Prison Labor: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

prison and if for some reason you are unfamiliar with the concept i'll let a beloved children's entertainer explain it to you in a clip that has in no way dated badly all of those people who are in prison right now were kids once just like you and then somewhere along the way they did something wrong something dumb whatever it was it probably started small became bigger maybe they even got away with it at first and thought they'd never get caught they were wrong now they're in prison yes they are it's almost like they should have really seen this coming and look on this show we've talked before about the problems of mass incarceration but this story isn't so much about who is in prison or whether they should be there it's about what they are doing while they are inside which is to say that broadly it's a story about prison labor because over 60 percent of people in prison actually have jobs in fact prisons are basically operated by the inmates as you would know if you've ever seen an episode of lock up raw on msnbc the most common jobs are working in the kitchen or some form of janitorial duty i you know clean carpet vacuum empty trash i work in laundry here five days a week monday through friday he has recently landed one of the most coveted inmate jobs staff canteen clerk i didn't come into prison with a staff canteen job i started in food service in the dish room and worked my way right on through the ranks oprah didn't start on oprah winfrey show so i mean he is right of course oprah didn't start on the oprah winfrey show oprah started when a glowing magical orb consolidated all of the earth's energy into one mesmerizing perfect beacon of light then the light the orb and the result was oprah that's oprah's origin story right there but there are some major differences between the jobs people do in prison and the ones they do on the outside particularly when it comes to money the average wage in prisons is around 63 cents per hour and remember that's the average so that means there are states where prisoners make considerably less in texas georgia arkansas and alabama prisoners are not paid for their work at all and in some places they're required to work under threat of disciplinary action if they say no i'm not going to work they can write you up for that they can send you to solitary for that that's that's that's slavery to work for free yeah and then they can and they can put you in solitary if you don't work or write you up for not working yeah for free why is that not slavery yeah that's not good because why is that not slavery it's one of those questions that even if you have to ask it something has already gone very wrong like how many swastika tattoos or which of mommy's nightstand draws did you open things are already bad we just need to figure out how bad and the answer to why is this not slavery is well it's not exactly not slavery because it turns out treating prisoners as slaves is literally written into the constitution the 13th amendment states that slavery is abolished except as a punishment for a crime and the amendment abolishing slavery is really not the one that you want to suddenly include the word accept and look i know that to many inmates are not a naturally sympathetic group of people in fact when there was a push to get a higher wage for those working behind bars a few years ago these people on fox found it hilarious inmates behind bars are now suing for the minimum wage for the work they're doing behind bars should that be a crime he says he deserves minimum wage as if crime pays why let crime pay exactly crime should not pay it's very simple common sense is very simple this is common sense it's very simple look first of all if you watch that on mute you would definitely assume it was a panel on erectile dysfunction and even with the sound on you you can't definitely say it's not but but in a way in a way i actually get it crime doesn't pay does sound like common sense but it's much much more complicated than that the truth is when you combine the low to non-existent wages that prisoners get paid with these surprisingly high costs that they and their families can incur while they're inside the current system can wind up costing all of us and tonight we're going to look into how how prisoners make and spend money and the companies that have managed to get rich off them and let's start with the fact that prison labor can take many forms it is often the janitorial or kitchen work that you saw earlier but in some states prisoners actually work as firefighters in fact in the california wildfires last year around 12 of the firefighters were current inmates and i should say many of them find fighting fires very rewarding just the other day we were able to save houses from from burning down to have a woman come out to her backyard and thank us for saving her house makes us feel like we're doing something now being able to give back and potentially save lives is um it's huge yeah and that makes sense being able to save lives must be very satisfying it's why batman always seems to be in such a good mood and what his catchphrase is we i'm batman how great is fact in crime it's great i love it and and that honestly feels like the best case scenario for prison labor people who are happy to work contributing to society and learning new skills although it is worth noting those firefighters base pay is only between three and five dollars per day for that dangerous work and if you're thinking well at least they're learning skills that will help them get a job on the outside that is often not the case california law bars most people with a criminal record from becoming licensed emergency responders which means that being a firefighter in prison is not unlike being an art history major in college it may be fun while you're in there but you're not going to be doing it once you get out do you hear that thessaly you're going to work in human resources you're gonna have a favorite coffee mug and a throw pillow that says it's one o'clock somewhere and you're gonna stare out the window yearning for the sweet release of death just like everybody else and incidentally fighting fires is far from the only dangerous job that prisoners do at louisiana state penitentiary some take part in a prison rodeo where the entertainment can be insane take convict poker four inmates sit nervously at a card table while a very restless bull picks out his target the last one standing or sitting wins so why do you do this money yeah i'm broke i'm trying to get a private investigator on my keys he earns two cents an hour working in the prison fields but he can earn hundreds out in that month [Applause] holy that is truly shocking also and look this really isn't the biggest issue there but if you are going to have a game where a bull attacks a group of people you don't name it convict poker you name it dodgeball again not not the biggest issue not the biggest issue but i i did want to bring it up and look being attacked by a bull for entertainment is clearly an outlier most prisoners are doing routine labor for little to no money the problem is that can lead to them being seen less as humans paying their debt to society and more as a pool of virtually free labor and don't don't take that from me listen to louisiana sheriff steve prater when the state as part of a prison reform program started releasing some inmates he went public with an unusual complaint in addition to the bad ones and i call these bad in addition to them they're releasing some good ones that we use every day to to wash cars to change oil in our cars to cook in the kitchens to do all that where we save money well they're going to let them out the ones that we use in our work release program they're going to let them out just think about what he's saying there he's saying some people need to stay behind bars because they're too valuable as a source of free labor which is exactly the same plan as the villain in the shawshank redemption normally to qualify as a stephen king villain you have to be something way less stupid like an evil car or a guy who forgot to wear a coat and look many prisoners do prefer having jobs to just sitting in their cells all day which again makes sense so getting rid of prison labor entirely is not the answer here paying prisoners more might help although that will be very difficult prisons are now so reliant on their labor moving to a competitive wage could cost hundreds of millions of dollars each year and i know that there are those out there who might say well what do prisoners even need money for but the answer to that question is actually really important here because while it may seem like you're living for free in prison you may actually have a lot of expenses like legal fees or basic necessities like soap or shampoo and as lawmakers in