… Slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited except in the latter case as punishment for a crime.—Louisiana Constitution Article 1, § 3
EVERY MORNING AT 5 O’CLOCK SHARP, Slim is roused from sleep by the overhead fluorescents that a guard outside the dormitory switches on at the breaker. Slim is 63, blind in one eye, suffering from cirrhosis and diabetes, thin as a rail. He has been a prisoner most of his life, currently serving his fortieth year of a life sentence for a murder he says he did not commit.
After breakfast he goes to work. He is a dormitory orderly. He sweeps, mops, dusts the window ledges and fans. Throughout the day he will repeat the process because the guards that make rounds insist the dorm remains clean. If it doesn’t, Slim can face disciplinary action, again. He might wind up in the dungeon, lose his job or, worse, his incentive pay, again. Two cents an hour. So he cleans.
The minuscule pay Slim earns buys very little, of course. He hustles for what he owns, which is not much, but he has to survive. A broker of illicit commodities, he sells and trades for others, collects commissions like smokeless tobacco, a hamburger here and there, a pair of threadbare gloves. When his drawing account builds up, he stands in line at the canteen to buy a three-ounce bag of powdered coffee—“gunpowder”—for $2.18. “Tastes like shit but it’s all I can afford.” Slim lives for gunpowder.
He cleans and hustles. A shoestring belt holds his pants up. Two cents an hour to keep the house clean and live like a bum.
When a state representative introduced a radical bill during a recent legislative session, he did not hold high hopes that his proposal would skate into codification. There were several big issues involved that he knew rattled his conservative colleagues: amending the state’s Constitution; injecting one of the most radical criminal justice reforms in state history; altering the economic landscape; reassigning a significant portion of the state budget; and dispensing with, once and for all, a legalized inhumanity born in an age of blatant racism and thriving in modern penology.
The lawmaker, a Democrat from a tiny town in a rural parish, wanted to abolish the forced labor in state prisons that he saw as tantamount to slavery.
It is a big word, slavery, a bad word. Yes, it exists in today’s identity-conscious society, but pushed into barred corners where lawbreakers reside, out of the sight of more conformist citizens. It is an accepted punitive response for offensive behavior: ten years at hard labor for this, twenty years at hard labor for that, and so on. The ten and twenty years spent separated from civilization, often growing old and sick in a closet-sized cell, is not enough. Prisoners must work. They will work, or their punishment will be compounded. The “hard labor” requirement fuels the carceral machine with free or cheap labor performed by a corps of thousands. And it is all legal.
The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola began its existence in the late 19th century as a conglomeration of several adjoining plantations in West Feliciana Parish. Convicts laboring beneath the eyes of armed overseers planted and harvested cotton and sugar cane on roughly 8,000 acres of rich bottomland. These unfortunate men and women were slaves in every sense of the word. They were “owned” by a shrewd former Confederate major, S.L. James, as part of a lease agreement between James and the state: he could do what he wanted with them, so long as Louisiana collected its cut of production profits and did not have to manage the miscreants.
Those were barbarous days that witnessed atrocities against human beings who were no longer considered fit for consideration. Many were worked to death, buried in the levees or along the roadsides that James had them constructing or repairing for the state. The major grew rich from the free labor that produced his agricultural gold, and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which prohibits involuntary slavery and servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”—granted him carte blanche. Prisoners, then as today, were not only vulnerable to abuse, they were expected to be abused in atonement for their sins.
A similar mindset nourishes today’s involuntary servitude of criminally convicted people. At the penitentiary, high-grade agricultural equipment purchased with the sweat of gun-guarded hoards in the expansive crop fields have now all but replaced human hands (but not entirely), and evolving social sensibilities have thrown out the bullwhip and chains ostensibly in favor of civil rights and programming. But prisoners are still expected to work if they want to enjoy a dormitory setting and freedom to walk around the perimeter on their off time. No work, no privileges, lodgings in a cell.
