If prisoners decide to stop reporting to their assigned jobs, or if they attempt to prioritize educational or rehabilitative programs during their mandated work hours, they won’t simply risk losing the job — they face disciplinary infractions. For lifers, a writeup documenting refusal to work spells almost certain doom toward hopes of parole.

“If you don’t go to work, we’re gonna punish you – and they do,” said J Vasquez, a former prisoner who is now an activist with Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice. “I remember the first time I saw a man cry, like he broke down because he had just lost his mother. And he was still forced to go to work under threat of punishment. It’s like the guy can’t even take a day off or a couple of days to grieve.

“These are the type of things that really undermine people’s healing, undermine rehabilitation — and really, it doesn’t make much sense, right?”

California voters are now deciding whether to ban those compulsory assignments for people in jail or in prison. Proposition 6 would change the state constitution to repeal a provision that has allowed forced labor as a form of criminal punishment since the state’s founding. 

California lawmakers placed the measure on the ballot with nearly unanimous votes, and passionate activists are campaigning for the initiative around the state.

But it’s far from certain that the measure will become law. Limited polling on the initiative shows likely voters are leaning against it.

“It’s an early first read,” said Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California, which released a poll last month that showed 50% of likely voters opposing Prop. 6. “I wouldn’t say it’s losing. In the field right now before the election, that’s where it gets interesting.”

No one organized a campaign to oppose Prop. 6, and yet the measure appeared to face an uphill climb as mail-in voting began this month. 

“It’s scary and frustrating,” said Vasquez. “It’s scary, because you don’t get many shots to run a ballot measure.”

Low-budget campaign for Prop. 6

Now, supporters are organizing phone banks and speaking of their lived experience whenever they can. It’s a low-budget effort, with supporters raising about $1.1 million for the measure. 

“Once we message this, people begin to understand what we’re talking about,” said Matt Reilly, Prop. 6’s lead political strategist. “We have terrific grassroots organization in various L.A. communities. We want people affected by this to be the voice for our campaign.”

Prop. 6 landed on the ballot after a similar proposal failed in 2022. The state Finance Department at the time estimated it would cost $1.5 billion because the state might have to pay prisoners more money for their work. Today, most of them earn less than 74 cents an hour. 

This year, supporters of the proposal adjusted it to continue voluntary work assignments with pay determined by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Several other states, including Colorado, Alabama, Tennessee and Vermont, recently have banned forced labor in prisons. Some activists characterize the campaigns as efforts to wipe out a legacy of slavery; and California’s measure moved forward after the state’s Reparations Task Force drew attention to the harmful effects of discriminatory policies against African Americans. 

Prop. 6 supporters say the measure would compel state prisons to prioritize rehabilitative programming rather than busywork that does not necessarily help someone for life after incarceration. 

“When a person has access to rehabilitation, we’re all safer. Right now, we spend $14 billion per year on prisons, with a failure rate of 70% in terms of recidivism. When we talk at a high level about these facts, we win people over,” said Jay Jordan, founder of the advocacy group Center for Social Good.

California’s total corrections budget is expected to top $18 billion this year, with $14 billion coming from the state general fund. About 42% of prisoners released in 2019 were convicted of new crimes within three years, according to the state’s most recent report on recidivism. 

Is Prop. 36 influencing polling on forced labor?

Democratic Assemblymember Lori Wilson of Suisun City, who sponsored the bill that placed Prop. 6 on the ballot, said the measure could be lagging because of broad support for another criminal justice initiative on the November ballot, Proposition 36. 

Polls show voters favor Prop. 36 by wide margins. It would lengthen criminal sentences for certain drug and theft charges, and it would steer some people convicted of multiple offenses to treatment instead of incarceration.

“Prop. 36 is messing with the numbers out there,” Wilson said, arguing that support for the better-publicized Prop. 36 could be influencing voters’ first impressions of Prop. 6.

The measure to ban forced labor in prisons does not have a big warchest for advertising, but a number of large public employees unions and Democratic Party leaders have endorsed it. 

Wilson said winning over undecided voters is an “easy conversation” when supporters get an opening to talk with someone. 

“Rehabilitation lines up with our goals. We’re saying we want them to be rehabilitated, but if we continue forcing them to work, then we’re not making it the priority,” she said. 

“I’ve never seen a judge – when sentencing a person to prison – they never sentence them to work. This is part of that original sin of slavery when slaves were brought to our state and worked alongside prisoners,” she continued.

The post No one is fighting a proposition to ban forced labor in California prisons. Why it could still fail appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

That measure and several others designed to mitigate the effects of racism and slavery will face important legislative deadlines in the next two weeks.

Caucus members and other reparations proponents said they will hold similar State of Black California community listening sessions events in six cities over the next five months.

The Black Caucus’ 14 reparations bills tackle education, business, criminal justice, health care and civil rights, and include two proposed constitutional amendments that they hope to place before voters in November.

