It wasn’t that long ago that New York was facing shortages in PPE during the height of the pandemic and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his initiative to have inmates in state prisons make hand sanitizer.
It’s a reality rarely considered. While in prison, inmates work for penny wages, some even working for just 15 cents an hour.
A new book, “Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery,” details how prison labor affects the American economy.
It draws from interviews with people who were previously incarcerated in prisons from Alabama to Texas to New York.
Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli and Aiyuba Thomas, all members and researchers at New York University’s Prison Education Program Research Lab, joined NY1 political anchor Errol Louis on “Inside City Hall” Tuesday to talk more about their new book.
“Being forced to work and not being duly compensated for it is egregious,” Thomas said.
“We really tried to show how the system was built since the very beginning, even before it boomed in the 1970s, in strict connection with economic needs,” Bardelli said. “How labor, profits and economics always kind of intersected in the American prison system.”
