Is mass incarceration a labor issue? According to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, the answer is a resounding “yes”.
According to Dave Jamieson, writing in the Huffington Post, Trumka is prepared to give remarks on Friday “offering robust support” for California’s Porposition 47, a proposal that would downgrade non-violent crimes to misdemeanors, thereby rendering thousands of state and county prisoners eligible for immediate release or sentence reduction.
Trumka’s prepared remarks state, “It’s a labor issue because mass incarceration means literally millions of people work jobs in prisons for pennies an hour — a hidden world of coerced labor here in the United States…It’s a labor issue because those same people who work for pennies in prison, once they have served their time, find themselves locked out of the job market by employers who screen applicants for felony convictions.”
These are welcome words from a leader in the labor movement, which has not shown a united front when it comes to issues around prison reform. As Jamieson explains, “there are many labor unions that represent police and corrections officers, and they don’t always support lighter sentencing or the closing of prisons, seeing as prisons and inmates translate to jobs for those officers.”
However, there are indications that this may be changing, too: recently, two AFL-CIO member unions representing corrections and law enforcement officers came out against mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug convictions, arguing in part that prison crowding “ma[kes] its members less safe on the job.”
Read more at the Huffington Post.
Photo by Steve Rhodes via flickr.
