1. “Factbox: Ten facts on prison labor worldwide,” Reuters, April 11, 2019: www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-slavery-global-factbox-idUSKCN1RN0ZL [last accessed July 22, 2022].

2. “Who are the Uyghurs and why is China being accused of genocide,” BBC News, May 24, 2022: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22278037 [last accessed July 22, 2022].

3. “Sweating for fashion: Labour comes cheap, and will get cheaper still,” The Economist 370 (March 6, 2004): 138–39.

4. Sean Sellers and Greg Asbed, “The History and Evolution of Forced Labor in Florida Agriculture,” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 5 (2011): 38.

5. Prison populations across the world have fluctuated during the COVID-19 pandemic (from early 2020 onward), and differing methods of calculation give different population headcounts, so these figures are indicative, but were sourced from “Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total,” World Prison Brief, December 2021, www.prisonstudies.org [last accessed: July 22, 2022]. In addition, the most recent U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics show that from 2010 to 2020, the nation's correctional population decreased 22.4 percent (down to 1,588,400 persons). The United States’ community supervision and incarcerated populations declined steadily until 2019 when there was a sharp drop in both. Evaluations of the impacts of COVID and post-pandemic trends are, of course, ongoing. See Rick Kluckow and Zhen Zeng, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” (2022) 1. NCJ 303184. Washington: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus20st.pdf [retrieved June 1, 2022].

6. “Russian Prisons: Slave labour and criminal cultures,” The Economist 409 (October 19, 2013): 40.

7. Gibson-Light, Michael, “Sandpiles of Dignity: Labor Status and Boundary-Making in the Contemporary American Prison,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 6 (March 2020): 200–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fraser, Steve and Freeman, Joshua B., “IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR: Barbarism and Progress: The Story of Convict Labor,” New Labor Forum 21 (2012): 94–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Does the United States really have 5 percent of the world's population and one quarter of the world's prisoners?” Washington Post, April 30, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/30/does-the-united-states-really-have-five-percent-of-worlds-population-and-one-quarter-of-the-worlds-prisoners/ [last accessed: July 22, 2022].

9. Studies of contemporary prison labor in the United States include: Parampathu, Joseph, Prison Labor: Capitalism Without Markets: Understanding the Economics of Totalitarian Institutions (e-publisher, 2022)Google Scholar; Hatton, Erin, ed., Labor and Punishment: Work in and Out of Prison (Oakland, CA, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hatton, Erin, “When Work Is Punishment: Penal Subjectivities in Punitive Labor Regimes,” Punishment and Society 20 (2018): 174–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wright, Paul and Herivel, Tara, Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; Haney, Lynne, “Working Through Mass Incarceration: Gender and the Politics of Prison Labor from East to West,” Signs 36 (2010): 73–97CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Bowe, John, Nobodies: Modern American slave labor and the dark side of the new global economy (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Bair, Asatar, Prison Labor in the United States: An Economic Analysis (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pryor, Frederic, “Industries Behind Bars: An Economic Perspective on the Production of Goods and Services in U.S. Prison Industries,” Review of Industrial Organization 27 (2005): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. See, for example: Ashley T. Rubin, The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913 (Cambridge, 2021); Jonathan Nash, “‘The Prison Has Failed’: The New York State Prison, In the City of New York, 1797–1828,” New York History 98 (2017): 71–89; Jeffrey A. Mullins, “Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History: Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform,” New York History 97 (2016): 427–49; Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012); Janet Miron, Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Living in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto, 2011); Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (Cambridge, 2008); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: the Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, 2006); Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Durham, NC, 2006); Mark E. Kann, Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power in the Early American Republic (New York, 2005); Matthew W. Meskell, “An American Resolution: The History of Prisons in the United States from 1777-1877,” Stanford Law Review 51 (1999): 839–65; David J. Rothman and Norval Morris, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: the practice of punishment in western society (Oxford, 1995); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971).

11. See, for example: Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017): Henry Kamerling, Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post-Civil War America (Charlottesville, VA, 2017); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (Charlottesville, VA, 2000); Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era, (Gainesville, FL, 2000); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the South (New York, 1996); Ward M. McAfee, “A History of Convict Labor in California,” Southern California Quarterly 72 (1990): 19–40; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19^th-Century South (Oxford, 1984).

