Ma$$ Incarceration in the American Gulag: Ugly Truths in Caddo Parish

Caddo Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff Steve Prator

The news story that surfaced last week about Caddo Parish, Louisiana Sheriff Steve Prator's comments about incarcerated prisoners performing manual labor was a troubling reminder of one of the most insidious aspects of mass incarceration in America.

Namely the profit motive that channels people into the justice system on the front end, then moves them through an overburdened municipal, state and federal prison pipeline that extracts financial gain in a variety of ways.

Profit realized not from rehabilitating those found guilty in courts of law, but from keeping those individuals incarcerated for as long as possible, irrespective of flawed sentencing laws, overt bias on the part of some members of local law enforcement, or sometimes even a suspect's guilt or innocence - as in the tragic case of Glenn Ford.

As Jonah Engel Bromwich reported in a New York Times article last Thursday, it was almost three weeks ago back on Thursday October 5th that the sheriff of Caddo Parish Louisiana, Steve Prator, held a lengthy press conference in which he railed against a series of substantive prison and sentencing reforms passed with overwhelming bipartisan support by both Democratic and Republican members of the Louisiana state legislature.

Whether Sheriff Prator harbors personal political ambitions isn't really clear.

But his alarming suggestion that the 1,400 low-level offenders convicted of non-violent offenses scheduled to be released from various Louisiana prisons (under the terms of the bipartisan prison reform bills) would have negative economic consequences because they perform a variety of manual labor services for the state's prison system, seemed close to justifying slave labor.

Incarcerated Americans sewing military fatigues

Consider a Prison Policy Initiative report by Wendy Sawyer last April that noted that there's been a decline in the average of the already-meager prison wage nationwide - which can be as low as 50 cents an hour in some states.

In some southern states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and (Surprise!) Texas, do not pay inmates for regular work in prison at all.

My sense is that part of the reason Sheriff Prator's comments drew such widespread criticism was that he shed an unsettling light on some of the numerous ways that prison labor is used in the Caddo Parish jail - including cooking and washing and performing mechanical work on cars and vehicles.

But more troubling was that he was arguing that low-level offenders jailed for non-violent offenses should STAY in prison because local state municipalities need the revenue - that's frightening.

And to many it seemed to reek of the undisguised authoritarian stench of Trumpian policy; undermine the free press, label anyone who disagrees with him an "enemy of the people", encourage law enforcement to use excessive force against suspects, lie at will, support for-profit prisons and back off of prison reforms that would keep more people out of the mass incarceration pipeline.

As Bromwich noted the story really didn't blow up nationally until journalist and criminal justice activist Shaun King posted a link to Sheriff Prator's comments on his Twitter feed early last Thursday morning.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards

In the wake of the utter devastation wreaked upon the state of Louisiana's economy after the disastrous economic policies of former Republican Governor-turned failed 2016 presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, one of the core campaign promises of current Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards was to reform the state's notoriously broken prison system.

A system that, like in other states, costs taxpayers hundreds of millions a year to operate.

Back in June, as Rebekah Allen reported for the Advocate, when Edwards signed the ten separate bills into law with a large group of Republican and Democratic supporters looking on (Republicans drafted seven of the bills), the scope and depth of the reforms was hailed as an "historic achievement" - click the link above and read some of the details outlines of the bills that were passed.

It's literally a progressive roadmap-template for sensible national criminal justice reforms, and as Bel Edwards successfully argued, those reforms would save the state of Louisiana over $260 million a year by keeping non-violent low-level offenders out of prison and out of the justice system.

For men like Sheriff Prator to argue against that kind of common sense change reflects the deep systematic challenges to meaningful prison reform in America.

For years, writers, historians, advocates of prison reform and criminal justice reform have presented data and made the case that mass incarceration in America and other countries is used as a means to warehouse a massive pool of readily cheap labor.

Not just for states and local municipalities either - we're not just talking about some guys hoeing fields or cutting grass.

A small sample of companies that use American prison
labor in some capacity

Prisoners do everything from logging, to road resurfacing to working in call centers for major retailers - yes, some of those people you speak to in customer service when you call to place an order, book an airline ticket or return an item are prisoners.

There's a long list of companies like Walmart, McDonald's and Victoria's Secret that benefit from prison labor.

When you consider the immense lobbying power that these companies wield on Capitol Hill, and the influence they wield on Congressman, Senators and Governors (and Fake President), the pushback against prison reform, which has bipartisan support in the Senate, starts to become more clear.

Sheriff Prator isn't alone in his opposition to releasing non-violent offenders because it will make labor costs rise, many U.S. corporations feel the same way.

Of course you'll never see THAT in a television commercial for McDonald's or AT&T, but they do.

Remember the efforts to untangle the prison phone rate scam a couple years ago?

If you recall, the Democratic-majority Federal Communications Commission, in conjunction with wider prison reform efforts by the Obama administration, passed a rule capping the outrageous rates that major phone companies charge prison inmates.

