The Brutal History of Prison Labor

Summary

Stuff You Should Know – "The Brutal History of Prison Labor"

Date: December 2, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Podcast: iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

In this sobering episode, Josh and Chuck dig deep into the history and present reality of prison labor in the United States. They explore the origins of forced prison labor, the systemic loopholes that enabled it, the racial and economic underpinnings from the 19th century to today, and the modern debates around fairness, reform, and ethics. With characteristic candor and dry humor, the hosts unpack how labor in prisons has remained disturbingly exploitative, often disguised as rehabilitation or punishment, while tapping into powerful quotes, revealing statistics, and historical anecdotes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of Prison Labor

• Early Motivations:
  • The concept that labor could serve as a humane alternative to harsher punishments (such as execution or corporal punishment) gained traction after Thomas More’s 16th-century work "Utopia".
  • Josh: “It turns out no Sumerians forward all the way into the Enlightenment period in Europe just killed people … Thomas Moore wrote a book called Utopia and said, there’s a better way people … What if we just put them to work?” (04:01)
• Aims of Prison Labor:
  • Deterrence from crime, rehabilitation of the person, and—most importantly—profit from free or cheap labor (05:24).

2. Colonial and Early American Context

• Transported Convicts:
  • 60,000 convicts were sent from Britain to America’s colonies before the Revolution, mostly for minor crimes.
  • Often, labor was in brutal conditions with sentences ranging from seven to fourteen years.
  • Indentured servitude was distinct from race-based slavery (07:29).

3. The Birth of the Penitentiary & Institutionalized Labor

• Penitentiaries, Not Just Jails:
  • Prisons as places of punishment (not just holding cells) emerged around the Revolution, with Quaker-inspired institutions meant for "redemptive suffering" (11:40).
• Rise of the Northern Model:
  • Auburn Prison in New York set the standard: businesses leased prisoners and buildings, effectively turning prisons into industrial plants (12:41).

4. The Post-Civil War South and the Loophole of the 13th Amendment

• 13th Amendment Loophole:

  • Officially abolished slavery, except as "punishment for crime". Southern states exploited this clause to maintain systems of forced Black labor (14:15).
  • Josh: “Not only was it okay, it’s enshrined in the Constitution that slave labor is legal in prisons.” (14:44)

• Black Codes and Convict Leasing:

  • Laws criminalized Black life and funneled newly freed people into forced prison labor, often leased back to plantations or corporations.
  • Alabama (by 1898, 73% of state revenue from convict leasing) and Louisiana were key offenders (18:35; 21:17).

5. The Chain Gang Era

• Public Penal Labor:
  • Prisoners, often chained together, performed hard manual labor such as road building in the South through the early 20th century.
  • “If you ran into … a chunk of Stone Mountain … you would just set a bunch of convicts to work on it with sledgehammers.” (31:49)
• Racial Dynamics:
  • The system was heavily racialized, with disproportionate targeting and abuse of Black prisoners.
  • The threat of chain gangs led Black workers to accept exploitative jobs as a lesser evil (33:07).
• Cultural Exposure:
  • Accounts and media such as "I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang" (1932) and reporting by figures like Bayard Rustin helped bring these abuses to the public eye (34:28–35:22).

6. Labor Reforms and Modernization

• New Deal Changes:
  • Labor unions and public outrage led to restrictions on private use of prison labor, but Unicor (Federal Prison Industries) was established to employ federal prisoners making products for government agencies (24:13).

7. Modern Mass Incarceration and Labor

• Incarceration Boom:
  • Between 1970–2008, the US population grew by 50% but its incarcerated population grew by 700% (40:16).
  • US has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates—Louisiana leads states with 1,000 per 100,000 people; Black Americans imprisoned at 900 per 100,000 (41:02).
  • This massive boom is due to policies like Nixon’s "war on drugs" and "tough on crime" rhetoric, not increased violent crime (42:41).
• Present-Day Labor:
  • ~800,000 incarcerated people do some form of labor; most work for prison operations, others for state or private industry; only 2% work for Unicor (43:04).
  • Dangerous jobs sometimes yield higher pay (CA wildfire fighters: $2–$5 per day plus $1/hr while fighting fires) (45:09).
  • Private industry and supply chain use persists, often under the radar, despite stated company policies (46:12).

8. Compensation, Rights, and Exploitation

• Low or No Pay:
  • No federal law requires pay for prison labor; state rates average 52¢ an hour—often less (47:20).
  • Even when earning more, prisons often deduct for room, board, or restitution, so actual take-home is minuscule (48:33).
• No Legal Protections:
  • Prison workers are not covered by OSHA or Fair Labor Standards, as courts consistently find they’re not “employees” (50:23).
  • US is among a handful of countries (with China, Russia, etc.) not signed onto the Forced Labor Convention of 1930, due to its reliance on subcontracting prisoner labor to private industry (51:58).
• Punishments for Noncompliance:
  • Prisoners refusing to work can lose family visits, be transferred to higher security, or face other punishments (52:01).
• Calls for Reform:
  • Most reformers seek: voluntary labor, market wages, useful skills, and employee protections—mirroring European models (51:58).

9. Economic Implications and Final Thoughts

• Economic Rationale for Reform:
  • Prison labor saves the system ~$15 billion/year and produces $2 billion in goods/services.
  • Paying market wages could reduce family burden, improve post-release earnings, and, according to studies, return $2.40–$3.16 to society for every $1 paid in wages (54:22).
• Ongoing Problems:
  • Reports indicate some prisoners must scavenge guards’ leftover food to avoid hunger (49:36).
  • Wages earned in prison don’t apply toward Social Security or Medicare (58:32).
• Josh: “Private prisons are able to … deduct way more. But the other problem with it too is that they’re at the same time getting tax breaks for leasing out their convicts … it’s quite a racket from what I can tell.” (48:59)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the 13th Amendment’s Loophole:
  “That tiny provision … said that if you’re a convicted prisoner, you can be punished with slave labor. That’s OK. And not only was it OK, it’s enshrined in the Constitution …”
  — Josh (14:44)

• On Exploitation’s Evolution:
  "Supposedly in the 1930s, thanks to the New Deal, America became enlightened enough that we moved on past convict leasing. ... Prison labor, working for the prison or working for the state, that was still a-OK."
  — Josh (23:22)

