SALT FACT SHEET: Prison Pay Reform
Virginia prisons pay inmates rates from $0.27 per hour to $0.80 per hour. Pay rates have not increased in more than 30 years. Pay rates are so low that they punish prisoners and devalue their contributions to society.
Paying prisoners a real wage would give them more incentive to pay their court imposed fines, restitution orders and child support. It would permit savings for the inmates’ eventual release and re-entry to society. The benefits in successful re-entry, lower recidivism and reduced human suffering would be palpable. The lower future costs for warehousing inmates would offset the higher budgetary requirement to increase prison pay.
Incarcertation should not be a reason for failing to pay a reasonable wage to the imprisoned who work. The current situation can best be described as counter productive for rehabilitation and re-entry purposes. Mandated labor without just compensation is a human rights abuse and a holdover from Jim Crow laws that perpetuate poverty. We can begin to end this human rights abuse by raising prison pay rates to a more reasonable level
Imprisoned people are perpetually in debt trying to obtain basic necessities. It can take hours of work in a Virginia prison to save a sufficient amount of money to make a co-payemt for medical services or cover the costs of medicine, not to mention mandatory fees and fines that are automatically deducted from paychecks. In addition, inmates do not have purchasing options like the rest of us, forced to pay inflated prices for commisary items, personal care products and convenience items available only from a single source.
In Virginia, prisoners must pay a $5.00 copayment to seek medical care. This may not be a burdensome expense for someone earning a living wage. However, an inmate working in the state prison system is paid between $0.27 and $0.80 per hour. That’s 6.25 to 18.5 hours of work just to see a doctor for medical treatent guaranteed by the fifth, eighth, ninth, and fourteenth amendments to the U. S. Constitution.
The net wages earned by inmates invoke the notion of slavery because state deductions — “LFOs,” or legal financial obligations, such as taxes, restitution, room and board, and other costs associated with the prisoner’s criminal processing and incarceration (which the prisoner can be made to repay), may reduce as much as 80 per cent of a prisoner’s gross paycheck.
The inability to make a living wage in prison lowers the chances of success after release. Without paying the incarcerated fair wages, inmates have no funds to cover the immediate outside costs for food and housing. We are essentially destroying all chances at successful reintegration upon release, by failing to compensate prison workers fairly. One study found that increasing a released prisoner’s access to cash on release reduced the first-day recidivism to zero, with no increase in crime later.
(October 21, 2019)