arizona recently discovered prisons there were actually requiring women to buy personal hygiene products there's a new bill in the legislature that would have the state pay for all feminine hygiene products and first to hear the proposal a committee of nine men some of them a bit squeamish about taking on the task i guess hearing the bill was something i didn't expect i didn't expect to hear pads and tampons and and the problems of periods okay so two things there first the problem of period sounds like the title of a medical textbook written back in the time when we used to treat female emotions with either electrocution or drowning and second i am frankly shocked that a man who willingly chose that haircut isn't more of an expert on women but but the fact is until last year arizona's female prisoners were allotted just 12 pads per month which as i am going to say at least half of you know often isn't nearly enough and extra hygiene products were not a minor expense base pay for prisoners starts at 15 cents an hour which meant that to buy one additional pack of pads took about 21 hours of work and in theory women who needed more could simply ask prison guards or get a medical dispensation but the problem is in arizona as in many places prisoners also have to pay a co-pay to see a doctor and i'll let a former prisoner addressing that panel tell you how that worked out in reality the most important thing if i want to request the medical right to get more pads because say i have a heavier flow this month than last month i would have to pay four dollars just to be seen by medical now when i'm making ninth cents uh after tax you got to really think if i want to put my whole month's income into hopefully being allowed approved for extra pads if they believe i deserve it look not only is it utterly ridiculous that she needs to pay to make a case that she deserves access to pads just spare a thought for her having to discuss the details of a heavy flow into this bewildered face so it's pretty clear that for many prisoners there is an enormous gap between what they make at their prison job and having enough for basic necessities now if they are lucky they might have family or others on the outside willing to help them out by sending them money but even that is more complicated than it appears and this brings us to the final absurd element here the for-profit companies who stand between prisoners and the outside world because let's say that you want to send money to your incarcerated son or daughter one of the biggest companies that lets families do that is jay pay but there is a catch in lots of states families have to go through jp to send money into a prison at all for almost 450 000 families jp is the only way to send an inmate money and the company charges them fees as high as 45 to give him 50 i have to i have to send 70 off of my card it's hardest on people like pat taylor who are barely scraping by i just let a bill go i let a bill go and pick it up later it's true it costs her 20 just to send 50. so you know what that means look out ticketmaster when it comes to dickish transaction fees there's a new in town and charging families to transfer money isn't the only way companies can profit jpeg's parent company securus is also a leader in the field of charging prisoners for phone calls and video visits which is a 1.2 billion dollar a year industry sakuras has ads which play like a shitty apple commercial but make it look like it's a warm fuzzy company focused on human connections and it's honestly nice that they are fully acknowledging how important it is for people to connect to others on the phone it's frankly a lesson that at t would do well to take boom you suck at business daddy business baby i never get in line this baby rides dirty wow where i'm fussy don't rub my tummy i won't be settled where but what that ad doesn't make clear is just how expensive they have successfully made those vital connections phone calls within states can go over a dollar per minute and facilities served by securist have had fees over three dollars for the first minute and 16 cents for each additional one and that can really add up which can be a massive problem for prisoners families who may have limited resources shaina palace is married to a man who is currently facing a seven and a half year sentence in prison palace has been paying high telephone fees trying to keep her daughter connected to her father however she can we're done though but at six dollars a call keeping that connection isn't easy you know some people might not see six dollars a day is a lot but when you have an infant you know six dollars a day is half of you know a pack of diapers and that is rough you should not have to choose between letting your kid talk to her dad and buying them diapers that is pretty much the definition of a shitty shitty situation and if you curtail or remove that connection it can have serious consequences on life inside the prison as those who have been there can tell you all a lot of guys have when they're incarcerated are those phone calls those letters those visits that's it that's what they live for that's how they get through their time i've seen guys that family didn't come see him in a week or two and the next thing you know they ended up in a hole for 90 days because they just felt alone because you feel alone you can't build a family in prison he's right contact with families is incredibly important and completely unrelated in the hole for 90 days is also how sting describes a quickie and and if you're thinking well hold up maybe families can just get around phone charges by visiting their loved ones in person they can although that is changing too prisons and especially jails have been phasing out in-person visits in favor of video visitation meaning that you can turn up to see a loved one and still have to sit in a different room and talk to them on a screen incredibly this is something securist has contractually mandated up until 2015 some of their contracts with facilities had them promised to eliminate all face-to-face visitation and that is just evil machine that makes money by stopping people from seeing their families sounds like an item at the top of satan's amazon wishlist right before superbed bugs cauliflower rice and just the actual existence of amazon and while this sounds inhumane the people running these facilities will insist that the reason for it is purely a safety issue if you limit the people who are coming in uh you're going to limit the the attempts of contraband you don't have to worry about contraband if you're doing a video visit you're not going to be able to introduce contraband into the jail okay i get it so it's a contraband issue the problem with that explanation is that research shows that installing video visitation does not decrease contraband probably because it's easier for it to come in through other ways like through guards staff and occasionally through owls although admittedly that is mostly an azkaban problem so so why push video visitation so hard it is difficult to say i will point out it seems notable that jails and prisons often get a cut of the proceeds from phone and video calls and while they will point out that the money goes to an inmate welfare fund that fund is often used for things other than inmate welfare one county spent nearly three quarters of that money on staff salaries while another dipped into it to buy tasers tasers which really stretches the definition of inmate welfare to a literally shocking degree and when you put all of this together you wind up with a scenario where you're not just hurting the people who are incarcerated you're hurting everyone around them one in three families of inmates reported going into debt to pay for phone calls or visitation which is terrible and that doesn't really set up a prisoner for success once they are released look the current system of low wages and high cost is clearly no good for anyone but for the companies who are somehow managing to massively profit from this and there are things that we can do here small and large new york city recently made phone calls from jails free and connecticut will consider similar legislation next year and if we want to make bigger changes like paying prisoners more we could do that although as i've said it would undeniably be incredibly expensive and very unpopular you saw people argue crime doesn't pay that's just common sense but part of the way mass incarceration persists in this country is by keeping the true costs of it off the books and we're currently doing that through a combination of underpaid labor from prisoners themselves financially draining families who've done absolutely nothing wrong and occasionally managing to monetize prisoners being launched into the air with livestock and at that point i would argue we've come a long long way from common sense

