Of the estimated fourteen thousand firefighters who took on the devastating wildfires throughout the Los Angeles area in January, approximately one thousand were inmates. Prisoners helped city and county firefighters and crews from California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection contain the blazes, which have already laid waste to more than forty thousand acres of land in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. “We know we’re out here doing a good thing for the common good,” an incarcerated firefighter told the BBC. “I have a debt to pay to society, so I’m happy to pay this debt this way.”
The incarcerated firefighters have garnered a great deal of media attention—and universal praise from residents. But their extraordinary work has also called attention to the plight of incarcerated workers. Nearly eight hundred thousand state and federal inmates, or two-thirds of the entire prison population, provide ordinary goods and services for low or no wages at all. Though the vast majority of incarcerated workers are required to work, they do not typically get to choose what kind of work they perform.
Incarcerated firefighters in California volunteer for the detail but receive limited training and only make between $5.80 and $10.24 a day, well below the state’s hourly minimum wage of $16.50. Meanwhile, California’s seasonal firefighters earn a base salary between $3,672 and $4,643 per month, and the annual salaries of full-time Los Angeles firefighters start at more than $85,000 a year. Prisoners also fight wildfires in thirteen other U.S. states, but most incarcerated workers maintain institutional facilities or produce goods like beef, corn, and wheat for national supermarkets like Kroger, Aldi, Target, and Whole Foods. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the national average salary for inmates who produce goods is $1.41 per hour, while those working maintenance make just 63 cents per hour. Some states, like Arkansas and Texas, do not pay incarcerated workers at all. In federal prisons, incarcerated workers produce an array of products, from military helmets and body armor to home appliances, airplane parts, and office furniture. For every dollar generated in future sales of these products, only four cents go toward incarcerated workers’ wages.
All together, labor by inmates contributes $2 billion in goods and more than $9 billion per year in services, which helps offset the costs of operating prison facilities and maintaining local infrastructure. As one former Florida county commissioner put it, “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor.... We could not tax our citizens enough to replace the value that the inmate labor contributes to our community.”
A 2023 bill to extend the Fair Labor Standards Act to incarcerated workers remains stalled in House and Senate committees. But a number of states have abolished forced labor in prisons—most recently Nevada, which passed a constitutional amendment in November, the same day a similar initiative failed in California. Even in states with laws on the books, administering this change has proven difficult: in 2020, two Colorado inmates sued the state for violating its amended constitution after they were punished for refusing to work in the prison’s kitchen.
Compulsory or not, labor remains an integral part of the rehabilitation process. Inmates who spend more than half their sentences working exhibit better behavior and lower rates of recidivism, and have an easier time finding employment after they’re released. But too often, U.S. prisons exploit incarcerated labor. Though prisoners forfeit specific legal protections while in captivity, they should not be expected to surrender the right to be justly compensated for their work. As the extraordinary efforts of incarcerated firefighters in Los Angeles demonstrate, labor can offer prisoners a unique opportunity to regain their dignity. The state must not take it away again.
