In fact, I fear I am a jack-of-all-trades.

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These 7 Household Names Make a Killing Off of the Prison-Industrial Complex

You won't believe who's on this list.
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Once slavery was abolished in 1865, manufacturers scrambled to find other sources of cheap labor—and because the 13th amendment banned slavery (except as punishment for crimes), they didn’t have to look too far. Prisons and big businesses have now been exploiting this loophole in the 13th amendment for over a century.

“Insourcing,” as prison labor is often called, is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing. Instead of sending labor over to China or Bangladesh, manufacturers have chosen to forcibly employ the 2.4 million incarcerated people in the United States. Chances are high that if a product you’re holding says it is “American Made,” it was made in an American prison.

On average, prisoners work 8 hours a day, but they have no union representation and make between .23 and $1.15 per hour, over 6 times less than federal minimum wage. These low wages combined with increasing communication and commissary costs mean that inmates are often released from correctional facilities with more debt than they had on their arrival. Meanwhile, big businesses receive tax credits for employing these inmates in excess of millions of dollars a year.

While almost every business in America uses some form of prison labor to produce their goods, here are just a few of the companies who are helping prisoners pay off their debt to society, so to speak.

  1. Whole Foods. The costly organic supermarket often nicknamed “Whole Paycheck” purchases artisan cheese and fish prepared by inmates who work for private companies. The inmates are paid .74 cents a day to raise tilapia that is subsequently sold for $11.99 a pound at the fashionable grocery store.
  2. McDonald’s. The world’s most successful fast food franchise purchases a plethora of goods manufactured in prisons, including plastic cutlery, containers, and uniforms. The inmates who sew McDonald’s uniforms make even less money by the hour than the people who wear them.
  3. Wal-Mart. Although their company policy clearly states that “forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart”, basically every item in their store has been supplied by third-party prison labor factories. Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms where laborers are often subjected to long, arduous hours in the blazing heat without adequate sunscreen, water, or food.
  4. Victoria’s Secret. Female inmates in South Carolina sew undergarments and casual-wear for the pricey lingerie company. In the late 1990’s, 2 prisoners were placed in solitary confinement for telling journalists that they were hired to replace “Made in Honduras” garment tags with “Made in U.S.A.” tags. Victoria’s Secret has declined to comment.
  5. Aramark. This company, which also provides food to colleges, public schools and hospitals, has a monopoly on foodservice in about 600 prisons in the U.S. Despite this, Aramark has a history of poor foodservice, including a massive food shortage thatcaused a prison riot in Kentucky in 2009.
  6. AT&T. In 1993, the massive phone company laid off thousands of telephone operators—all union members—in order to increase their profits. Even though AT&T’s company policy regarding prison labor reads eerily like Wal-Mart’s, they have consistently used inmates to work in their call centers since ’93, barely paying them $2 a day.
  7. BP. When BP spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf coast, the company sent a workforce of almost exclusively African-American inmates to clean up the toxic spill while community members, many of whom were out-of-work fisherman, struggled to make ends meet. BP’s decision to use prisoners instead of hiring displaced workers outraged the Gulf community, but the oil company did nothing to reconcile the situation.


From dentures to shower curtains to pill bottles, almost everything you can imagine is being made in American prisons. Also implicit in the past and present use of prison labor are Microsoft, Nike, Nintendo, Honda, Pfizer, Saks Fifth Avenue, JCPenney, Macy’s, Starbucks, and more. For an even more detailed list of businesses that use prison labor, visit buycott.com, but the real guilty party here is the United States government. UNICOR, the corporation created and owned by the federal government to oversee penal labor, sets the condition and wage standards for working inmates.

One of the highest-paying prison jobs in the country? Sewing American flags for the state police.

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I think that Lin is stepping forward, boldly, with the first real synthesis of two great American institutions: the Broadway musical and hip-hop. Before Hamilton, each of them had their monuments. Broadway had its Chorus Line, Cats and West Side Story. Hip-hop had its Ready to Die, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and 3 Feet High and Rising. But the two worlds turned independently of one another. When there was a seismic event on Broadway, the citizens of hip-hop nation didn’t feel the ground move under their feet. And when there was a major release or retrenchment in hip-hop, the dancers and directors and dramaturges didn’t experience an inner reawakening. Until now. Because Hamilton’s isn’t just a hip-hop musical or a stage presentation of hip-hop; it’s organically and genuinely both things at once, in ways that are too important to be skimmed over.

Let’s start with the music and build up from there. When I hear Hamilton described as a “hip-hop musical,” even when I’m the one doing the describing, I balk a little bit at the phrase. Even when swearing to friends that it’s not “B-boy with spirit fingers,” it’s hard to capture. The music in the show isn’t limited to hip-hop. There are elements of pop and elements of rock and elements of the more traditional show-tune feel. But the very fact that the show draws on all these diverse genres is exactly what makes it hip-hop in spirit. Think back to all the different kinds of music and musical energy that have been absorbed into hip-hop. Run-DMC used American hard rock, in the form of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” for their song of the same name. Kanye West sampled classic R&B, in the form of Ray Charles, for “Gold Digger.” And Jay-Z used Broadway show tunes themselves, in the form of the Annie lament “It’s the Hard Knock Life,” for “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” (and then, in an encore performance, the Oliver! song “I’ll Do Anything” for “Anything”). Hip-hop, at its heart, draws on old pieces of multiple traditions but gives them a new context and new life.

The show’s tagline, “This is the story of America then, told by America now,” thinks that it’s about American history, but it’s just as much about American musical history, and specifically about the way that hip-hop has always operated. It locates the past and adds a layer of the present in a way that becomes genuinely forward-looking. That’s the first great hip-hop characteristic of the show, to borrow all kinds of music equally, and to turn them toward one end.

The second comes from Lin’s profound understanding of what makes hip-hop truly revolutionary. Broadway, at its best, works because of its spectacle: It has precision and scale and energy, and it manages to have these things over and over again without losing a step. A Broadway trouper can hit his or her marks precisely and powerfully whether it’s the first time or (in the case of the Phantom of the Opera) the 10 thousandth. Hip-hop comes from a different place. It has immediacy and cleverness and the sense of doing something big with relatively simple supplies (voice, sample, brain).

This is where Hamilton really soars. Every time I have seen it, I have tried to dissect what I’m watching: not to understand it, but to dissect it, analytically, and then count the parts. There aren’t that many parts. There are actors and dancers and a script and lighting cues and music. Those are the basic organs required for survival. But they’re used with an efficiency and a certainty that can only come from hip-hop, and from Lin’s understanding of what hip-hop really is, down at the bottom.

Questlove on ‘Hamilton’ and Hip-Hop: It Takes One (Rolling Stone)
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