• On Rehabilitation versus Reality:
  “There is redemption in labor. So we’re not saying do away with it, but it needs a lot of reforms … It should be the kind of labor that’s going to help them get jobs on the outside where they learn valuable skills. They should be paid fairly … and they should get protections that any worker gets in the United States.”
  — Josh (49:36)

• On Present-Day Challenges:
  “There's no federal law that says that someone has to be paid for work if they're a prisoner … I think the average pay for a prisoner in the US is 52 cents an hour.”
  — Chuck (47:20)

• On Racial Inequity:
  “Louisiana leads the way at 1,000 per 100,000. And the rate for Black Americans is 900 per 100,000.”
  — Chuck (41:06)

• Economic case for change:
  “Every dollar spent on prisoners wages would add up to a society-wide return of $2.40 to $3.16.”
  — Chuck (54:22)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Prison labor origins, Thomas More/Utopia – 04:05
• Indentured servitude in the colonies – 07:29
• Penitentiaries and Auburn Model – 11:47, 12:41
• 13th Amendment loophole & Black Codes – 14:15–16:10
• Convict leasing’s peak in Alabama – 18:35
• Conditions in chain gangs, cultural impact – 29:23, 33:07, 34:28
• Unicor and modern prison industries – 24:13
• Mass incarceration era statistics – 40:16
• Modern prison work & pay rates – 43:04–47:20
• Lack of labor protections – 50:23
• International comparisons and UN treaties – 51:58
• State constitutional bans and legal loopholes – 52:01
• ROI for paying prisoners fair wages – 54:22
• Prison labor and Social Security – 58:32

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Conclusion

Josh and Chuck’s deep dive traces a continuum: from colonial exploitation and race-based legal manipulations, to modern mass incarceration and concealed forms of labor exploitation, often justified in the names of rehabilitation or economic efficiency. They highlight the ongoing debates around reform, the need for dignity and protections for incarcerated workers, and the persistent financial motives and racial injustices underpinning US prison labor.

For further listening:

• Black Codes episode (Jan 2022)
• 13th Amendment discussion
• Previous episodes on mass incarceration and private prisons

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This summary brings you the crux of a thought-provoking SYSK episode: an unsettling look at how profit, punishment, and power have intertwined—past and present—in the world of prison labor in America.

Transcript

[Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

Guaranteed Human living with an autoimmune condition isn't easy, and every journey is different. That's why Season five of Untold Life with the Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenics shares powerful firsthand stories from people with conditions like MG and cidp. Hosted by Martine Hackett, these conversations dive into what resilience really looks like through setbacks, breakthroughs, and finding strength in community. Listen on the iHeartRadio app for Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Thanks Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Seecapitalone.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC.

[Chuck Bryant]

Our listeners love puzzles, paradoxes and hidden patterns almost as much as we do. On TikTok. Those fascinations come to life. People are breaking down physics, exploring geology, and explaining why the world works the way it does. You'll see impressive experiments, explanations that finally make sense, and connections you didn't expect. It's like having a lab, a lecture hall and science museum in your pocket. TikTok is where wonder is shared, where curiosity turns into discovery, and where millions learn something new every day. Hey everybody. We are partnering up with the Cooperative for Education once again to help raise money for their Rise Youth Development program, which sends students to school in Guatemala and they break the cycle of poverty through education.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, kids who otherwise would not have gotten an education get a world class. One thanks to Co Ed thanks to your donations and so far in our history with Co ed, which dates back all the way to 2009, Stuff youf Should Know listeners have given $1.4 million in donations and helped 172 different Rise students who are sponsored directly by Stuff youf Should Know fans. So we're asking you guys to do it again. And if you go to cooperativeforeducation.org and give today as little as $20 to support a Rise student, you will be entered into a raffle to be picked to hang out with us virtually in January.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right, set up a recurring gift of $20 a month by December 19th and you can win that raffle and hang out with us in a zoom call. It's a lot of fun. We do it every year and It's a great organization to support.

[Josh Clark]

So go to cooperativeforeducation.org sysk and you'll get all the info you need. And thank you.

[Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartrad.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And it's just us. Jerry's on leave right now. She's having a little R and R. Living it up in the South Seas. Falling in love, spending a lot of time on the beach, writing people's names in the sand for money.

[Guest/Other]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

I. I assume that's what she's doing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

She might also just be in New York. It's one of the two, Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, she could ride on a beach there. Jones Beach.

[Josh Clark]

I guess so. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Coney Island.

[Josh Clark]

I guess we should stop all the joking around, the horsing around, Chuck. Cause this is a very serious episode. So let's just end that now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, what better to chat about over what's probably gonna end up being the holiday season when this is released than hard labor at prisons in that history?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because, I mean, if you think about prison labor, it's bad enough as it is, but when you really start to get into the nuts and bolts of it and all the loopholes that are abused and all of the ways that prisoners are actually treated in exchange for the labor, it's. It's even worse than you would think, it turns out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That's the good news, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and we'll get into the bad news for sure. But the thing that I was a little surprised about from the outside is that I would have thought that this was ancient, like the Sumerians doing stuff like this. And it turns out no Sumerians forward all the way into the Enlightenment period in Europe just killed people. They hung you or they cut your hand off, or they put you in the stocks. Maybe the stocks were a non lethal form of punishment. Um, and you would be ridiculed by your neighbors. And then a guy named Thomas Moore wrote a book called Utopia. And he said, there's a better way people. There's an alternative to just killing people or cutting off their hands. What if we just put them to work? There's all sorts of benefits and upsides to this. And they said, well, what are they? Thomas More? He said, let me tell you, I'm glad you asked.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He basically, I mean, and we'll see this over and over again. The point has sort of always been one, it can. Or really threefold. One, it can deter People from committing crime. If they see somebody manual laboring for probably no money or very little money these days. The second is it can help rehabilitate that person and make them think about what they've done. Basically.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then the most obvious one is we can get them to do stuff for us for nothing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like, we can really use that labor. Especially if you put a bunch of people together and make them work for free. You can get a lot of stuff done. And that is a fairly new form of punishment. It wasn't like, immediately adopted after Thomas More wrote Utopia. He wrote it in the 16th century. Even into the American revolution and beyond, there was not, like a lot of government enforced punishment using prison labor. They were still crazy for the stocks. But there were things regarding the colonies that did have to do with punishment that did result in your labor. And that would be if you got into trouble, say in England, you would be sentenced to transportation, either Australia or the United States, maybe even Canada, if you were lucky. And I think 60,000 people before the American Revolution, while America was British colonies or were British colonies, were sentenced to transportation and showed up there and said, okay, what do you want me to do? I'm here to work.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, I doubt if they said that. They were probably more told that. But they were known as the king's passengers. And they, you know, the colonies, you know, the people in the colonies, they weren't that wild about this. They were worried about, you know, sending convicted criminals here, obviously, but most of these criminals were, you know, maybe not petty crimes, but pretty minor crimes, maybe theft, maybe vagrancy, you know, depending on what the laws were. In whatever weird English village you lived, you might have committed a crime against one of those. But they weren't sending over generally to the colonies. That is like the worst of the worst.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

