The System › The jail
Inmate Labor · All four localitiesRRJ Inmate Labor and Work Programs
Weight basis: $122,649 in litter-detail reimbursement, of which approximately $105 reached the workers
What this is
The jail puts people to work. Litter details, facility operations, kitchen and laundry. The litter-detail program generated $122,649 in reimbursement to the institution. Of that, approximately $105 reached the people who did the work. That is not a typo and it is not a rounding error — it is a ratio of roughly one twelve-hundredth. Work programs are defended as skill-building, as structure, as a route to earned credit. Whatever else they are, they are also an arrangement in which a public institution bills a third party for labor performed by people it holds, and retains substantially all of the payment. The Thirteenth Amendment permits involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, and the people on the litter detail include those still awaiting trial.
Where it fails
Severity is a 1–5 editorial judgement about how acutely this institution damages a person along that dimension. It is an argument, not a measurement.
Spiritual Defining
You stand on a roadside in a marked vest picking up other people's garbage, visible to every car that passes, and the county is paid for your day while you are paid in pennies. It is designed to be seen. The message to the traffic is that this is what you become, and the message to the worker is that their labor belongs to someone else.
Civil Severe
The economics are not published. The $122,649 figure and the roughly $105 in worker compensation had to be extracted from institutional records. Neither the labor agreements, nor the pay rates, nor the pretrial status of participating workers is proactively disclosed.
Economic Defining
The institution captures approximately 99.9% of the value of the labor. Meanwhile the worker's family is paying $64 to $431 a month to the same institution. The household is thus paying the jail while the jail is being paid for the household member's work — a two-directional extraction from the same family.
Wellness Contributing
Roadside labor carries traffic and environmental exposure risk. Injury reporting, workers' compensation coverage, and medical follow-up for work-related injury are not publicly documented for this population.
The story, as it passes through here
They pay the county one hundred and twenty-two thousand six hundred and forty-nine dollars for the work. The work is done by men in vests on the side of Route 1 in August. The men are paid, all of them together, about one hundred and five dollars. Do the division. Do it again, because you will not believe it the first time. And back at the building, their mothers are paying the same county rent on the cells those men sleep in.
Paul the Apostle · The System
Panels: Panel 16, Divide It Yourself
Documented facts
| What | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Litter detail reimbursement | $122,649 received by the institution | Uncage RRJ, The Record (FOIA responses, RRJA packet extraction, recorded testimony) |
| Worker compensation | Approximately $105 total reached the incarcerated workers | Uncage RRJ, The Record (FOIA responses, RRJA packet extraction, recorded testimony) |
| Retention ratio | The institution retained approximately 99.9% of the reimbursement | Uncage RRJ, The Record (FOIA responses, RRJA packet extraction, recorded testimony) |
| Concurrent family cost | The same households pay $64–$431 per month to the facility | Uncage RRJ, The Record (FOIA responses, RRJA packet extraction, recorded testimony) |
Evidence
The only place people are named: documented cases and, where the record names them, officeholders.
Five restorative changes this institution could make
Pay prevailing wage for all labor performed, full stop. A public institution that bills $122,649 for work and pays out $105 is not running a program, it is running a margin.
Prohibit any work assignment for people held pretrial except on genuinely voluntary terms with full compensation, since these are people convicted of nothing.
Publish all labor agreements, reimbursement received, hours worked, and wages paid, annually and by program.
Convert work programs into credentialed vocational training with recognized certification that survives release, so the labor builds a future rather than a revenue line.
Guarantee workers' compensation coverage and injury reporting parity with free-world workers doing identical work.
Tagged to the Ten Theses for Humane Justice. Written to survive a change of administration.