An image of a UMBC dorm room from InternHousingHub, showing a desk, chair, and the bed along with some light decoration.

Earlier this semester, I learned that a significant portion of the furniture from our university is made using prison labor. How’d I find this out? I asked for a new desk chair at my job, because ours was falling apart. I was told that it would take months to get one, yadayadayada, something something, and then I heard the words “prison industrial complex” and immediately tuned back in to the conversation.

So yes, unfortunately, like many public universities, UMBC buys mostly furniture made by incarcerated people. The entire UMD system, in fact, has Maryland Correctional Enterprises (what the hell kind of name is THAT?!?!?) as their “preferred provider.”

Looking through the information I could find about MCE, including their annual report, was honestly sickening. MCE made over fifty million dollars in sales in 2019, according to this report, and at this time, they had over fifteen hundred incarcerated employees. These employees, at that time, were getting paid between 17 cents and $1.31 an hour, depending on if their labor is “skilled” or not. Within their report, they dress up this program as a way to get inmates back on their feet and have a job waiting for them when they get out of jail. But even if that is the case, MCE is exploitative at absolute best.

So why do universities do this? Because it’s the law, silly!

Yes. Literally. There is a law in Maryland that forces the UMD system to have MCE as its preferred provider. So while we can urge UMD to divest all it wants, they are forced to buy prison-produced furniture unless MCE grants them a waiver.

There are a lot of things to consider when diving into the nuances of this subject. Racial disparity in incarcerated people, the liklihood of reoffending/being re-incarcerated after going to prison, the dehumanization of prisoners, and so much more. It would take half a dozen blog posts to talk about all of it, but I’m going to keep it as simple as possible.

Imagine you clock in for an eight hour shift. You work all day, doing what someone else has deemed to be “unskilled labor.” At the end of all of it, you have made a dollar and thirty six cents… and that is before taxes.

YES! THEY ARE TAXED!

Words actually cannot describe how worked up I am getting about all of this, so I’m going to wrap this up as best as I can.

Inmates in Maryland prisons are given jobs for miniscule wages. They build and construct furniture that is then purchased by Maryland instritutions, potentially with funding from the state of Maryland. Those already miniscule wages get taxed, which is money that gets fed directly back to the state, and then the left over money may or may not go to them depending on if their work release requires them to pay room and board. If they do get the money, they can often only spend it on things from the prison commissary, which is a limited selection at best.

It is just one more way that the prison industrial complex feeds into a constant cycle of dehumanization of incarcerated people, showing them that their labor is worth hundreds of times less than the labor of others, despite the fact that said labor is making MCE tens of millions of dollars in sales.