If you were a plantation owner or if you were an employer that maybe was near a prison, you were pretty psyched because that was very cheap, meaning usually free labor compared to what it cost to trade in the enslaved African market.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And we should say this early indentured servitude is what they called, was aimed at white people exclusively in the colonies and then later on the early United States. Because if the government intervened in a plantation owner, enslaved person's dynamic, then, and they removed the enslaved person and put them in jail, the poor white plantation owner was the one suffering there. He lost a laborer. So it was left entirely to the plantation owners to basically keep their slaves, punish their slaves, essentially. And if you've ever have you ever seen 12 Years a Slave yet?

[Guest/Other]

12.

[Chuck Bryant]

I still shamefully cannot bring myself to see that movie.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, I get it. I totally understand your reticence, but it's the way that plantation owners punished slaves is depicted throughout in really brutal, honest fashion. And it really drives home what it was like. But you were left up to the guy that owned you legally doling out punishment based on his whim. Essentially the state would not intervene. It was just strictly up to white people. Or it was just strictly directed at white people at first.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know what? That's the kind of movie that you gotta watch that when it comes out and when it's in the zeitgeist, because that's never the movie when you're like, what do I wanna watch tonight? It's a gloomy sighted several years later, it's just not gonna happen. So I need to just, you know, it's like a history lesson. So I need to watch it. And I've heard it's good, like in an upsetting way, but like a well made film.

[Josh Clark]

Oh yeah, Defin, everybody does an amazing job in it. Look at it like a classic novel that you just have to read before you die because I think that'd be a good approach to it.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know what, when I start Moby Dick Finally I'll watch 12 Years a Slave and I'll just do both at the same time.

[Josh Clark]

I remember we talked about reading Moby Dick and a couple of people wrote in and they're like, Josh, do not waste your time. It is not worth reading. And I'm just going to go with their interpretation.

[Guest/Other]

Oh wow.

[Josh Clark]

I like Bartleby the Scrivener, but I'm not sure I could take hundreds and hundreds of pages of that writing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, you know, our mutual friend and friend of the show, Joey Ciara is going to be very upset to hear that.

[Josh Clark]

I'm sorry, Joey.

[Chuck Bryant]

So as far as these laborers, 90% of the ones that were. Of those 60,000 that were sent to the States, which is, I'm surprised it was, you know, 90%, they ended up kind of in two places, Maryland, Virginia, probably working in industry, like the Industrial revolution type stuff, or on the farms, like tobacco farming, obviously in Virginia. And it was terrible work. It was really brutal. You're talking maybe seven to 14 years is your sentence. After your sentence, maybe you go back to England, maybe you have a shot at a free life in the new colonies. But just like getting out of prison these days, it's not an easy transition to make.

[Josh Clark]

Right. The ones that went back to England were like, I really miss the tasteless cuisine of home.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Back then, maybe. Sure. It's come a long way.

[Josh Clark]

So one of the. It has, for sure. One of the other things that had to evolve for prison labor to become an actual thing in the United States was prisons themselves. Like, at the same time, when they were still crazy about the stocks and indentured servitude. Like, you had jails, you didn't have prisons. And a jail was just basically where they kept you while you were awaiting trial or sentencing or something like that, and then you left the jail. The idea of going to a place to be held as a punishment in and of itself, that is prisons, that came later on, after the American Revolution. I think it was the Quakers that came up with the idea of the penitentiary, which is meant to give you quiet time to reflect on what terrible things you'd done and hopefully find God and come out of it a better person. And, of course, that's not how it. How it worked out. But very quickly after penitentiaries became a thing, prison labor became a thing in really short order, actually. Like decades, maybe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I never thought about the root word penitent for penitentiaries. It was sort of one of those things where I was today years old, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But I mean, like, you. Yeah. It's just so easy to look right past it. It's its own thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. But, yeah, redemptive suffering is what they called it. And that was a big part of being in prison and committing. Well, not committing to hard labor, like being committed to hard labor. Auburn Prison in New York was one of the sort of leading examples that set the way forward for what was to become the norm, where private businesses would lease prison buildings along with the prisoners and say, hey, we're just gonna. You've got this big building over here. You got lots of free labor. I'm gonna bring my machinery into here. And all of a sudden, the prison is part prison and part, you know, industrial plant for whatever company worked out, whatever deal. And that provided a real model moving forward, I think. Auburn. The prisoners of Auburn ended up building Sing Sing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. They use them for that as well. And that. I think Sing sing opened in 1828. So this is going on, like, if prisons became a thing around the time of the American Revolution. Like this, this. Like I said, my point is proven. This transition happened quickly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So by the time the Civil War came around like this. It's called the Northern Model, or The Auburn prison model where you can rent a building, rent the inmates and then set up shop. There's. That's what prison labor looked like. Or else you were working for the prison, like say building other prisons. That's what the north was doing in the South. They were still quite hung up on the idea of chattel slavery and owning a person and making them work until they died, essentially. That was something that was really ingrained in the culture and was not an easy thing to give up despite having lost the Civil war and the 13th amendment being passed. And I know you've seen 13th, the Ava DuVernay documentary.

[Chuck Bryant]

I have seen that.

[Josh Clark]

That's a great one too. That's one of those like life changing, perspective changing, eye opening type documentaries.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And even if I hadn't seen it, I would lie to your face right now and all of our listeners because there's no way you're going to double shame me.

[Josh Clark]

Well, how about this? If you.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I did see it.

[Josh Clark]

If you. Well, if you are lying right now and you go look for it, do not be confused by the documentary 13th that came out in 2025.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It's about the high pressure student exams in India.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure that's upsetting too.

