Voters in California and Nevada consider forced labor ban

By SOPHIE AUSTIN and RIO YAMAT Associated Press/Report for America

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Voters in California and Nevada will decide in November whether to ban forced labor in prisons, removing from their state constitutions language rooted in the legacy of chattel slavery.

The measures aim to protect incarcerated people from being forced to work under threat of punishment in states, where it is not uncommon for inmates to be paid less than $1 an hour to fight fires, clean prison cells, make license plates or garden. . work in cemeteries.

Nevada incarcerates about 10,000 people. All prisoners in the state are required to work or receive vocational training 40 hours a week unless they have a medical exemption. Some of them earn as little as 35 cents an hour.

Voters will weigh in on the proposals during one of the most historic elections in modern history, said Jamilia Land, an advocate with the National Network to Abolish Slavery who spent years trying to get the California measure passed.

“California, like Nevada, has the opportunity to end legalized and constitutional slavery in our states, in its entirety, while at the same time, we have the first Black woman running for president,” she said of California’s historic record. Vice President Kamala Harris. ran as the first Black and Asian-American woman to win a major party’s nomination for the nation’s highest office.

Several other states, including Colorado, Alabama and Tennessee, have in recent years eliminated exceptions for slavery and involuntary servitude, although the changes were not immediate. In Colorado — the first state to eliminate a slavery exception in its constitution in 2018 — incarcerated people alleged in a 2022 lawsuit against the corrections department that they had still been forced to work.

“What it did was create a constitutional right for an entire class of people that didn’t previously exist,” said Kamau Allen, co-founder of the National Network to Abolish Slavery, which championed the Colorado measure.

Nevada’s proposal seeks to abolish both slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime from the constitution. California’s constitution was amended in the 1970s to remove the exemption for slavery, but the involuntary servitude exception remains in effect.

Wildfirefighting is among the most sought-after prison work programs in Nevada. Those eligible for the program receive about $24 per day.

“There are a lot of incarcerated people who want to do meaningful work. Are they now treated fairly? No,” said Chris Peterson, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, which supports the measure. “They are being paid pennies an hour, while other people are being paid dollars, to do incredibly dangerous work.”

Peterson pointed to a state law that created a modified workers’ compensation program for incarcerated people who were injured on the job. In this program, the amount awarded is based on the person’s average monthly salary at the time the injury occurred.

In 2016, Darrell White, an injured prison firefighter who filed a claim under the modified program, learned he would receive a monthly disability payment of “$22.30 for a daily rate of $0.50.” By this time, White had been released from prison, but was unable to work for months while recovering from surgery to repair his fractured finger, which required physical therapy.