From interviews conducted with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated laborers by employees of the American Civil Liberties Union and professors and students at the University of Chicago Law School.

field labor

In prison you have to work. The choice is work or solitary confinement. It’s hard manual labor. If you worked in the field, you would most times get written up for malingering. There weren’t a lot of white girls in the field. The amount of work that prisons get out of inmates is insane. They gave me a pamphlet [of prospective employers] when I got out.…