Prison Reform in the Bayou State
In the summer of 2017, Governor John Bel Edwards signed the most comprehensive prison reform package in the Louisiana’s history. At the time that legislation was passed, Louisiana had the highest incarceration rate in the United States—the country with an incarceration rate higher than that of any country in the world. A year later, Louisiana’s incarceration rate has fallen behind that of Oklahoma, per data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In part, the package permitted the early release of 1,400 nonviolent offenders across the state in November 2017.
Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator criticized the reform package for not only releasing “bad” prisoners but also for “releasing some good ones that [the prisons] use every day to wash cars, to change oil in cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that where [the prison system] save[s] money.” In the state with the second highest relative population of black folks* at 32 percent of Louisiana’s population—Mississippi is first at 37 percent—and an incarcerated population that is 66 percent black, Prator’s comments are inherently racialized.
Daphne Robinson is the Assistant District Attorney in Caddo Parish with twenty years of experience as a prosecutor and public health expert. In an interview with HPR, Robinson—a black woman—acknowledged that many of the folks she comes in contact with who look like her are offenders and not fellow law enforcement officials. She supports the reform as “a good first step,” saying that “we need to provide people with the tools and the resources to keep them from re-offending.” However, she argued that it does not go far enough to reform a criminal justice system which has been “abused” throughout history to control free blacks as they attained rights in the United States.
In the Huffington Post, Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project compared the contemporary use of free or cheap labor in prisons to “convict leasing”, a post-Civil War system in which black folks would be arrested for small charges and rented out to plantation and industrial capitalists who would pay nominal wages and provide basic food and housing in conditions akin to chattel slavery. Some of the earliest and most brutal examples were at Mississippi’s Parchman farm and Louisiana’s Angola prison.
Such legislative reform is certainly a positive move towards justice in the state with one of the most aggressive carceral states in the world; however, continued prison reform in the Deep South and across the United States must be critically realized in its intersection with race and labor. In part, this means policies that allow for increased wages and heightened job security through stronger unionization will provide a more sustainable future for curving incarceration and enacting justice for black and low-income workers.
A Brief History of Racist Labor Policy
Springboard to Opportunities provides federal housing residents with community, education, and job resources in Jackson, Mississippi. In 2017, Springboard collaborated with New America to produce Becoming Visible: Race, Economic Security, and Political Voice in Jackson which outlines the historical legacy of systemic black impoverishment in the United States, pointing directly to convict leasing as one example of how U.S. policy has “both maintained a racial social hierarchy and legally supplied free and cheap labor to private industry” while solidifying social narratives of black criminality and laziness.
In an interview with HPR, Springboard CEO Aisha Nyandoro asserted that the United States “has a far too narrow definition of work; we only define work as working outside of the home.” This decimates the value of hard labor that black women perform inside the home, such as childcare and elder care—the majority of the 5,000 families she works with are headed by black women between the ages of 25 and 44 with two or more children and an average income of $11,000 annually. For many of these women, available jobs do not provide a livable wage to afford child/elder care; therefore, working at home is more affordable than participating in the labor force.
As Nyandoro and New America highlight, race and class have always been integral to determining which U.S. workers are excluded from government support. In Who Rules America, sociologist G. William Domhoff explored how New Deal policies of the 1930s denied Social Security and the right to unionize to agricultural and domestic workers— which included 60 percent of black Americans—in ceding to Southern Democratic demands. The Jackson Daily News reported at the time, “The average Mississippian can’t imagine himself chipping in to pay pensions for able-bodied Negroes to sit around in idleness on front galleries, supporting all their kinfolks on pensions, while cotton and corn crops are crying for workers to get them out of the grass.” According to New America, more than half of Southern black men and less than one-third of white men accounted for agricultural labor at the time.
“Right to Work”
As industrialization through the latter half of the 20th century merited unionization demands from increasing manufacturing workers in the South and social insurance was expanded to agricultural/domestic workers, state legislatures began to pass right-to-work laws.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described right-to-work laws as efforts to “destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. . .”. As described by Domhoff and raised by Dr. King, collective bargaining is fundamental for unions, a means of compromise between workers and corporate interests to forge agreements “on matters concerning wages, hours, and working conditions.”
Essentially, right-to-work laws allow non-union members to reap union benefits without committing to the union—especially paying dues—decreasing the power of collective bargaining and strengthening employer leverage. In The Nation, Sean McElwee wrote:
“Recent research shows that de-unionization since the 1970s reduced weekly black wages by $49 per week. Research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that black union workers are far more likely than non-unionized black workers to have access to employer-sponsored retirement plans. These right-to-work laws threaten to exacerbate the already disturbingly large racial wealth gap.”
Black Americans, who have historically been exploited in the labor force and criminalized in the national imagination, are most affected by these strategic policy choices, such as right-to-work. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant wrote, “We observe a spectacular rise in the number of people being put behind bars as the state relies increasingly on the police and penal institutions to contain the disorders produced by mass unemployment, the imposition of precarious wage work and the shrinking of social protection.”
Incarcerating the Black Working Class
Black folks, especially black men, are more likely than any other racial group to be unemployed. Along with total unemployment, black unemployment has been decreasing nationally since 2010, and it at its lowest point since initially being reported in the 1970s. However, this rate does not include folks who are incarcerated. Black folks are more likely to be incarcerated than other racial group—five times more than whites, nationally.
