Worker Rights and the Carceral System
by Rachel van Geenhoven and AnaStacia Nicol Wright
The removal of the Department of Corrections from the protections of the Indoor Heat Standard has led Worksafe to invest more in the intersection between worker rights and prisoner rights.
In a sane and caring system of justice, the aim would be restitution, healing, rehabilitation, and reintegration. The focus would be on harm reduction, and money and connections would not protect people from accountability, nor would lack of money and protections make people more vulnerable to injustice.
Instead, we know that our prison industrial complex unfairly targets BIPOC individuals (Black/brown, indigenous, people of color) as well as the impoverished; that it punishes “crimes” such as lacking the means to obtain shelter; and it effectively ignores broadscale offenses like stealing money from the paychecks of hundreds of workers at a time.
The rights of the incarcerated land squarely at the center of all workers rights issues. The issue of workers rights is an issue of exploitation vs. humanity, and no workers are more exploited and dehumanized than the incarcerated. It has increasingly become more widely understood that the criminal justice system is an industrial complex which originated with chasing down slaves and returning them to their owners. Despite the abundant evidence that it has not strayed far from that general purpose (legitimizing and enforcing slavery), there remains a passive acceptance of incarceration, and a stigma against the incarcerated, that make it difficult to transform this deeply harmful system into something that seeks to repair harm and teach and rehabilitate those who cause it.
Stigma and broad injustices aside, incarcerated individuals do have basic rights, both as human beings, and as workers. According to California Labor Code Section 6404.2, anyone working in the correctional industry is considered an “employee.” This means that incarcerated workers are in theory protected under the same workplace safety regulations that other employees benefit from. Unfortunately, many of these workers find themselves with little recourse as they face unique challenges related to extreme heat conditions and the dilapidated facilities where they work.
Incarcerated workers contribute significantly to California’s economy — over 800,000 incarcerated individuals across the U.S. generate around $10 billion in goods and services each year. No-one’s value in society should be based on their financial contribution. Nevertheless, many prisoners work in facilities that lack basic necessities like air conditioning and ventilation. It’s no wonder that a large percentage of incarcerated individuals report extreme heat as a serious hazard to their health and safety.
At Worksafe, we are focusing on the need for a Indoor Heat Standard for all people working within Corrections, after the entire Department was excepted from the standard which recently passed in California. The death of Adrienne Boulware on July 6th of this year, shines a dramatic and tragic light on the issue of heat in prisons. Temperatures as high as 106 degrees have been recorded in the cells of the Central California Women’s facility in Chico, the facility where she died.
We must not allow the prior existence of deeply unjust, harmful and racist institutions and practices to numb us to the urgency we feel, as sane and caring humans, to end the rampant injustice and harm they inflict on individuals and communities.
Through our partnership with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, we’re working hard to educate both incarcerated individuals and the general public about these issues. We’re also pushing for changes that lead to better conditions. This includes calling on Cal/OSHA to write and implement specific heat standards specifically for incarcerated workers.
