Maine’s State Department of Corrections, the state entity which maintains and operates Maine’s prison and jail systems, states that its mission is to make our communities safer by reducing harm through supportive intervention, and to empower change and restore lives.
I wonder about that.
As evidenced by the controversy among voters concerning Portland ballot Question D – pertaining to an increased minimum wage – the ability to make a living wage is an interest that is held by all. However, many of us frequently consciously or unconsciously exclude those who are incarcerated from this interest. Regardless of one’s own personal feelings on the matter, prisoners are frequently an exception of such consideration by many people, and undeniably ruled out this thinking by government. To many, those who are imprisoned are there to pay their dues and make amends as their punishment for transgressing against the public good.
The difference between Maine and four of the states that voted to overturn involuntary servitude in prison on Tuesday – Alabama, Vermont, Tennessee and Oregon – is that while prisoners are incentivized and even individually motivated to work while imprisoned, our state does not provide for compulsory labor at the command of the state itself. Regularly referred to by the American Civil Liberties Union as a form of slavery, involuntary servitude – or, in Maine’s case, less regulated labor without guarantee of compensation – is not a novel policy.
Prisoners who are “employed” in Maine to work seafood processing jobs outside of prison, for example, doing the same work as their law-abiding peers, are not considered employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act in Maine. What this means is that they have a lesser quality of rights than other Mainers who do the same jobs that they do. This spans a number of sectors in Maine, as reported by the Republican Journal in 2015: “[between] 28 and 33 employers representing a variety of industries, including manufacturing, seafood processing, construction, auto repair and food service, hire inmates from Bolduc Correctional Facility.”
The mandatory minimum pay of prisoners is $0.00 per hour with an averaged ceiling of $220 per month. In January of this year alone, 144 Mainers in prison engaged in 7,347 hours of labor, many alongside their law-abiding coworkers, outside of prison, under a qualitatively different set of workplace protections.
Maine’s labor systems within corrections affords a considerable percentage of the proceeds from inmate labor into restitution for victims of crime and their families. This is something that we should seriously consider when we’re wrestling over the nature of this morally fraught topic.
There is no way to get around the fact that the Maine State Department of Corrections’ operational goals conflict with how its incarcerated population is compensated and protected. The differences in quality of rights afforded to those who are employees and those who are employed to work while still prisoners bring rise to an uncomfortable realization for the voting public. If prisoners are incentivized to work or mandated to provide a service as a condition of their sentence, there remains an incentive to incarcerate people.
There is an ominous fact that Mainers should consider when idealizing or demonizing the labor that is produced by those incarcerated. If it remains perfectly legal, regardless of ethical or situational considerations, to have a prisoner work with demonstrably fewer regulations and lesser protections during their labor hours while not considered employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act that you and I are protected by, there will be an incentive to further incarcerate people.
That means that even if the Department of Corrections eliminates harm, supports all intervention, empowers change and restores damaged lives, Maine’s correctional system will still have a continuing financial motive to incarcerate people.
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