One of the amendments, ACA 8, would ban one of the last vestiges of slavery: forced labor in jails and prisons.

The California Constitution and the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime. That exception has enabled corrections facilities to require inmates to work for little or no pay.

Many states have ended those requirements. California is among 16 states that allow it due to exceptions in state constitutions, although Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont voters have removed it from theirs.

An effort to stop forced inmate labor in California failed to make it out of the legislature in 2022.

Ending slavery in any form

Assemblymember Lori Wilson, a Democrat from Suisun City, proposed an updated initiative that asks voters to affirm that “slavery in any form is prohibited,” but language was recently struck from her proposal that spelled out what that statement meant.

The language now says a prison or jail “shall not punish” an incarcerated person for refusing a work assignment, and it notes that a prison or jail can still reward a prisoner for voluntarily working, such as giving them credit and reducing their sentence.

The bill does not address the issue of cash payment, such as requiring that inmates be paid a minimum wage. In 2022, the California Department of Finance estimated it would cost the state $1.5 billion to pay prisoners the state’s minimum wage.

At the panel discussion Saturday, Assemblymember Corey Jackson, a Moreno Valley Democrat, said the proposal’s softened language was a deliberate choice to make the bill more palatable to voters by proposing incremental changes.

Polls that tested variations of the ballot initiative found higher support for a simplified version, he said.

“Of course, we also know that when you make something more simplistic you are watering down its effectiveness,” he said.

If voters approve it, a partial victory would be better than none and would set the stage for subsequent amendments with similar goals, he said.

“We need to chip away at it, rather than do a total elimination” of forced prison labor, Jackson said later in an interview with CalMatters.

The bill to place the proposed amendment on the ballot must first pass the state Senate’s Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee on June 18 and then the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 24, in order to meet a June 27 deadline to finalize ballot measures.

There could still be changes during its final hearings, the legislators said.

State Sen. Steven Bradford, an Inglewood Democrat who also spoke at the event, said he’s pushing for a stronger version.

“It’s quite clear we want to eliminate involuntary servitude in California,” he said. “Anything less than that is falling short of the objective.”

Seeking a subtle balance

Wilson told CalMatters in a telephone interview that the changes don’t weaken the bill, but there may be more small language revisions.

“The first line is a very bold statement, that slavery is prohibited,” she said. “We all started with what we as legislators agreed to, as well as what we think voters agreed to.”

Voters believed prisoners should work during their sentences, Wilson said, though most agreed they should not be forced to work when they are ill or when a work shift conflicts with a rehabilitation program.

The debate over forced prison labor illustrates the subtle balance that Black Caucus members must often strike to turn the recommendations of the state’s Reparations Task Force into policies.

California became the first state in the country to form a reparations task force three years ago and the first to introduce a comprehensive reparations package of more than 100 recommendations last year.

Several cities, including San Francisco and Evanston, Ill., have proposed their own compensation programs for descendants of slaves or victims of racism, often with pushback. A recent lawsuit challenging reparations for Evanston’s Black residents gives a preview of the political and financial opposition California’s efforts likely will face.

Some Black California legislators noted that Republican colleagues have pledged to vote against reparations bills and some Democrats also have expressed reservations.

Nevertheless, the Black lawmakers said they will continue trying to build support for their reparations bills through the listening tour and by starting with modest measures that could serve as proof of concept.

“We want to make sure we have some wins we can build up to,” Jackson said at the event. “People need to know that when you do things on reparations the state isn’t going to fall apart. As a matter of fact, it’s going to improve the state overall.”

What would be reparations benefits?

In addition to the ballot initiative to restrict prison labor, another proposed constitutional amendment, authored by Jackson, would counteract Proposition 209, the 1996 measure that banned preferential treatment and affirmative action.

Jackson’s initiative, ACA 7, would authorize the state to pay for programs designed to improve life expectancy and educational outcomes of “groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.”

The Black Caucus’s other priority reparations bills would expand educational assistance, address food insecurity, prevent community violence, restore property taken through race-based use of eminent domain, and draft a formal apology for California’s role in slavery.

If reparations measures succeed, the benefits for California could offset their costs, because more disadvantaged Californians would be contributing to its economy instead of dropping out of school or landing in prison, said sociologist Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Equity Research Institute.

“When you have this level of over-incarceration, you are throwing away talent,” he said. “When you have this low level of education you are short-changing productivity in the future. So equity is everyone’s business.”

He pointed to figures showing Black Californians earning less than White counterparts, even with the same education levels. Moreover, those disparities worsened between 1990 and 2021.

“At each and every level of education there is a wage penalty for being Black or Latino,” Pastor said.

Those gaps contribute to what he called “asset stripping” of Black people and families, creating social and economic shortfalls that snowball over generations.

“People asked, why would I want reparations, why would I want to upset the apple cart?” said Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who created the state Reparations Task Force when she was an Assemblymember in 2020. “We need reparations to restore us to a healthy state.”

The next community listening session is scheduled in Santa Barbara on July 13.

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