By including incarceration, sociologist Bruce Western wrote in Punishment and Inequality in America that during the period of expansive economic growth from 1980 to 2000, while whites and Hispanics experienced decreasing unemployment, young black men conversely experienced increased unemployment via incarceration: “As the unemployment rate sank to historically low postwar levels in the late 1990s, jobless rates among non-college black men in their twenties rose to their highest levels ever.” Dan Kopf for Quartz wrote that in 2014, while black male unemployment appears to be 11.4 percent when excluding incarcerated folks, the statistic is actually 18.6 percent when including this population.
Nyandoro sees this interface in Springboard’s community: “The reality is that there are a lot of men… that we are not able to support because legally they’re not on the lease due to rules issued by [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] as it relates to formerly-incarcerated individuals accessing affordable housing.” She described this as a policy which inhibits black men from returning to their communities and building a life of dignity for themselves and their families. If formerly-incarcerated individuals are found to be living in affordable housing, the whole families’ housing is at risk of loss.
Robinson highlighted that another policy which channels poverty into prison for people of color is the cash bail system. While held for their inability to post bail, many offenders often “lose their job, lose their home, and stress is created in their whole family;” others take plea deals. Reform is on the horizon—a federal judge in New Orleans ruled the cash bail system as unconstitutional in August.
The Future of Labor in the Deep South
Operation in Southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana allows corporations to exploit low corporate tax burdens and the broad distribution of low wages that workers experience; for an individual working a minimum wage job in fast food, an auto factory job is a significant gain in income. Therefore, union leaders understand that, as stated by Noam Scheiber of the New York Times, “a unionized South is crucial to restoring leverage for workers across the country, since employers can rein in wages by locating there, or merely threatening to.”
For example, from 1980 to 2013, automobile industry jobs grew by 52 percent across the South while decreasing by 33 percent in the Midwest; simultaneously, automobile workers’ wages steeply fell—a 24 percent decrease in auto worker wages in Alabama from 2001 to 2003, the state with the highest growth of auto manufacturers. Meanwhile, these states legislated union-weakening right-to-work laws and opposed minimum wage increases while also using many temporary workers. Of this reality, Harold Meyerson wrote for The American Prospect, “The South’s aversion to both minimum-wage standards and unions is rooted deep within the DNA of white Southern elites… the prospect of biracial unions threatened not just their profits but the legitimacy of their social order.”
In the summer of 2017, United Automobile Workers failed to unionize automobile workers in Canton, Mississippi, with 60 percent of voting workers deciding against unionization in the Nissan plant under threats from management. For working-class policies to be electorally successful in the United States today, Southern states must focus on the formation of stronger multiracial labor coalitions. This organizing cannot be the effort of black laborers alone; influential white leaders, especially within the Democratic Party, must fully commit to a unified movement as well.
Dear Democrats
Dominique Erney is a senior at Harvard College studying Social Studies and African American Studies with a focus on the effects of mass incarceration; she is also the Vice President of the Harvard College Democrats. In a recent interview with HPR, Erney described the intersection of poverty and incarceration in her own life, saying that as a child who observed various family members who were jailed or imprisoned, “it was very clear to me that the level of poverty that some of my family members were living in really necessitated the ‘crime they were committing’… you see how very quickly that cycle reproduces itself, and they can never get back on their feet…You become ineligible for things because you’re marked as a criminal forever.” As echoed by Nyandoro and Robinson, Erney believes policies which provide access to quality housing and mental healthcare for black communities are essential to breaking the cycle of poverty and incarceration, especially from Democrats who must reckon with and acknowledge their role in the escalation of these systems.
The Democratic Party must invest more in the voices and needs of working-class blacks in the South, especially ramping up its efforts on voting rights, gerrymandering, and felon disenfranchisement. Nyandoro urges Congress to do away with the work requirements to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, commonly referred to as “welfare,” signed into law by President Clinton in 1996.
Newly-elected Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) could represent the Southern delegation in co-sponsoring a proposed amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, currently led by Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA). This legislation is directly in response to the omission of black laborers from New Deal expansions and would require overtime payment for farm laborers and omit minimum wage exclusions that still persist from 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Furthermore, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduced legislation in 2017 to ban right-to-work laws. In addition to their direct effect on black laborers’ quality of life, “right-to-work laws decreased Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5 percent” as unions have lost power to organize and financially contribute to races, wrote McElwee.
Ultimately, it is important that as the Democratic Party contends with gaining the support of a portion of the working class lost to Donald Trump and the Republican party in the 2016 election, it must be aware that working class people are not unilaterally white and many of their most reliable voters are being dehumanized and removed from the labor market and voting bloc by means of weak or absent unions, mass incarceration, and voting restrictions of which many Democrats have been active or complicit in maintaining throughout this country’s history.
*“Folks” is a term that has been used historically in anti-racism organizing and academia (W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk) which refers to a definitive collective of persons with common experiences, especially as it relates to a working-class socioeconomic status—rather than “people” which has a more universal connotation. Privilege is stratified at different intersections.
Image credit: Rowland Scherman / Wikimedia Commons