution and trigger a companion law, AB 628, that requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to develop a voluntary system where prison work can be rewarded, but not punished.
Currently, nearly 60,000 of the roughly 90,000 people incarcerated in California state prisons have work assignments, and “when assigning an individual to work, academic, therapeutic or other institutional programs, the individual’s expressed desires and needs are among the factors that are considered,” Terry Hardy, press secretary for the state prisons, said in an email, declining to comment on the ballot measure. But this doesn’t mean these considerations are without consequences: Saying no to work can mean punishments, such as less time out of your cell, and fewer privileges, including losing out on an early release.
Still, many people who are incarcerated want to work for reasons of their own, and some studies have suggested participation in the California Prison Industry Authority, which runs prison manufacturing and training programs, is associated with lower recidivism. “The alternative to not being out of your cell is being in your cell 24 hours a day,” Donald Hooker, who prefers to be called “C-Note,” says in a phone interview from the Los Angeles County state prison in Lancaster. “You’re in the cell, how far can my thoughts really go? My body, I’m freer. That’s the incentive. Not being cooped up in what is in essence 9 by 15 inches [feet] of cell space, and you’re sharing this with another person. That alone, being in that environment, is incentive enough for many people.”
But when he recently received an assignment for kitchen duty, he refused. “This is intense, intense manual labor, and I’m turning 59 in December,” C-Note says. “I would have been exhausting the remainder of my life force in the service of Gavin Newsom or whoever the governor is. And I can’t see the rest of my limited days on planet Earth exhausting my life force for the state.”
C-Note received corrective action but didn’t realize until later that the notation in his personnel file could have an even bigger impact. “If you have to go to the parole board, as I do, they’ll see that,” he says. “And those could make you stay in prison longer.”
Banning forced prison work altogether has also been a major objective of California’s advocates for reparations to Black Americans. While it would not make prison work illegal, including for pennies an hour, Proposition 6 would allow inmates the option to say no and to have a choice in participating in work.
“People talk about California being a free state [before the Civil War], but we had a law on the books: If someone had slaves when they moved to California, they could continue to own slaves,” says Assemblymember Lori D. Wilson, the Democratic chair of the legislature’s Black Caucus, who sponsored the legislation creating the ballot measure. “We, as Californians, have done historic harm.”
It’s a criminal justice issue where often-progressive California is a follower, not a leader. The state is one of 16 with an involuntary servitude provision on the books even as seven have issued repeals since 2018. An initial effort by California lawmakers stalled in 2022 after a provision to mandate minimum wage for prison work was estimated to cost $1.5 billion annually. The wage demand was dropped for the version on this November’s ballot, which has bipartisan support and little official opposition apart from a couple of newspaper editorials.
“Inmates should not be legally empowered to dictate what chores they’re willing to do while behind bars,” the Mercury News and East Bay Times wrote. “The fundamental question here is whether inmates should be required to provide work that contributes toward their room and board. We believe they should, just as the rest of us on the outside who have not committed crimes must also do.” (The cost of incarcerating each person in California is now $132,860, having skyrocketed in recent years.)
Voters are also skeptical. Fifty percent of likely voters said they oppose Proposition 6, while 46% said they would vote yes, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. Supporters chalk up some voters’ caution to the ballot measure’s adjacency to another, far more hotly contested criminal justice ballot measure, Proposition 36, which would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes.
“Our polling was very similar to PPIC’s,” says Esteban Núñez of the consulting firm Actum, one of the lead campaign consultants on the Anti-Recidivism Coalition’s ballot push. “We knew this from the gate, but nobody knows what the fuck ‘involuntary servitude’ was. It’s a legal term.”
Proposition 6 supporters are still optimistic they can pull out a victory on Nov. 5 by putting in campaign work in the coming weeks. And a win in the nation’s most populous state could add momentum to the national movement to repeal similar policies at the state and federal levels.
“It’s about making the case between now and then. People are getting their ballots,” says Wilson. “I just don’t want to wake up the day after election day and find out California voters said it was okay to have slavery on the books.”
[post_title] => California Voters Can End Forced Prison Labor
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to California's Proposition 6 this election.
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