A recent investigation into the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) revealed that prison guards there have been using incarcerated individuals to wash their personal cars, give haircuts and shine shoes at fundraisers to benefit the prison staff — in other words, they have been using the labor of incarcerated people for their own personal gain.<\/p>\n
One senior IDOC staff member admitted to state-employed investigators that these fundraisers were \u201cbad optics.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really hard for me to just honestly stomach the idea,\u201d he told an investigator, that \u201cemployees benefit from offender labor.\u201d<\/p>\n
This information came to light after an anonymous individual at the Pinckneyville prison filed a complaint in 2017 alleging that guards had improperly raised money for the so-called Employee Benefit Fund (EBF), established to provide various perks for prison guards, including birthday parties, Christmas parties, funeral flowers, retirement gifts and Employee Appreciation Week.<\/p>\n
The complaint then triggered an investigation<\/a> by the state\u2019s executive inspector general\u2019s office. Whether the complaint was filed by a staff member or a person incarcerated at the prison is unclear.<\/p>\n Once it was underway, the investigation soon found that the issues raised by the complaint \u201cmay not have been unique\u201d to Pinckneyville. EBFs existed at all of the IDOC\u2019s 25 adult prisons, and administrative headquarters in Springfield, bringing in almost $1 million in 2017. <\/p>\n As the senior IDOC employee told an investigator, he believed that the EBFs had become more prevalent because the current administration was \u201cpushing to improve employee morale.\u201d The EBFs were found by investigators to be open to potential fraud, and some included illegal raffles. Then-Acting IDOC Director John Baldwin feigned ignorance of the EBFs when questioned during the investigation, and said he had \u201cno issue\u201d with the use of prison labor.<\/p>\n Bianca Tylek, founder and executive director of Worth Rises<\/a>, a national organization working to dismantle the prison industry, spoke with Truthout<\/em> about the #EndTheException<\/a> campaign against prison labor, where people are paid dismal wages for prison jobs. \u201cThose incarcerated, disproportionately Black and Brown people,\u201d she said, \u201care still enslaved in many ways. They are forced to work under the threat of bodily harm.\u201d They should be recognized as workers who have rights, who deserve a minimum wage, or commensurate wages, and worker protections. \u201cIf someone in prison gets hurt on the job, or if they get sick, they don\u2019t get paid,\u201d Tylek told Truthout<\/em>. <\/p>\n In putting incarcerated people to work to directly benefit those overseeing their captivity, the guards from the Illinois Department of Corrections created a situation even more exploitative than the sorts of standard prison labor that Tylek described. <\/p>\n Additionally, EBFs were found by investigators to be open to potential fraud, to \u201cwaste\u201d hours of staff time, and to include illegal raffles.<\/p>\n IDOC policy requires that EBF funds only come from purchases made by guards from vending machines and commissary (a store inside the prison with food, hygiene products and office items for sale). But during 2012-2017, the period being investigated, the majority of revenue for EBFs came from other sources. In 2017, 80 percent of the nearly $1 million raised for EBFs in Illinois prisons came from fundraising efforts. A small but not insignificant fraction of that money was raised through the use of prison labor. Between the fiscal years of 2016 to 2018, fundraisers at 18 facilities using prison labor brought in a total of about $56,300.<\/p>\nFundraisers Were a Flagrant Violation of IDOC Policy <\/strong><\/h2>\n