Cruel and Unusual: The Nature of America’s Reliance on Prison Labor
July 2021 | Annie Vong, Staff Writer/Editor
The work from prison labor could be seen everywhere. From constructing clothing to creating license plates to making coffee, prison labor is the foundation of many of the products Americans use every day. However, these products are often created in unsafe environments that can result in serious injury, which may be a constitutional violation. Despite operating like employees, prisoners are often denied the same protections that typical employees get. When inmates are treated as “employees,” they are compensated to remedy injuries sustained while working, similar to typical employees.[1] When they aren’t treated as “employees,” courts rule that they are not guaranteed to be protected from negligence on the part of prison officials.
Negligence is the inability to use reasonable care, consisting of both action and inaction.[2] A common example of negligence on the part of employers is failing to ensure that employees are properly trained to operate a forklift. Some might question whether negligence that occurs in prison working conditions should not be regarded as negligence, but rather as an Eighth Amendment constitutional violation. The Eighth Amendment consists of three main clauses. The first and second clause required that there shall be no excessive bail or fines imposed. The third clause states that no cruel or unusual punishments can be inflicted onto citizens by the government.[3] It not only aims to protect against punishments themselves being “cruel or unusual,” but also the conditions in which punishments are being served. With that said, some questions can be raised considering the dangerous conditions these prisoners may be forced to work in. What are prisoners who engage in prison labor defined as? Furthermore, are the labor-related injuries that prisoners sustain and conditions that cause those injuries an Eighth Amendment violation or is it just plain negligence on the part of prison officials?
Cases concerning the tumultuous relationship between the state and its prisoners have been treated as ordinary employer-employee labor cases when they are not. Courts have chosen to interpret the relationship between prisoners and the state as if it is an ordinary employer-employee relationship, while, at the same time, ignoring all protections that employees get in an employer-employee relationship. For example, some protections that typical employees would receive are safe working conditions and the ability to bring a lawsuit against their employer if safe working conditions were not met. For inmates, however, that process is far more difficult. In order to differentiate between a prison official being cruel and unusual or being negligent, the Supreme Court established the “deliberate indifference” standard.[4] Deliberate indifference is defined as “a failure to act where prison officials have knowledge of a substantial risk of serious harm to inmate health or safety.”[5] Due to the “deliberate indifference” standard, prison officials have a generous amount of leeway when it comes to not being held liable for failing to keep working conditions safe. This makes cases of prisoner abuse difficult to bring to court under the Eighth Amendment because it is easy for prison supervisors and officials to claim confusion, incompetence, and/or negligence, but it is difficult for the petitioner to prove that the prison official was aware of health and safety risks that could endanger a prisoner and wilfully ignored it.
This issue was seen in Arnold v. South Carolina Department of Corrections. Chris Arnold was working in the kitchen when a coworker tried to drain hot water from the pot.[6] The pot broke and burned Arnold, but he claimed that it was common knowledge amongst the prisoners that the pot was broken, thus prison supervisors had to have known about it. When questioned, Harmon, the defendant, said that he did not have the time to fix the pot because he had to feed over a thousand inmates. As a result, the court ruled that Harmon was aware of the dangerous conditions in the kitchen, but did not ignore it on a malicious basis. Arnold’s case against Harmon fits the “indifferent” part of the “deliberate indifference” standard, but not the “deliberate” part of the standard. This was one out of several cases that was determined to not fit both parts of the “deliberate indifference” standard in order for it to be ruled as a constitutional violation.
There are only a few cases in which it was determined that the injuries sustained during prison labor and the conditions surrounding it were a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In Morgan v. Morgensen, Steven Morgan, an inmate, injured his right hand while working with a defective printing press.[7] He told his supervisor, Canady Morgensen, the defendant, about the defects, but Morgensen pushed him to keep working and told him to “just be very careful.” Morgensen’s statement meets the “deliberate indifference” standard because he demonstrated awareness of the problem and was indifferent in providing an option for Morgan to refuse to work. The court ruled in Morgan’s favor, reasoning that the dangerous environment that Morgan was unwillingly put in violated his Eighth Amendment right to be protected against “cruel and unusual punishments.”
However, whether an inmate voluntarily chooses to work or not is a factor that can waive their Eighth Amendment rights. It does not make it cruel or unusual if the prisoner still chooses to work in that environment. If Morgan voluntarily chose to work in those conditions, then an Eighth Amendment violation would not apply to his case. But for many, prison labor is not a simple voluntary choice. There is much more of a power differential between prison officials and inmates. Some inmates are threatened with solitary confinement if they do not choose to work.[8] Therefore, potential Eighth Amendment violations should not be dismissed if it seems as though prisoners willingly chose to work.
Courts have fallen short on two occasions: 1) failing to consider the involuntary nature of prison labor and 2) creating the strict “deliberate indifference” standard that allows prison officials to escape the consequences of violating an inmate’s constitutional right. It is the responsibility of prison supervisors to create safe working conditions, and the failure to do so should be a violation of the Eighth Amendment, regardless of whether the prison official was negligent or not. The body of case law concerning prison labor abuse sets forth an interpretation of the Eighth Amendment that is so unforgiving it leaves the door open for rampant prison abuse that does not align with the intentions of the Eighth Amendment.
Sources
Dougherty, Colleen. “The Cruel and Unusual Irony of Prisoner Work Related Injuries in the United States.” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business and Employment Law 10, no. 2 (2008): 483.
“Negligence,” Legal Information Institute. Cornell Law School, Accessed July 19, 2021.
U.S. Const. amend. VIII
Farmer v. Brennan, 511 US 825 (1994)
Crayton v. Quarterman, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 103709 (N.D. Tex. Oct. 14, 2009)
Arnold v South Carolina Department of Corrections, 843 F. Supp. 110, 112 (D.S.C. 1994)
Morgan v. Morgensen, 465 F.3d 1041, 1043 (9th Cir. 2006)
Benns, Whitney, “American Slavery, Reinvented” The Atlantic. Sept. 21, 2015.