On the plantation

The noise is deafening. In the cavernous “wet room” it is the churning of industrial washing machines. In the warehouse-sized “dry room” it is the whirr and whine of the dryers. With the fans blasting, the air is nonetheless hot, close, muggy. Like Georgia in late June. Like a plantation in Georgia in late June. The similarity only begins there.

I am describing Oregon’s second largest commercial laundry, a facility I toured a few years ago when researching and writing A Grip of Time. It is housed behind the 25-foot concrete wall that rings Oregon State Penitentiary and is one of more than two dozen businesses operated by a private entity within the Department of Corrections that manages labor contracts for the state’s prisons. Like those who labored in plantations in the South, the men who work in the laundry are slaves. Or at least indentured servants. Like plantation slaves, they are provided with (as one historian of the mid-1800s described it) “crude lodging, basic foods and cotton clothing.” The slaves of the South and the slaves within prison walls live in marginal conditions isolated with “their own kind,” working to support an economy they are not a part of.

Plantation slaves received no wages but could sometimes sell their services, after work, for nominal earnings that might equal as much as $100 a year. Prison laborers in Oregon are paid between 5 and 47 cents an hour. I’ll do the math for you:

$100 in 1860 has the purchasing power of $3,100 today.

The prison job, assuming 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year at the top wage of 47 cents equals $977 a year.

The laundry work is low-level, menial labor that does not foster job skills useful to prisoners after release. The working conditions are unhealthy: loud enough so that earplugs are almost useless, the air in the “dry room” linty enough so that masks are required, the temperature hot enough so that everyone sweats all year.

Given all this, I should be overjoyed with the news that Oregon Health Sciences University, one of the laundry’s biggest clients, just announced that it is terminating its contract (in place since 1995).

Willamette Week reported it this way: Now, following a nationwide reckoning against racial injustice and demands for criminal justice reform, OHSU says the use of prison labor runs counter to its values. “The foundation on which our prison systems lie, and on which programs like laundry services operate, is antithetical to our values,” the president of OHSU said in a statement.

And, um, this conflict-of-values was just discovered after 25 years of supporting the laundry?

Still, I should be overjoyed, but here’s why I’m not.

Jobs in the laundry are actually considered the top jobs in the prison. They pay the most, offer two or sometimes three working shifts, are the only jobs to offer overtime, and are the only jobs to keep operating during lockdowns.

The men employed in these jobs, many of them, are trying to save money to show Parole Boards (and their families) that they are responsible. Or they are using these funds to pay for “luxury” canteen items like stamped envelopes so they can write to their families. Or an extra roll of toilet paper.

I am glad OHSU has decided prison labor runs counter to its values. Now how about we use this moment to examine the entire morally bankrupt system of mass caging of human beings that runs counter to OUR values?