[Josh Clark]

I'm sure. But the 13th Amendment is kind of what we're talking about here. And that not only abolished slavery, it abolished involuntary servitude of all kinds except one tiny provision, one little loophole that said that if you're a convicted prisoner, you can be punished with slave labor. That's okay. And not only was it okay, it's enshrined in the Constitution that slave labor is legal in prisons.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know, it's one of those things where it's hard to go back and imagine what the original framers intended. But I think most people agree that they didn't intend to just have, you know, enslavement and another name. Basically.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Whereas that's basically what happened for a long, long time. You know, through that, through the loophole. And you know, you mentioned loopholes at the beginning. There's been a lot of loopholes over the year. And anytime there's a loophole, somebody's going to exploit it, like for greedy purposes.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Free labor. I saw that the reason that they included it in that amendment was because it was just such a no brainer that you would want the ability to, to care, to perform hard labor rather than just being punished in other ways. That it was just an accepted thing that. Yeah. The Loophole wasn't meant to be there, but in the south, almost immediately they put that to use. We did an episode on the black codes back in January of 2022.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Another very eye opening topic. And those only lasted like a year or two. And it was basically they criminalized being a free black person in the South.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And so they could pick you up and they could arrest you with something if you couldn't prove on the spot that say you had a job and you'd be arrested for vagrancy, you'd be taken to jail, and then you could be leased out as a slave to a local plantation owner doing the work you were doing before you were freed by the 13th Amendment legally because of that loophole in the 13th Amendment.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Maybe to the same plantation where you were previously held.

[Josh Clark]

Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. A lot of times that's a great episode. People should go back and listen to that too. Decreed that, you know, the black coats went away with the Civil Rights act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment, which is ratified in 1868, made equal rights and protections, you know, the law everywhere, basically. But you know, there were still ways to make things happen, especially in the south and especially, as it turns out, shamefully in Georgia. Georgia kind of led the way in 1868. There was a provisional governor named Thomas Ruger, and he leased. Like this is when the kind of the, the big sort of prisoner trade started where they were leasing prisoners to different states kind of back and forth like, hey, you gotta, you've got a farm in your state that needs like a crop tended to. Well, let me lease you some prisoners from our state. And Georgia led the way early on with 100 black prisoners being leased to William Fort of the Georgia and Alabama Railroad for 2,500 bucks. So 25, that's $25 a prisoner. Right. But here's the thing. It's like, hey, you're paying us to lease these prisoners to you. So now not only are we getting money for that, but now they're your responsibility. But your responsibility didn't really mean anything. Like 16 of those prisoners died in the first year. And as you'll see a story that is going to be repeated over and over, that was one of the biggest problems with all of this is like basic medical care was not provided and decent food and certainly like, you know, if somebody was, was sick, they would just let them die, basically.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that, that still happens today. I mean, not quite to that dramatic a degree, but when people die in custody, in prison, there's Not a lot that the prison's held accountable for. So that's, that's essentially a long standing thing in the United States. People like prisoners dying even though they're, they haven't been sentenced to death. So I think you said that Georgia was making some pretty good money off of this starting in the 1860s. I read this started to like other states were like, oh, that's a really good idea. By 1898, convict leasing made up 73% of Alabama's state revenue.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which is really saying something.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a staggering stat.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And then when reconstruction ended, the federal government just basically said, hey, we really just want to be on good terms with the southern elite again, so we're just going to leave you on your own and withdrew from the South. Black people were in really terrible positions, really vulnerable positions. And at that time, prison labor stepped up, incarceration stepped up. But prison labor also did it as well. And it was nothing compared to what you would, the work you would be put to in the North. It was essentially slavery all over again. But again, this time the union wasn't going to come down and push anybody around at the end of a bayonet because this was all agreed upon in the 13th Amendment.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, like up north, if you were working prison labor, you might work an eight or nine hour day. In the south, it was routinely 12 to 16 hours or just however long they felt like you needed to work to get whatever job done. There's anecdotal evidence at least like during the cotton harvest, like before the cotton harvest, that the plantation owners would call up the sheriff and say, hey, why don't you make some more arrests? We need some guys. And you know, a lot of these pretextual arrests were happening where it was just like, you know, they would just cook something up and arrest you. And you have basically no rights and no representation. So it's just a way to stock the, the industry or the farm or the field with workers.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So that was like plantation owners, local plantation owners. Like you said, you could have been a former slave who was arrested for something as stupid as mischief and put back to work on that same plantation essentially as a slave. They would also, like corporations got in on this as well. Like you said, the railroad. There was a company in Alabama called the Schloss Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in Jefferson County, Alabama. That's where their mines were. They had a 10% death rate from the leased convict labor that they got from the state. And there was a sugar company, the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugarland, Tennessee. Which I guess is an appropriate place for it to be.

[Chuck Bryant]

Where else?

[Josh Clark]

A lot of people died when Texas leased them. Every single state prisoner it had in 1878 to help in the sugar fields. People were dying of things like malaria, like you said. They weren't given any kind of medical care at all. They were fed just the minimum amount to keep them alive and have energy enough to work. And this is just par for the course in the South.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, I was bagging on Georgia. Cause that's our home state or my home home state. But Louisiana has kind of from the beginning been certainly one of the worst offenders. In the 1870s and 80s, they built the New Orleans Pacific Railway with prison labor. About 140 people died. And when you look at some of the incarceration rates and especially incarceration rates for black males in the United States today, Louisiana leads the way. And also with some of the worst working conditions for forced labor.

[Josh Clark]

That's another thing too, that you mentioned. Like they built the railroad or say they mined something that was turned into a product that people use. They don't think about. I'm sure they didn't think like, oh, this railroad's really nice. The prisoners who built it really did a good job that actually still carries on today. Like, a lot of people don't realize that the stuff they're buying from a big box retailer was made somewhere down the line by a convict who was essentially leased out to that company to make those products. It still goes on today.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, the chicken on your plate in your house might have come from a chicken farm that had. And you know, these are people that are sort of the work release programs we're going to talk about later, where they leave the prison to go work for like a private industry. And a lot of times it might be like a chicken farm or they may work at a D and B call center or something like that. So yeah, the person you talk to on the phone might be, you know, incarcerated.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which is quite surprising. But Chuck, don't call it convict leasing. Even though essentially it's so much the same thing that basically just the people's clothes changed. That's what's going on today still. Supposedly in the 1930s, thanks to the New Deal, America became enlightened enough that we moved on past convict leasing. We didn't do that kind of stuff anymore. Not at least a private industry. Prison labor, working for the prison or working for the state. That was still a. Okay, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, that was, you know, sort of 50 years before that is when wage workers started complaining. Like prisoners obviously were complaining. Families might be complaining, but they're not going to get very far. But once wage workers got unions involved and they're like, hey, these, you know, we want these jobs, we want to make a little bit of money ourselves. And that's when it finally started to change a little bit. And I think eventually that led to that new deal era law prohibiting interstate trade and prison made products. But in 1934, the federal prison industries was created. It's now known as Unicor. And that is still a big program. It employs people that are incarcerated in our federal system. Not state prisons again, and obviously not private prisons. Are any federal prisons private or is that just state?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know we never did one on the private prison industry, did we?

