How Private Prisons Literally Run on Slave Labor
💣 Follow-Up: The Other Half of the Story
After our deep dive into how private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic are cashing in on ICE detention, readers started asking the obvious follow-up question: What happens to the people once they’re locked in these corporate cages?
The answer is worse than you think. Much worse.
While these companies are billing taxpayers massive amounts for detention—whether it’s $134 per day for ICE facilities or monthly contracts for state prisons—they’re simultaneously forcing those same people to work for $1 per day or sometimes just snacks to run the entire operation. It’s not just detention for profit. It’s literally slavery with a government contract.
Welcome to the 13th Amendment loophole, where corporations have found a legal way to own human beings again.
🔗 Slavery Never Ended—It Just Got Incorporated
Let’s be brutally clear about what the 13th Amendment actually says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
That word “except” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The 13th Amendment didn’t abolish slavery—it privatized it and moved it behind prison walls.
Today, over 2.2 million people are incarcerated in America, and nearly all able-bodied prisoners are forced to work. They provide services valued at $9 billion annually and produce over $2 billion in goods, while being paid between 13 and 52 cents per hour on average. That’s not employment—that’s exploitation with extra steps.
But private prison companies have taken this constitutional loophole and turned it into an art form of human trafficking.
🏭 The Corporate Plantation Model
GEO Group’s Northwest Detention Center is a perfect case study in modern slavery. The company was paying detainees with snacks or $1 per day for labor that provided all the non-security employment at the facility. Think about that: immigrants detained while seeking asylum were being forced to cook, clean, do laundry, and maintain the very facility holding them captive—for a dollar a day.
When detainees tried to refuse this forced labor, GEO threatened them with solitary confinement. When they organized strikes to demand fair wages, the company called in guards to break up the protests. It’s the same playbook plantation owners used 200 years ago, just with corporate HR departments and quarterly earnings reports.
Colorado and California sued GEO for requiring prisoners to work maintenance jobs for $1 a day – essentially forcing people to provide all facility maintenance, food service, and cleaning for slave wages while the company collects substantial daily rates from government contracts for housing those same prisoners.
💰 Triple-Dipping on Human Misery
The profit model is obscene in its efficiency:
Revenue Stream #1: Detention Contracts Private prison companies receive $134 per day per detainee from taxpayers—guaranteed money regardless of whether the person has committed any crime or is simply waiting for an asylum hearing.
Revenue Stream #2: Slave Labor Those same detainees are forced to work for $1 per day (or snacks) to run the entire facility—cooking, cleaning, maintenance, laundry, everything except security. The companies pocket the difference between what they would pay actual employees and what they pay their captive workforce.
Revenue Stream #3: Tax Credits Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), employers receive a tax credit of $2,400 for every work-release inmate they employ. So taxpayers are literally subsidizing companies to exploit prison labor.
It’s the most efficient extraction of value from human suffering ever devised. Wall Street loves it because the labor costs are essentially zero while the revenue is guaranteed by government contract.
🔗 The Corporate Supply Chain of Slavery
This isn’t just about facility maintenance. Prison labor produces goods that end up in major retail chains across America. Many companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own stated policies against the use of forced labor—but they keep buying because the profit margins are irresistible.
When corporations can buy products made by workers earning 13 cents per hour, they’re not competing in a free market—they’re participating in a slave economy subsidized by taxpayers and enforced by the state.
The same retailers that put out press releases about “ethical sourcing” and “fair labor practices” are buying products made by people locked in cages and forced to work for sub-subsistence wages. It’s corporate virtue signaling built on literal human bondage.
🚨 ICE Facilities: Immigration Detention Meets Slave Labor
Here’s where it gets especially grotesque: many of the people being forced into this labor aren’t even convicted criminals. They’re immigrants in detention, including asylum seekers who came to America legally seeking protection.
GEO Group’s legal argument is that detainees “volunteer” for work programs. But when your choices are work for a dollar a day or sit in solitary confinement, that’s not volunteering—that’s coercion. When refusing to work results in punishment, that’s forced labor. When you’re locked in a cage and have no other options, that’s slavery.
The company fought all the way to federal court to maintain their right to pay ICE detainees $1 per day, arguing that anything more would be too expensive. Think about the moral bankruptcy of that position: a publicly traded corporation arguing in federal court for the right to pay human beings a dollar a day for full-time labor.
🔥 The Resistance Fights Back
Detainees at GEO facilities have organized work strikes, demanding to be paid minimum wage for their labor. Their courage is extraordinary—organizing labor actions while locked in corporate cages, facing retaliation from guards and the threat of extended detention.
These strikes aren’t just about wages—they’re about human dignity. They’re about refusing to accept that being detained gives corporations the right to own your labor. They’re about recognizing that the 13th Amendment exception doesn’t make slavery moral, just legal.
Activists outside the walls are fighting too. Organizations are pushing for legislation to close the 13th Amendment loophole entirely, recognizing that you can’t reform slavery—you have to abolish it.
📊 By the Numbers: A $9 Billion Slave Economy
The scale is staggering:
- 2.2 million people incarcerated in America
- $9 billion in services provided by prison labor annually
- $2 billion in goods produced by prisoners
- 13-52 cents per hour average wages
- $2,400 tax credit per prisoner for companies
- $134 per day that taxpayers pay private prison companies
These aren’t statistics—they’re the accounting records of a slave economy operating in plain sight, subsidized by taxpayers and celebrated by shareholders.
🚫 No Cages, No Chains, No Compromise
The 13th Amendment loophole represents the most successful rebranding of slavery in human history. By moving human bondage behind prison walls and corporate boardrooms, America convinced itself it had abolished what it actually just relocated and monetized.
Private prison companies didn’t just stumble into this system—they engineered it. They lobbied for policies that increase incarceration, they designed facilities around forced labor, and they structured contracts to maximize the extraction of value from human suffering.
This is why prison abolition isn’t radical—what’s radical is a society that allows corporations to own human labor as long as the humans are locked in cages first. What’s radical is a constitutional amendment that abolishes slavery “except” when it’s profitable.
The fight against private prisons isn’t just about detention conditions or corporate contracts. It’s about whether we’re going to allow slavery to continue operating under different branding. It’s about whether we believe human beings can be owned, as long as the proper paperwork is filed and the quarterly reports look good.
Every dollar that flows from taxpayers to private prison companies is funding a slave economy. Every politician who votes for private prison contracts is voting to maintain human bondage. Every corporation that buys prison-made goods is participating in a supply chain built on forced labor.
The 13th Amendment gave us the legal framework for slavery. The private prison industry gave us the corporate infrastructure. The only thing that can stop it is us.
No kings. No cages. No chains. No compromise.
The fight to abolish slavery isn’t finished—it’s just getting started.
Support organizations fighting to close the 13th Amendment loophole and end prison slavery. Because in a just society, human labor isn’t a commodity to be bought and sold, regardless of what someone has been convicted of doing.
https://www.propublica.org/article/geo-group-ice-detainees-wage
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