Foreword

Each year, tens of millions of people with criminal records power the American economy. They load our trucks, stock our shelves, fix our roads, prepare our food, and build our cities. They are the invisible backbone of the industries that keep this country running.

The predominant narrative about people reentering society after incarceration is that they are excluded from the job market—that they can’t find work. But as our report will expose, the truth is more insidious. People with records are working, often in the lowest paid, most dangerous jobs in our country, precisely because they have records. They’re locked out of good jobs and left to survive in the most unstable, exploitative ones.

Our work at Beyond the Bars begins with a simple truth: There is no path to ending incarceration without transforming the conditions of work. 

The United States has built an economy where punishment and labor exploitation are deeply intertwined. Inside our nation’s prisons, multimillion-dollar compounds are sustained by the coerced labor of incarcerated people, who cook meals, clean cells, cut grass, repair roofs, and perform nearly every task needed to keep facilities running. 

The experience of performing labor under coercion leaves a lasting mark. Inside prison walls, incarcerated people learn that work means control without rights. Upon release, they enter a labor market that is hauntingly familiar, with the authority of the prison guard replaced by that of the supervisor, and the control of the cell replicated on the shop floors of low-wage, high-turnover jobs. What is often dismissed in popular and policy discourse as a “prison mentality” is, in truth, a rational adaptation to a labor market that cheapens labor, normalizes disposability, and trains people to accept exploitation as inevitable.

Many of the same jobs people perform under coercion in prison—cooking, cleaning, repairing, building, caring for others, and resolving conflicts—exist outside as stable, higher-wage careers in culinary arts, sanitation, logistics, construction, care work, and conflict mediation. People returning home from incarceration already possess the skills to thrive in these fields, yet the doors remain largely closed to them. Background checks, licensing restrictions, liability policies, insurance barriers, and employer stigma block access, creating a cruel paradox: The state profits from people’s labor inside only to bar them from the very industries their work sustains once they’re free.

Locked out of stable careers, people returning home are funneled into the only jobs still willing to take them. The temp industry has become the default entry point after incarceration. A person might apply for a warehouse job paying $25 an hour, get denied because of a background check, walk next door to a temp agency, and then be sent to that same warehouse the next day, doing the same work for minimum wage while the temp agency captures the difference. 

Temp agencies promise what other employers won’t: fast placement with no background checks, a ride, a badge, and quick pay. When bills and court fees pile up, they are one of the few avenues that open quickly enough.

This report exposes how the carceral and temp labor systems together create a workforce that can be easily controlled, underpaid, and silenced. It also lays out a roadmap for change rooted in our forthcoming strategy document, the “Economic Freedom Agenda,” which advances two interconnected objectives: raising standards in the temp industry and expanding access to union jobs, through which workers can obtain stability, fair wages, and collective power.

We offer this report as a blueprint for organizers across both the decarceral and labor movements. It is a tool for decarceral organizers to critically examine how we approach “reentry,” to recognize our shared interests with labor, and to understand that without engaging workers’ economic conditions head on, we cannot win. And for labor organizers, it is a call to see the realities, resilience, and profound skills of workers with records—and to understand that organizing these more than 114 million workers1 is not optional or peripheral, but essential to the survival and future of the labor movement itself.

Temp work is reshaping entire industries and threatening to set the floor of wages, rights, and conditions for all workers. If we don’t organize temp workers, we cede the ground on which the future of work will be built.

Maya Ragsdale & Katherine Passley

Co–Executive Directors, Beyond the Bars