Trump's FCC head Ajit Pai

But a federal court shot that down earlier this summer, and the conservative right-wing puppet that Fake President tapped to head the FCC, Ajit Pai, refused to pursue the fight.

Ajit Pai basically sided with the large telecommunications carriers that lobbied Republicans to be able to freely charge wildly excessive phone rates to incarcerated inmates - making it even more difficult for them to maintain some kind of emotional bond with family and friends on the outside.

Think about that.

But it's not surprising, like a young Dinesh D'Souza, Pai is one of those Ivy League-educated sons of hard working Indian immigrants who seem to revel in prostrating themselves before the alter of right-wing conservative American ideology - gleefully pushing all the buttons that make the corporate establishment squirm and giggle with pleasure.

If there's any issue on which the FCC could rule to stick it to consumers and make it easier for large telecommunications and internet companies to consolidate their power and rack up profits, you can be sure Ajit Pai will be on the front line making it happen - after using his law degree to work for the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division, he took a job as Verizon's Associate General Counsel where he (surprise!) specialized in among other things, regulatory issues.

Now he does the bidding of a president who holds dark-skinned people in total contempt - MAGA!

Sadly, all this corporate ass-holery is not new in America as illustrated in disturbing detail in Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer-Prize wining book, "Slavery by Another Name", which explores the disturbing truth that slavery in this country continued up into the 20th century in the form of forced human bondage based on arcane local laws, corrupt local courts and greedy businessmen who conspired to target, imprison and torture thousands of African-Americans in flagrant violation of the Constitution to quench a thirst for free labor that grew exponentially after the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865.

African-American prisoners laboring on a railway
in the late 19th or early 20th century 

These weren't just farmers using wrongly-incarcerated prison labor to clear fields or harvest crops; in some cases corporations like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil dipped into that ill-gotten labor pool too.

Slavery By Another Name is also a brilliant PBS documentary if you've never seen it; albeit a disturbing one that will alter one's perspective on the U.S. justice system and corporate America.


Michelle Alexander's 2010 nonfiction book "The New Jim Crow" is also an essential tool to understand the dynamics of mass incarceration in America and it's relation to a justice system warped by bias and internal dysfunction.

If there were some kind of a litmus test to measure the federal government's response to the urgent need for prison reform in the U.S., where would the score be on the spectrum?

The rigidly conservative, yet remarkably uncurious Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an ideologue whose quasi-religious adherence to his narrow concept of the "rule of law" could be seen as conditional and uneven with regards to the role the Department of Justice should play in such efforts.

While he's stated publicly that he would prosecute members of law enforcement who cross the line, there's little indication that he will - especially considering that he's already gone on record as saying that the Department of Justice under his leadership will steer clear of efforts to monitor local police departments who engage in systematic biased policing based on race.

Sessions also steered the DOJ back to approving the use of for-profit prison companies to manage some federal institutions - despite those companies having a sketchy track record in such areas as safety and cost-effectiveness.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions 

Part of what's troubling about the hands-off approach to bipartisan criminal justice reform under Sessions' DOJ is the simple stubborn refusal to recognize the dehumanizing and alienating effects that flawed sentencing laws and biased court systems have on the men, women and children who populate America's prisons.

It's like his adherence to an ideology blinds him to virtually anything else.

Nothing else exists - reality, facts and common sense are secondary to his entrenched belief system.

The narrow-minded, simplistic ideological rhetoric of men like Sessions, Fake President and Sheriff Prator often obscures the simple fact that prisons house real human beings - sure some have committed violent crimes and deserve to be in jail for their crimes, but they're still people.

Did you see the New York Times article last week that quoted the Texas Criminal Department of Justice as saying that some 6,663 inmates housed in correctional facilities across the state of Texas collectively donated some $53,863 to Hurricane Harvey relief charities?

This despite the fact that most only keep on average about $5 in their prison commissary accounts; much of which goes to telecom companies so they can make phone calls.

Prisoner fire fighters in California 

Recently the news has been full of the devastation and loss of life and property in parts of California in some of the worst fires seen in years - but as MotherJones reported recently, a remarkable 30% of California's forest firefighters are made up of state prisoners.

When you consider that California's forest fire fighting budget in 2014 was about $209 million, 30% of the thousands of forest fire fighters coming from prison labor is not small change.

Despite that devastation Trump has called for a $300 million dollar cut in the US Forest Service's wild fire prevention budget for fiscal 2018 (again, ideology uber alles), who knows, maybe he plans to plug those gaps with even more prisoner labor?

So in retrospect, Sheriff Steve Prator's griping about loosing a few inmates from the Caddo Parish prison cafeteria staff and motor pool seems like chump change in comparison with the wider use of prison labor in America by both the military, private corporations and state governments.

Given all that, it's interesting how much time Trump spends talking about how immigrants are taking away American jobs in this country.

Why read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's massive three-volume work on the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system when we've got an American Gulag going on right here at home?

Debtor's Prisons in 21st Century America

Women at mealtime - St. Pancras Workhouse in London

Last week Alan Pyke wrote an article posted on ThinkProgress.org about a recent court settlement reached with the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado in the wake of an ACLU suit filed over the incarceration of mostly poor and homeless individuals basically for being poor.

