Across the United States, carceral economies exploit the labor and resources of incarcerated people\u2014disproportionately Black\u2014for state and corporate profit. Enabled by the Thirteenth Amendment\u2019s Punishment Exception Clause, which permits slavery as punishment for a crime, and reinforced by state economic policies that reach far beyond prison walls, these systems siphon wealth from Black communities into government budgets and private industries. They reflect racial capitalism: an economic system in which racism and capitalism operate in tandem to sustain structures of profit and exploitation. Laws and policies at every level entrench this system, ensuring that Black overincarceration continues to fuel a profitable carceral economy.<\/p>\n
This Article centers state-run prison industries as a core, yet underexamined, engine of carceral capitalism. Using Maryland\u2014which has the nation\u2019s highest percentage of Black people in its prison population relative to the state\u2019s general population\u2014as a case study, it examines how the state has deliberately designed a prison labor economy. At its center is Maryland Correctional Enterprises (MCE), a state-run program that pays incarcerated workers exploitatively low wages to produce goods and services for state agencies. Maryland law requires state agencies to make purchases from MCE, guaranteeing a market. To sustain this labor force, the state pays low wages and charges inflated prices for necessities, extracting wealth from incarcerated people and perpetuating the very conditions that drive incarceration.<\/p>\n
Although scholars have long critiqued exploitative prison labor and called for reforms such as repealing the Punishment Exception Clause, raising wages, and extending labor protections to incarcerated workers, this Article argues that such efforts are necessary but insufficient to dismantle the deliberately designed carceral economy that makes exploitative labor possible. It argues that doing so also requires dismantling both the economic logic that hides the true costs of incarceration and the legal architecture that allows exploitation to persist. Building on existing scholarship and drawing insights from Maryland\u2019s carceral economy, this Article contends that abolishing state-run prison industries and the economic policies that sustain them is essential to ending exploitive prison labor and advancing the broader abolitionist goal of dismantling the carceral economy. Accordingly, it calls for additional measures: repealing procurement mandates, eliminating authorizing statutes, and advancing abolitionist advocacy that exposes the true costs of incarceration. Together, these strategies confront the legal and economic structures that link incarceration to profit and enable exploitative prison labor and carceral economies to thrive.<\/p>\n