[Josh Clark]

No, and we really should.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's on the list.

[Josh Clark]

They do this too and they like the idea of them leasing out convicts for a for profit prison is just mind boggling.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. But yeah, with Unicor they're making things for the federal government like a lot of times, you know, military fatigues or furniture, stuff like that, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. And if you are a government agency, you have to go to Unicor first to see if they have what you want. Then you order for them then. And so even still today, like companies complain like these guys, it's unfair competition. You know, they have like unpaid labor making these products so they can sell it for whatever. And the feds are basically like, we can't hear you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take a break?

[Josh Clark]

I think so, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, since the feds can't hear us.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, right.

[Chuck Bryant]

We might as well.

[Josh Clark]

We might as well.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back with more on prison labor. Support for the show Today comes from public.com. you're thoughtful about where your money goes. You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is you're engaged with your investments and public gets that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi asset portfolio for the long haul. Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus an industry leading 3.6% APY high yield cash account.

[Chuck Bryant]

Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.comsysk and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.comsysk paid for by Public Investing.

[Guest/Other]

All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for U.S. listed registered securities options and bonds in a self directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures.

[Announcer]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Yeah. With USA Made Kids specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed. It's why Guardian is America's favorite kids bike and the New York Times and Wirecutter's top pick three years in a row.

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Okay, so when we left off like convict leasing was dead in the north thanks to labor unions. The south has long been considered kind of anti worker. So labor unions never really got a foothold here. So it took a little longer for convict leasing to go away. But again, that doesn't mean that there was no such thing as prison labor. They just kind of directed them to state owned stuff. A really good example of this is a parchment farm in Mississippi, part of Parchman State penitentiary. It's a 20,000 acre farm where in the early 19 teens with a 90% black prison population, prisoners were put to work on this farm. And one of the reasons that got so famous very quickly, in addition to just the scope of what was going on was they used a trustee system. They spelled it trustee, as in T R U S T Y. Where some of the worst, most violent convicted felons that were prisoners there were given rifles and said, you guys make sure this other 80% of your fellow prisoners do the work the way we want them to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a really interesting system.

[Josh Clark]

It really is. It seems risky, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I wanted to look more. I'm going to look more into that just for my own edification, but because I'm curious that that dynamic is. I don't know, it seems like a. Would create a really dodgy dynamic.

[Josh Clark]

It would, but it also reminded me of what is the Quentin Tarantino antebellum slavery movie, Django Unchained.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, Django.

[Josh Clark]

Remember, he posed as a black slaver. That's kind of how I took it to kind of be like, yeah, I.

[Chuck Bryant]

Think you're probably right. Chain gangs is something that you've seen in movies and stuff. Like I was watching oh Brother, Where Art Thou Again the other night.

[Josh Clark]

I forgot to have that in there.

[Chuck Bryant]

And there was, you know, chain gang scenes in that. And that was another type of sort of very public penal labor because they were put in place to build roads in the south in the 1920s. You know, hard laboring all day again in the south, out in the hot sun on that blacktop, 10 to 15 hours a day. But they were chained together. That's why they were called chain gangs. They were chained to their ankle. They stayed chained when they walked to the job. They stayed chained as they slept in their bunks that were close to one another. And again, the conditions were abysmal. Terrible food. They were beaten, they were tortured. I think there was this one investigation. This wasn't a chain gang, but this is Tucker Farm in Arkansas where they found that the staff stripped prisoners naked at the prison hospital and put electric shocks to their testicles and penis. Women prisoners were also subjected to work in the fields. Not as much as men. They were, you know, the main labor force. But, you know, women were put to work as well.

[Josh Clark]

Have you ever read beloved Toni Morrison novel?

[Chuck Bryant]

I feel like I have to say yes.

[Josh Clark]

You should read that too, if you have.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I haven't read that.

[Josh Clark]

It's very good. But there's a. It's. It's mind bogglingly good, actually. But it's. There's a. The. A few scenes about the chain gang and just what it would have been like One of the main characters spent time on a chain gang. And I mean, this is the way you said it was brutal work. And they were building roads. Like a good example of what chain gangs did. If you were building a road, you were using, like, human labor to build roads. This is before they had machinery.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Like road building machinery. It just didn't exist. So you used human beings to do this stuff. If you ran into, say, in Georgia and you're building a state road, if you ran into a chunk of Stone Mountain that was popping up out of the ground where you wanted your road to go, well, you would just set a bunch of convicts to work on it with sledgehammers, and eventually they're going to wear it down to nothing if you give them long enough and work them hard enough. That's what people did on chain gangs. That's just what life was like. And again, you were working outside, so you weren't protected in any way, shape, or form. You were fed meagerly like you were working as hard as anyone's ever worked in their life with, like, the minimum amount of nutrition, the minimum amount of rest. And if you put all that together, especially if you think about it accumulating, it's a brutal, brutal form of prison labor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And, I mean, and it was a racist framework. I know we're talking a lot about the racism involved. There were white labor camps and stuff like that, of course, too. You know, sometimes they look like Paul Newman even.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But it was very much a racist framework wherein the threat of violence, the threat of torture, they felt was like a necessary component to, you know, quote, unquote, keeping guys in line.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. One of the other things, too, is there was a certain amount of usefulness to letting these chain gangs get these horrible reputations, because the reach of these things reached out beyond the inside of prisons into the outside world. Because if you were black and you were looking for a job and you could be arrested for not having a job and put onto a chain gang, and you knew it, you would accept all sorts of terrible working conditions in low pay because at least that was better than being put on a chain gang, which, if you didn't accept this job and got caught without a job, you would end up on a chain gang anyway. That was another really kind of insidious effect that they had.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But, you know, it's not like this kind of thing was being. You know, there were no exposes being written in newspapers about chain gangs. You might drive by one, and that's how you knew they existed. But little by little, what went on with these chain gangs started to kind of leak out, especially all over the South. There are a couple of famous examples. In 1932 there was a white northern veteran who is a convict obviously named Robert Burns. He published a book called I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, exclamation point. That's why I read it that way. That kind of got the word out a little bit. There was a movie adaptation.

