SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California lawmakers will once again introduce legislation that could ban imposing forced labor on inmates. This effort to amend state’s Constitution was rejected last year when lawmakers failed to pass it through the Assembly.
Assemblymember Lori Wilson, a Democrat, announced Wednesday the reintroduction of the measure called End Slavery in California Act during a news conference at the State Capitol West.
Wilson was joined by other members of the Legislature as well as a coalition of sponsors such as Anti-Recidivism Coalition, All of Us or None, Anti-Violence, Safety, & Accountability.
The original measure — known as ACA 3 — was developed by criminal justice-reform-advocate Samual Brown and brought to the state Senate in 2021 by then-Sen. Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles. She has since been elected to the U.S. Congress.
“I appreciate all the hard work of each and every member, especially Congresswoman Kamlager and all of those that stood in solidarity with her to get this across,” Wilson said. “I think they started the conversation and made people really think about what kind of California we want to have.”
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has nearly 65,000 work assignments for inmates, according to the state’s Department of Finance.
Many prison jobs include work maintaining correctional facilities. About 7,000 inmates have jobs through the Prison Industry Authority, which contracts with state agencies and some private companies to manufacture clothes, furniture and other goods.
Generally, while California prisons pay inmates for labor, their wages are negligible. Inmates typically earn 8 cents to 37 cents an hour for work they perform while incarcerated.
According to a Senate analysis, Kamlager’s bill could have made it an obligation to pay inmates minimum wage, or $15.50 an hour, which would have cost the state north of $1 billion a year.
“People in prison still have expenses, common ones include necessities such as hygiene items, food, clothing, medical or health related devices, telephone, electronic and snail mail communication with loved ones. This also costs money,” Wilson said.
Opponents to the bill presented last year were concerned that it would disrupt rehabilitative work programs in county jails and state prisons.
“There is an economic impact to it, but there’s also a greater economic impact,” Wilson said. “Do you think of the prisoners and the families of those prisoners and the lost wages to our communities related to that? (Do) you think about how much it is that we spend on our incarcerated individuals just to keep them incarcerated?”
Kamlager said that wages have nothing to do with removing that language in the constitution that allows for slavery.
“This is not about changing wages. It is about removing a stain from our state’s constitution and ultimately from the federal constitution, that is a vestige of slavery and Jim Crow,” Kamlager said. “They (allow) it because the labor force is available and free.”
Wilson explained that every incarcerated person gets assigned to specific work without their preference in the type of job, or choice of work schedules upon entering prison.
Last June, California lawmakers declined to put an anti-slavery measure on the ballot that delayed decisions on a proposal to prohibit the practice of using forced labor to punish incarcerated people.
“Today slavery takes on the modern form of involuntary servitude, including forced labor in prisons,” Wilson said at Wednesday’s news conference. “This is about our humanity in California.”
Lawmakers who voted against or held up Kamlager’s bill last summer said they wanted to protect rehabilitative work programs, including criminal sentences that call for community service.
Multiple states have removed such exception clauses from their constitutions. Last November, four states — Tennessee, Alabama, Oregon and Vermont — were added to the list of states that banned constitutional language that allowed for slavery, specifically for use of forced labor as punishment for crime.
California is among only 16 states with an exception clause for involuntary servitude in their state constitutions, but Wilson remains optimistic that the state will pass the amendment this time around.
“If we don’t pass it this time around, we will be at the bottom. Only four other states that have this on the books,” Wilson said. “California being the most progressive state in the union, do we really want to be at the bottom? That hasn’t been our way. We’ve been leaders all the way, we want to make sure we continue to be leaders.”
The constitutional amendment — if passed through the Assembly — could appear on ballots in California’s general election in November 2024.