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 6,351,180

Rating: 4.8802452 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: AjqaNQ018zU

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

That bull fighting thing is like something from Black Mirror.

[u/zsotraB]

I remember how surprised I was when I first heard that there are private prisons in the US. I just don't understand how anyone can think it's a good idea.

[u/rocksoffjagger]

One of the youtube comments really hit the nail on the head, so just going to paraphrase their comment here: The real problem is that by not paying inmates for honest work they do as part of the reform process, they aren't teaching them that crime doesn't pay, but that honest work doesn't pay. Is that really the lesson we want inmates to learn during their incarceration?

[u/RoboticStoner]

Last year in government class I did a policy project on mass incarceration and mentioned something about prison labor and how it’s essentially modern day slavery and the lady listening to my project shut that shit down real fast. Of course I wasn’t as prepared as John Oliver so I didn’t argue with her but damn I hope she watches this

[u/shit-rmelbourne-says]

Did they cover Kamala Harris in this?

[u/Microchaton]

As per usual: What the fuck America?

If you don't see the fundamental problem with for-profit prisons, you've probably been bought by for-profit prison lobbyists.

[u/fullicat]

Any mirror for this guys? Isn't available for me in the UK, even though he's one of our greatest little parrot sons.

[u/XQlusiv]

Mirror?

[u/rossmosh85]

Americans flat out do not care about prisoners. This will never rank as a "problem" for most Americans.