70. Prison Labor

When Christopher Barnes walks to work each morning at a highway sign plant in Bunn, North Carolina, he is making the green exit signs that drivers see on interstates across the state. But Barnes is not a typical employee. He is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, and the plant where he works sits inside Franklin Correctional Center, a medium-security prison. Barnes is one of roughly 800,000 incarcerated people with jobs in America's prison system, producing an estimated $11 billion worth of goods and services every year—for wages that typically range from pennies per hour to nothing at all.

The Deep Roots of Prison Labor

Work has been used as a form of punishment in America since the colonial era, when Britain shipped convicts to farms in Virginia and Maryland. After the nation's founding, prisons began renting out inmates to for-profit companies. But the system took on a new character after the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery and involuntary servitude, but carved out a crucial exception: "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Across the South, newly emancipated Black men were arrested for petty offenses, then forced to grow crops on penal farms or work in chain gangs building roads. These practices persisted for decades.