12. See, for example, Courtney Crittenden, Barbara Koons-Witt, and Robert Kaminski, “Being Assigned Work in Prison: Do Gender and Race Matter?” Feminist Criminology 13 (2018): 359–81; Haley, No Mercy Here; LeFlouria, Chained in Silence; Gross, Colored Amazons; Mara Dodge, ‘Whores and thieves of the worst kind’: A Study of Women, Crime and Prisons, 1835-2000 (Northern Illinois, 2006); Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World; Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency; Mara Dodge, “‘One Female Prisoner Is of More Trouble Than Twenty Males’: Women Convicts in Illinois Prisons, 1835-1896,” Journal of Social History 32 (1999): 907–30; Anne M. Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men's Penitentiaries (Illinois, 1997); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons and Social Control (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); Anne M. Butler, “Still in Chains: Black Women in Western Prisons, 1865-1910,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 (1989): 18–35; Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Prisons for Women, 1790-1980,” Crime & Justice 5 (1983): 129–81.

13. See also Haley, No Mercy Here and Vivien M. L. Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida's “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (Gainesville, FL, 2012) for analysis of similar female carceral experiences in early-twentieth-century Georgia and Florida.

14. On the twentieth-century development of state-use prison markets in Texas and Florida, see Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019); Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time.

15. Quoted in Daryl Michael Scott, “The Social and Intellectual Origins of 13thism,” Fire!!! 5 (2020): 27.

16. Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners' Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 102 (2015): 77.

17. Scott, “The Social and Intellectual Origins of 13thism,” 2–39. The exception clause is in italics: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

18. Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 21 Grat. 790 (Virginia, 1871) quoted in Chase, 77.

On legal history of the loss of citizenship rights by those convicted of a felony, see Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship (Oxford, 2012). On civil death, law and prisons, see also: Sarah M. Benson, The Prison of Democracy: Race, Leavenworth, and the Culture of Law (Oakland, 2019).

19. See for example, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010, 2020); Luke J. Hickey, A Legacy of Supremacy: Prison, Power, and the Carceral Nation (Bellingham, 2017); Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis, MN, 2015); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York, 2009).

20. Heather Ann Thompson, “The Prison Industrial Complex: A Growth Industry in a Shrinking Economy, New Labor Forum 21 (2012): 39.

21. Sadhbh Walshe, “How US prison labour pads corporate profits at taxpayers’ expense,” The Guardian, July 6, 2012: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/prison-labor-pads-corporate-profits-taxpayers-expense [last accessed July 22, 2022].

22. Jaron Browne, “Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation,” Race, Poverty & the Environment 14 (2007): 42.

23. Joseph T. Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation (New York, 2001); Scott Christianson, With Liberty For Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston, 1999), last chapter.

24. “Minnesota's job market; Land of 1,000 opportunities,” The Economist, 351 (May 29, 1999): 56, 61.

25. Quoted in Jaron Browne, “Rooted in Slavery,” 42.

26. Quoted in Keith Armstrong, “‘You May Be Down And Out, But You Ain't Beaten’: Collective Bargaining for Incarcerated Workers,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 110 (2020): 597. For critiques of California's prison fire camps, see: Philip Goodman, “Race in California's Prison Fire Camps for Men: Prison Politics, Space, and the Racialization of Everyday Life.” American Journal of Sociology 120 (2014): 352–9; Philip Goodman, “‘Another Second Chance’: Rethinking Rehabilitation through the Lens of California's Prison Fire Camps,” Social Problems 59 (2012): 437–58; Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” Journal of American History 96 (2009): 702–26.

27. Samar Ahmad, “The Shadow Workforce: Prison Labor and International Trade,” Harvard International Review (October 26, 2020), hir.harvard.edu/the-shadow-workforce-prison-labor-and-international-trade/ [last accessed July 23, 2022].

28. Bianca Tylek, “Corporate Exploitation of Prison Labor Reaches Deep into the Supply Chain,” Truthout (December 19, 2021), truthout.org/articles/corporate-exploitation-of-prison-labor-reaches-deep-into-the-supply-chain/ [last accessed July 23, 2022].

29. Gibson-Light, “Sandpiles of Dignity, 199.

30. See “Prison Laborers: What Kind of Labor do They do? US Marshals Service,”ß 2022, hcsdmass.org/prison-laborers [last access July 23, 2022].

31. Walshe, “How US prison labour pads corporate profits at taxpayers’ expense.”

32. Testimony is quoted in Walshe, “How US prison labour pads corporate profits at taxpayers’ expense.”

33. Ibid.

34. Armstrong, ‘“You May Be Down And Out, But You Ain't Beaten,” 595, 609.