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r/AskHistory•5 mo. ago

TheresJustNoMoney

So, starting wage in The Feds is $0.13 per hour (Yes, thirteen cents; not a typo.) In what year was the thirteen cent minimum prison wage first set, and how much would that be today if it had adjusted for inflation?

What would it take to have a change enacted that would update minimum prison wage with inflation, and retroactively so?

And how did you make it financially when you were in The Feds?

 

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[–]Litup-North 4 points 5 months ago 

The 13-cent per hour wage for prison work was never set as a standard across the entire U.S., but it has been used in many prisons, especially for basic jobs or non-industry work. The exact year it started isn't clearly documented, but inmates have been paid very low wages—sometimes just a few cents per hour—for decades.

In 2006, a law was passed that aimed to increase wages for federal prison workers in special programs to match the federal minimum wage by 2013. But that only applied to certain types of prison jobs, not all of them.

So basically:

• Prisoners have been paid very low wages (like $0.13/hour) for a long time.
• There's no exact year when the 13-cent rate officially started.
• Wages vary by state, prison, and job type.
• Some laws have tried to raise those wages, but it’s not the same everywhere.

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[–]hallese 3 points 5 months ago 

I can't really go into the when and the inflationary adjustments, nor am I going to attempt to figure out how that would work. Legislatively. What I will say is that I used to work in the finance office at the South Dakota Department of Corrections, and at the time we paid inmates $0.25 an hour. This number was chosen because it was roughly what an inmate would expect to get deposited in their account if they were working minimum wage 34 hours a week. When we looked at increasing the wages, we found that going up to $0.35 an hour would be the maximum before restitution would start to kick in, and then taxes would need to get involved. Rather than increase the hourly pay, South Dakota opted to enact earn discharge credits so inmates could move up there release date so long as they also completed any programming required by health.

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