It's a sad testament to a 21st century America where the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is as wide as it's ever been, and stagnant wages and crippling financial debt are a reality for millions of people.


Society has wrestled with the criminalization of poverty as a legal and moral issue since as far back as the middle ages when Europeans unable to pay off debts were taken to debtor's prisons where they could be kept for years until their debts were paid off.

Grim images of work houses (where people were locked up until they paid off debts through menial labor) in Ireland or England evoke scenes out of the books of English author Charles Dickens, who fictionalized settings, characters and scenes based on the social conditions he personally witnessed in England and France in the 1800's.

Marshalsea Debtor's Prison 1897

Dickens' views on the horrendous living conditions of the poor in the 19th century were deeply personal.

After his father John Dickens, who worked as a clerk in the Navy pay office, began to live beyond his means and accrue debts, he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison in London in 1824.

Dickens, who was well-read as a young boy and had attended private schools, was forced to leave school, take up residence with an impoverished friend of the family named Elizabeth Roylance, and work grueling ten hour shifts in a dilapidated rat-infested warehouse where he pasted labels onto pots of bootblack for six shillings a week.

Meager wages which went towards his room and board.


In fact, as Dickens would relate in The Life and Times of Charles Dickens, on his first day of work, a boy named Bob Fagin showed Dickens the proper way to attach the labels to the pots; Dickens later based the character Fagin from Oliver Twist off this same boy.

The remarkable yet disturbing book and PBS film Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon shed light on the systematic incarceration and forced servitude of thousands and thousands of African-Americans at the hands of a corrupt and racist judicial system in the southern United States after the Civil War up until World War II.

To look back on the deplorable social conditions of the poor and working class in Europe and America from the Middle Ages up through the 20th century, it's almost unimaginable to think that modern municipal governments in the wealthiest democracy in the Western world still imprison people for being poor - but as the ACLU suit against Colorado Springs shows - it's true.

And not just in Colorado either.

Ferguson cop Darren Wilson & Mary Ann Twitty (r)

In the wake of the killing of teenager Michael Brown by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the subsequent investigation of Ferguson's municipal courts and police department by the Department of Justice found a corrupt system that was systematically targeting middle and low income African-Americans for low-level administrative violations like parking violations, moving violations and even citations for "manner of walking" as a means to generate revenue.


Remember my blog about Mary Ann Twitty's magic wand? 

Remarkable that it took global outrage over a Ferguson PD officer shooting an unarmed 17 year-old boy in broad daylight and months of subsequent protests for the federal government to unravel the tentacles of a corrupt municipal court system working in tandem with the police department to intentionally target poor people of color simply to assign fines used as a revenue stream.

Modern debtor's prisons in America have even proven deadly.

Rex Iverson died over $2,376.92

Remember the story of Rex Iverson?

He was the Utah man who was jailed for failing to appear in court over an outstanding $2,376.92 bill that he owed for an ambulance ride in 2015.

After failing to respond to notices to pay the balance, he was arrested and placed in a holding cell where he was later found dead.


The inability to pay a fine also led to the death of 55 year-old Eileen DeNino back in June of 2014.

As Alan Pyke reported in an article for ThinkProgress.org two years ago, DeNino, a mother of seven, was jailed after not being able to provide documentation that she was not able to come up with $2,000 she owed from accrued fees related to her children being truant from the Reading, Pennsylvania school system.

Can someone explain the logic of locking a mother up in jail because she can't provide proof that she can't come up with $2,000?

55 year-old Eileen DeNino died over $2,000

Like Rex Iverson, she was arrested and a judge sentenced her to be incarcerated for 48 hours.

And like Iverson, DeNino was later found dead in the Berks County Jail.  

Over $2,000 in inflated fees and court costs.

The rise of for-profit prisons in the U.S. has also contributed to an increase in people being jailed because they can't pay court costs or fines.



A tactic that plays right into the hands of private companies like Judicial Correction Services (JSC) who routinely violate the constitutional rights of Americans and incarcerate them in private facilities - for profit.

It leads to some truly sad tales.

Stories like Georgia teenager Kevin Thompson a tow truck driver employed at an auto repair shop who was jailed for being unable to pay an $810 fine (based on a JSC recommendation...) after the DeKalb County Recorder's Court handed Thompson's case over to JSC.

Cases like these are all too common even though debtor's prisons were outlawed in the U.S. in the 1830's.

But as the old adage goes, what's old is made new again.

The glimmer of hope is that organizations like the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other legal advocacy groups are continuing to focus attention and resources on egregious laws that allow local governments to jail people simply for not having enough money to pay fines.

Fines which are too often leveled at those already burdened by the economic disadvantages of existing at the lower end of the rungs of an unequal and all too frequently unjust society governed by politicians who still fancy it "the land of the free".

Rex Iverson and Eilleen DeNino would say that's a myth; and Charles Dickens would simply weep.