[Josh Clark]

Have you seen that?

[Chuck Bryant]

I haven't seen it. Have you?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's really? Yeah. For some reason I don't know where you meet found out about it, but she is one of her well liked movies. I want to say it's one of her favorite, but she showed it to me and it is.

[Chuck Bryant]

What year was that?

[Josh Clark]

The. The movie? Yeah, I thought you were asking when I saw it. 1932, I believe, or 1935, something like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't watch a lot of movies from that era, but Chuck, you should.

[Josh Clark]

This one, it has 8.2 on IMDb and that's a pretty, pretty high rating. It's really good. It's a good movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, in 1947, some more news leaked out when a black civil rights activist named Bayard Rustin, and I know we've talked about Bayard Rustin before, he was on a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for civil disobedience. And a series of articles that he wrote came out in the New York Post.

[Josh Clark]

Did you read those?

[Chuck Bryant]

Huh? I read like, you know, snippets from it just to sort of get an idea.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I was just kidding.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know, I looked into some of it, but I didn't like sit around and read them.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I got you. Yeah, no, I was trying to get you again.

[Chuck Bryant]

But the 50s and 60s, because of the New York Post and because of that movie that Yumi loves came out. 50s and 60s is kind of when chain gangs basically went away. Although, you know, if you lived in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 90s, you know, they tried pretty hard. What was that guy's name, the sheriff there?

[Josh Clark]

Joe Arpaio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but he made big news a lot. And he was one of the guys trying to push for the reinstatement of the chain gangs.

[Josh Clark]

Did not happen though, because again, America lost its taste for chain gangs in the first half of the 20th century. And the idea of bringing them back was not something that you would want to do. Um, even beyond that not bringing back the chain gangs. Prison labor got to be more and more or I should say less and less brutal. How about that? Because I, I. The other way I could have put it is more and more or less brutal and that just doesn't make sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, we took a late break so it wasn't too long ago, but I feel like we should go ahead and get our second one under our belt.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back and talk about the modern era of mass incarceration. Support for the show today comes from public.com you're thoughtful about where your money goes. You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is you're engaged with your investments and Public gets that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi asset portfolio for the long haul. Stocks, bonds, options, crypto. It's all there. Plus an industry leading 3.6% APY high yield cash account.

[Chuck Bryant]

Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.comsysk and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.comsysk paid for by Public Investing.

[Guest/Other]

All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for U.S. listed registered securities options and bonds in a self directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash. Complete disclosures [e-mail] disclosures.

[Announcer]

Protect your pet with insurance from Pets Best plans start from less than a dollar a day. Visit petsbest.com Pet insurance products offered and administered by Petsbe PetsBest Insurance Services LLC are underwritten by American Pet Insurance Co. Or Independence American Insurance Co. For terms and conditions, visit www.petsbest.com Policy products are underwritten by American Pet Insurance Company, Independence American Insurance Co. Or Ms. Transverse Insurance Co. And administered by Pets Best Insurance Services LLC. $1.00 a day premium based on 2024 average new policyholder data for accident and illness plans. Pets age 0 to 10.

[Chuck Bryant]

Attention parents and grandparents. If you're looking for a gift that's more than just a toy, give them something that inspires confidence and adventure all year long. Give them a Guardian Bike, the easiest, safest and number one kids bike on the market.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. With USA Made Kids specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed. It's why Guardian is America's favorite kids Bike and the New York Times and Wirecutters top pick three years in a row.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. My daughter has a Guardian bike and she loves it. And that thing was really easy to put together. And get this. This holiday season, Guardian is offering their biggest deal of the year. Over 40% in savings on all bikes, plus $100 in free accessories. Guardian bikes have become one of the most sought after gifts of the season. And inventory is going fast. So don't wait. Join over a half a million families who discovered the magic of guardian. Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now. All right, we've covered mass incarceration quite a bit, certainly in our prisons episode. But here's a stat for you. Over a 36 year period from 1970 to 2008, the population of the United States rose by about 50% and the population of incarcerated prisoners rose by 700%.

[Josh Clark]

That's crazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we entered the mass incarceration era big time over about a 36 year period. Thanks to. Well, thanks to a lot, but namely thanks to Nixon, Reagan and Bill Clinton.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Nixon's war on drugs, Reagan's tough on crime thing. Clinton trying to wrestle the tough on crime, I guess moniker away from the gop. And I guess it was part of the Democrats platform every year until 2008 and when it was quietly removed. And not coincidentally, 2008 is the year that the peak incarceration happened, like you said.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, now we're about. That went from 1.6 in 2008 to about 1.3 million incarcerated individuals in the United States now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, because America's become softer and gentler.

[Chuck Bryant]

About 600 of every 100,000 people in the US are incarcerated. That is a higher rate than any other country in the world except Cuba, Rwanda and El Salvador. And Louisiana once again leads the way at 1,000 per 100,000. And the rate for black Americans is 900 per 100,000.

[Josh Clark]

Can I talk about El Salvador for a second? Because I looked into their incredibly high incarceration rates.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. Do they do prison labor?

