Is Forced Labor in Prisons Acceptable?

Forced labor has become fairly common in prison systems around the world, whether it's incarcerated people in the U.S. cleaning up the highways or religiously persecuted prisoners in China making disposable chopsticks for export. But is forced labor as a form of punishment reasonable? And what can consumers do if they want to avoid buying the products of forced penal labor?

The idea of labor as a punishment goes back as far as the concept of punishment, and is reflected at every level of society. We force people incarcerated in prisons to work for the state. We make people who haven't committed incarceration-worthy crimes do "community service." Even parents often use labor as a punishment for their children (when I was in middle school, the use of a swear word at the dinner table meant a two page research paper on the origins of that word and why it was inappropriate). Our images of forced labor in prison have ranged from innocuous (the prison librarian shelving books) to utterly inhumane (Soviet gulags forcing naked men to shovel snow in Siberia). Criminal Justice blogger Matt Kelly has an interesting take on the role of penal labor in the criminal justice system.

The natual extension of the idea of work-as-punishment is work-as-punishment-for-benefit. After all, if people who have been convicted of crimes are to be put to work, why not get them to do something productive like pick up trash or serve food to the homeless? China has become the master of this sort of efficiency, using their incarcerated population not just to serve the community, but as a manufacturing labor force. For example, chopsticks made by imprisoned Chinese religious minorities even made it to a Congressional cafeteria in Washington DC. And some groups have expressed concern that an unknown number of goods from China that make it onto the international market are made with forced prison labor.

But is forced labor acceptable, if it's being used as a punishment? In America, we accept the ultimate punishment for some crimes: death. Why should we balk at forced labor? Then again, we also shout about our passion for freedom from every available summit. Why should the ideal of freedom to work not extend to incarcerated people? And when do we cross that dangerous line from accepting some productivity as a result of incarceration to building up an indentured workforce in our prison system?

If you're like me and you try to avoid buying products made with forced labor, forced penal labor presents a challenge. It's not considered forced labor or slavery in the same way non-incarcerated people being forced to work would be. And it's not included in most companies' internal auditing processed or governments' reviews of labor issues. So avoiding products made my penal labor can be especially challenging. But the first step is for us to determine when penal labor is or isn't exploitative and how we can prevent forced labor from exploiting anyone, including people in prison.

So what do you think? Is forced labor in prisons acceptable?

Photo credit: quinn.anya