The penitentiary would be hamstrung without its incarcerated labor force. Prisoners cut grass, dig ditches, mop floors, attend laundry. They are clerks, counsel substitutes, correspondents, teachers, mentors, maintenance workers. They construct buildings, run electrical cable, repair appliances and automobiles. They paint, they preach, they plumb, they cook, they patrol cellblock tiers as trouble spotters. They sew mattresses, weld metal implements, screen tee shirts, and print ledgers and letterheads—all for sale by Prison Enterprises, the corrections department’s business arm that pulled in more than $30 million in fiscal 2021-2022. Roughly 3,900 prisoners essentially care for themselves and the prison that contains them, in the process saving the state millions of dollars that it would otherwise be forced to spend on contract labor.
Incentive pay is the bureaucratic defense of servitude: They can’t be slaves if we pay them. Wages are available to everyone healthy enough to work—but only after working for nothing for three years. Standard pay rates range from two cents an hour to twenty cents an hour for no more than eighty hours in a two-week period. There is no overtime for maintenance men roused in the middle of the night to repair a failed generator, or painters slop-brushing every brick and pipe in sight for twelve to sixteen hours straight prior to a tour from headquarters, or barbers and orderlies stationed at round-the-clock intake sites when summer tempests drive incarcerated evacuees to Angola from low-lying parish facilities. No extra pay for holiday assignments or extended hours to beat legal deadlines, no hazard pay for angry weather.
Disciplinary infractions can diminish or halt incentive pay for six months. Employment reassignment can reduce a twenty-cent-an-hour pittance to a four-cent-an-hour pittance. Many prisoners do not have hobbies that translate into revenue, nor donations from family members, nor inmate social clubs to mooch off. Many prisoners complain that their pennies have shrunk significantly over the years. It is a valid complaint.
Aside from specialty wages assigned to the court-sanctioned reentry program (in which inmate mentors/educational instructors can earn up to $1.00 an hour), certified inmate paralegals, and sign language interpreters (likewise), incentive pay has not seen inflation adjustments for decades. As a result, most prisoners who rely on incentive pay, like Slim, save their coins for gunpowder rather than an $11.76 pound of ground coffee.
One lawmaker wanted to put the issue before the voters in order to abolish involuntary servitude in prisons and put the state Constitution “in its proper position.” The bill was defeated in committee. He returned the following year with another bill, which progressed to a public vote but failed after the author himself refuted it as “confusing” as written. The legislator now declared that he did not want to abolish forced labor in prison, he just wanted a constitutional amendment formally renouncing slavery and involuntary servitude—and that would, incidentally, bear his name as sponsor.
His third attempt, in the spring of 2023, aimed to place before the populace a single question: “Do you support an amendment to prohibit the use of slavery and involuntary servitude?” In order to pose the question, two-thirds of the members of each legislative chamber would have to concur. It was a tall order. A simpler path was to reject the bill outright, which is exactly what happened. Slavery and involuntary servitude in Louisiana, it seems, is acceptable to the people’s representatives in Baton Rouge.
More than a dozen states have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners. Several others have no constitutional language for or against the use of forced prison labor. Lawmakers in seven states removed “slavery exceptions” from their constitutions in recent years, and many Democrats have been eyeing the 13th Amendment as perhaps ripe for revision as well. History records that slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865. It fails to mention that not everyone was included in the mandate.
John Corley was born in Shreveport, moved to Florien at 14, graduated Florien High in 1980. Went to work in the offshore drilling industry in 1981. Was arrested in 1989, ultimately convicted in 1996 as a first felony offender by a nonunanimous jury of second degree murder, sentenced to mandatory life without parole. “This is my 35th year of incarceration,” he told The Lens. “My prison record is impressive, and includes an associate’s degree, seven years as a paralegal, and 20 years as a journalist. My hope and belief is still strong that I will someday rejoin society.”
John Corley spoke with The Lens about his life, the PEN awards, and his work for the Angolite, which he edits, in an interview published here.