[Josh Clark]

I didn't check that out, but I got this other stuff about it. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So they have essentially established an authoritarian crackdown on gangs. And in 2015, their murder rate was 103 people per 100,000 population, which means every year more than 1% of their population was murdered. So they cracked down on gangs and just started throwing everybody in jail. And between 2015 and 2022, their murder rate went from 103 per 100,000 to 7.8 per 100,000, which you're like, okay, that's actually, I mean, authoritarian crackdowns on gangs and prisons is not very tasteful. But at least they got results. Here in the United States, we don't have the same excuse for that level of rise in incarceration. Our homicide rate in 1955 was 4.5. In 2024 it was like 5. It's remained relatively flat, give or take a few. A few points, like here or there over the years. So there's no reason why our prison population should have increased 700%. It just. There's no reason for it. Yeah, unless you expand crimes, especially nonviolent crimes like drug possession and really throw the book at people, which is what happened during that time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, exactly. As far as prison labor goes, most of the people in state and federal prison these days do some kind of prison labor. I think out of the 1.3 million ish, that's about 800,000 as of a few years ago. The ones who don't are probably either too old or have some sort of disability or health problem that won't allow them to. About 80% of those workers are working for the prison. So, you know, when you work in the cafeteria or you work in the laundry or something like that, that's about 80% of it. And most of the rest are kind of what we were talking about earlier, government run operations. Maybe you do laundry for a public hospital, maybe work in that DMV call center. About 2% of total prison workers in the federal prison system work for Unicor still. And I was curious about the whole license plate thing, you know, the sort of trope. But most of that doesn't happen at prisons anymore because it's just cheaper to have robot machinery do that kind of thing. But it's still a thing in some states and I know Utah is one of them. It's called the UCI operation. And they call themselves plate busters. And they make them all, even the specialty like ski Utah plates and the Olympic plates and stuff like that. They're making them all still.

[Josh Clark]

I saw that there's like a long standing, kind of jokey observation that prisoners in New Hampshire make their license plate and on the license plate it says live free or die.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And that's actually true. And they still do today at the state prison in Concord. The prisoners in New Hampshire make those license plates.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I imagine making those and making ski Utah plates or, I don't know, adds a little salt to the situation.

[Josh Clark]

You know, for sure, I like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Saying, a little salt to the situation.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I didn't want to say wound.

[Chuck Bryant]

No one likes that word.

[Josh Clark]

No, it's not a very pleasant word.

[Chuck Bryant]

Some of these prisoners do dangerous work too though, you know, it's not all just like sort of hourly easy stuff.

[Josh Clark]

No, no, I mean like again, you're, you're engaged in forced unpaid labor, so you go where they tell you to go. I know in California you might end up fighting wildfires and this is one of the highest paying jobs, as we'll see. It's you get two to five dollars a day plus one dollar an hour. When you're actively fighting wildfires in California, that's something they can make you do if you're a prisoner.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Saving the houses of the wealthy. Yeah, but not always wealthy, to be fair.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, no, but there are a lot of wealthy people in California, to be sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Not only firefighting, disaster recovery, sometimes lead paint removal. I think there's around 5% of the incarcerated workforce, which is about 40,000 people work for private industry still. And that a lot of times is like the work camp that I was talking about. So they may work at a fast food restaurant or may be like a work on the custodial staff at a well known hotel chain.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And a lot of these bigger businesses have policies where they don't use leased convict labor like this, but they also sometimes can't do a thing about it. Like if their supplier part of the supply chain is that like companies don't know who's painting the patio furniture that they're selling. Like they just don't know and that the company painting the furniture might be using lease convict labor or their franchisees can use lease convict labor and the corporate office can't do anything about it because they don't own those stores. So it still does happen, even though large corporations in the US tend to have policies against that and in fact have policies that they put in place to hire felons, like preferential hiring of felons. Still, it washes out to where there's plenty of least convict labor today in private businesses.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know, we've talked about money a little bit here and there, like, you know, no pay. And you know, sometimes there is pay, sometimes there isn't. There's no federal law that says that someone has to be paid for work if they're a prisoner.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

On the state level. It depends on the state. But you know, a lot of them pay nothing at all. I think the average pay for a prisoner in the US is 52 cents an hour and that was like three years ago. So I doubt if it's gone up that much. Who knows, maybe it's gone down almost always under a dollar an hour. You may get like minimum wage if you work one of the really hazardous jobs in a pretty forward thinking state. But then the prison can turn around and say, yeah, but we're going to take most of that paycheck to cover like room and board or maybe to provide restitution to your victims if it was a financial thing.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. So like even if you're off making federal minimum wage at kfc, as, you know, as a prisoner, as part of your prison labor, you're, you're ending up with pennies on the dollar per hour after they deduct all that stuff from you. So that's why that average for all prison workers is 52 cents an hour because they deduct so many things. That's why it's essentially convict leasing. That person goes out, works, they get paid and the prison says we're taking this X amount of, of your pay for our own use.

[Chuck Bryant]

That has to go into the private prison, like financial, you know, success rate.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Precisely that. Private prisons are able to do that. They probably deduct way more. But the other problem with it too is that they're at the same time getting tax breaks for leasing out their convicts to use in the outside world. So they're getting like fees and tax breaks. It's quite a racket from what I can tell.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. While the basic needs a lot of times of these prisoners aren't even being met, still some pretty bad conditions as far as medical treatment goes and food. I think Olivia helped us with this. She did a great job. But she found one woman named Carla Simmons who is an incarcerated in a woman's prison. And she wrote last year, and this is right here in Georgia, that prisoners aren't paid. And she said the food is so bad that people try to get work assignments where they can dig through the trash to eat the guards meals like the portions that they threw away. Good God in 2024.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. One of the other things too is that, I mean people point to this and say like, okay, yes, we agree that prison labor is in and of itself a good thing. Like Thomas Moore was right, like you can, there is redemption in labor. So we're not saying do away with it, but it needs a lot of reforms. These are the people who are like, well, reform minded about the whole thing. There's basically no one saying we should do away with prison labor. But they say it should be the kind of labor that's going to help them get jobs on the outside where they learn valuable skills. They should be paid fairly, federal minimum wage, at least for the labor that they're doing. And they should also get protections that any worker gets in the United States. This to me is mind blowing. We have workers protections out the yin yang here in the US we have osha, we have the Fair Labor Standards Act. All of these are meant to protect workers physically from injury and also protect them from being screwed over by their employers. And court after court after court has ruled that prison laborers do not count for these protections. They're not classified as employees because as I saw it put, the prison owns the prisoner's labor. The laborer doesn't own their own labor. So how can an employee be in that situation? They can't, therefore they don't get any of these protections.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, there was a lawsuit brought in Alabama in 2024 that was dismissed because they basically were like, oh, this isn't forced labor. These are mandatory chores. So it's just like, depends on what you want to call it, I guess. In 2021, there's a international anti slavery nonprofit called Walkfree in Australia who produces what's called the Global Slavery Index. And the United States is one of 17 countries that use state imposed forced labor, along with China and Russia and some other places. And the United States is one of only six UN member states that hasn't ratified the Forced Labor Convention of 1930, which we considered. The Senate considered that in 1991, like, hey, maybe we should sign onto this thing. And they said, no, it really, really conflicts with subcontracting these prisoners out to private companies. So like, let's not foul that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we'll just, we'll walk past that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And like I think you mentioned Europe and the UN in Europe, essentially the way that they treat prison labor is what I was saying that in the US Prison prison labor reform people are calling for. Right. And you mentioned Alabama in that lawsuit about mandatory chores. Not, not prison labor. The reason that lawsuit even came up is because Alabama surprisingly is one of seven states that in the last few years has passed in their state constitution a ban on prison labor. You're not allowed to, you can't force prisoners to work. They can, you can use prison labor, but you have to pay them and you can't coerce them with punishments. Right. Some of the punishments that prisoners face, if they refuse to work, they might be transferred to a higher security prison, which is not what you want to happen to you. Their family visits may get cut. There's all sorts of punishments that can be meted out legally except in these states under their constitution. But like you said, that lawsuit where they were like, these aren't, this isn't involuntary servitude, it's mandatory chores. They don't have any teeth right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Tennessee was in there too. Sort of surprising in Nebraska. Here's finally some numbers for you. And I love it when they kind of put numbers like this, which is like, hey, if you actually spent this in the long run, it would be better for everybody. I love those stats. And this is one of those Incarcerated workers saves prisoners. Sait's prison is about $15 billion a year and produces another $2 billion in goods and services. And so the Edgeworth Economics Group did a study, a cost benefit analysis last year and found that hey, if they actually use that money to pay incarcerated workers like an okay wage, like maybe even just minimum wage, it would reduce the burden on families to send money which they don't have a lot of money to begin with. Maybe they could pay child support from prison and improve their earnings like once they get out. And so they did the math and they found out in the end every dollar spent on prisoners wages would add up to a society wide return of $2.40 to $3.16.

