California's Prop 6 to address forced inmate labor in state prisons
This November, California residents will weigh in on the use of forced labor in state prisons when they vote on Proposition 6.
Every day, Lawrence Cox proudly wears a pin inscribed with the motto, "All of us or none."
"It's inclusivity. It means everybody, no matter what your race is, we are all capable of being impacted," Cox told CBS News Bay Area.
That impact, for Cox, is through the justice system. After spending 17 years in prison, he now wears his pin as a symbol of his fight to end forced labor as a criminal penalty, as he helps to write a ballot measure — Proposition 6 — that may outlaw that practice for prisoners.
"Having experience being worked and then making what, $22 a month for working all day? Just about sometimes. I have those experiences in my mind," he explained. "I understood what it meant not to have my own autonomy. I understood what it meant to be forced to work."
California outlawed slavery in 1850 in its first state constitution, but it held onto a clause that is still in effect 174 years later that allows prisons to demand inmates to work various jobs or be penalized.
Cox said his own experience working in prison kitchens and as a prison janitor wasn't effective in his journey of rehabilitation.
"I can remember being in High Desert [State Prison in Susanville] and getting up at five in the morning and being outside and working the main kitchen that supplied all the yards. And it's 15 degrees, 20 degrees. It's so cold to where all the water that falls, it's already turned into icicles leading on the roof from the dock, as you know that we work at, and I remember almost having frostbite, because we have to constantly go in and outside to unload and load trucks that come back from different yards," he recalled.
According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, inmates earn anywhere from $0.16 per hour for basic labor to $10.24 per day for inmates who works as firefighters.
But Cox says these wages even at the highest levels are not enough to provide an inmate with enough money upon release, or to sustain their needs from within prison.
"Plenty of times we'd be like, 'This is just slavery. We get paid slave wages,'" he said. "It's hard on people's families when they are incarcerated. It costs. It costs. It really does. It costs. So being able to take some of that burden off of my family would have been excellent, but making pennies on the hour, you can't. Can't do that. It's impossible."
Critics of the ballot measure say work inside a prison is all part of an inmate's need to repay their debt to society and set some up for life outside prison walls. But so far, no money has been spent opposing the ballot measure.
Even so, a new study from the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California shows that half of likely voters are estimated to vote "no" on the measure.
Study author Mark Baldassare says a lack of knowledge of the proposition often leads voters to default to voting "no."
"It's important always to keep in mind there isn't a d or and r next to it theres a yes or a no and voters if they're not sure for any reason the default is to vote no," he explained. "There's more a sense of why did the state legislature put this on the ballot what is involuntary servitude anyways."
Lawrence argues providing inmates with a right to engage in educational or vocational training, or dignified pay, would do more to improve public safety and reduce the potential to reoffend.
"I wanted to take a rehabilitative course. I wanted to take a college course that was an in-person college course. And because I had the job, I couldn't take it, and when I tried to get out, I was told, 'No, you have to get a write up. And after multiple write ups, they'll drop you," Cox recalled. "Well, when you get a write up, you know, you lose time for getting write ups. And if you go to the board, the board looks at those write ups as if, 'Okay, you can't obey the rules.' So no, we're not letting you go home early."
Cox said he believes the proposition is "an excellent opportunity for us as a state, as a society, as a people, as constituents, to step up and put our morals before profit and gain, put our morals before the desire to exploit individuals."