[Josh Clark]

Man, that's pretty, that's pretty good ROI just for paying prisoners.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know.

[Josh Clark]

I can't think of any better way to end this one, can you?

[Chuck Bryant]

I got nothing else.

[Josh Clark]

I thought I heard you drop your mic even.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, it's still up.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, since Chuck said his mic's still good to go, I guess it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's hard to drop the mic in a studio because you gotta unscrew it.

[Josh Clark]

I know.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've got like a windscreen. Two things have to get unplugged and by that time everyone's left the room, you know.

[Josh Clark]

They gave you a windscreen. I didn't get a windscreen.

[Chuck Bryant]

I bought my own.

[Josh Clark]

I brought this from home.

[Chuck Bryant]

So who is this from? This is from Kimberly. Hey guys, thanks for keeping me company on long work trips, during chores and throughout my day to day life. I feel like I'm listening to old friends. Like a lot of people have said before, I appreciate how my worldview is challenged and enlightened when I listen to the show. My weekly trivia team also appreciates how I can answer some of the most random questions thanks to the random facts and Kimberly sent in a great recommendation, how crowds work. I'd love to know more about how humans move through crowds. How do we manage to avoid bumping into each other at airports, stadiums, and other crowded places? How do we avoid crowd crushes? I feel like we touched on that.

[Josh Clark]

No, we have on our Black Friday episode and a couple others we've talked about. Crowd crushes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I think maybe just crowds would be a pretty good idea.

[Josh Clark]

Kimberly, we could work in standing in line. Where that came from is that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do people do that? I don't stand in lines.

[Josh Clark]

No. A lot of people do, surprisingly. And wait for their turn, I think is what they call it, their turn.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm a line jumper, you know, people love those guys.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, right. The key is to just not pay attention to anyone behind you. Pretend like they're not there.

[Chuck Bryant]

I had a guy at the airport recently and you know, boarding an airplane in the United States is just one of the worst things that can happen, especially after I've seen how they do it in Australia, which is to say civil and friendly. And this guy was standing behind us, me and Emily and Ruby, like in the line really to get, like, to get on, not the crowd that goes before they announce it. And he just like all of a sudden just walked right around us and jumped in front or tried to. And now I sort of just bodied up a little bit. And you want to see an incensed human is. I don't know if it's all 10 year olds, but my daughter, when someone tries to jump a line, she was furious. Did you see that guy tried to break in line? It was like almost no worst offense at that age.

[Josh Clark]

Was he in earshot? Did he hear her say that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I don't think so, but I repeated it loudly so Emily could hear it. I said, did you hear what Ruby just said?

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

She said, calling out this guy behind.

[Josh Clark]

Us, man, why would you do that?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. It's just. I don't know. I don't know, Josh.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, I get the, the, the drive to get on board as fast as possible to get some overhead space. So they don't check your carry on bag because that's all you have. And you don't want to stand around waiting for it because you got to get out of the airport as soon as possible. But you still don't walk around people that you're in line behind.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. And we were in that sort of, you know, they do zones now. I think we were zone one or two. So it wasn't like we were at the back of the plane and it was going to be dog eat dog for that space.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, maybe he just could not wait to get some pretzels. The mustard.

[Chuck Bryant]

Anyway, sorry, rant over.

[Josh Clark]

Was that the end of Kimberly's email too? Yeah, great idea Kimberly. I think we will do one on crowds eventually and we will try like heck to remember to credit you with the idea because it was 100% yours.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to be like Kimberly and give us a great idea, we love that kind of thing. You can send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Announcer]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Josh Clark]

One of the other things that reformers say we need to do is if you're in prison and you're laboring, none of that money goes toward Social Security or Medicaid. They suspend that so you're not working toward whatever check you're going to get in your retirement for however many years you're working in prison. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Guest/Other]

All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for U.S. listed registered securities options and bonds in a self directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC crypto trading providers by ZeroHash Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures.

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. My daughter has a Guardian bike and she loves it and that thing was really easy to put together. And get this this holiday season, Guardian is offering their biggest deal of the year. Over 40% in savings on all bikes plus $100 in free accessories. Guardian bikes have become one of the most sought after gifts of the season and inventory is going fast. So don't wait. Join over a half a million families who discovered the magic of guardian. Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now. Hey audiobook lovers, I'm Cal Penn. I'm Ed Helms. Ed and I are inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with our new podcast, Irsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Each week we sit down with your favorite iHeart podcast hosts and some very special guests to discuss the latest and greatest audiobooks from Audible. Listen to earsay on America's number one podcast podcast network, iHeart Followersay and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.