Talib Muwahhid has a knack for woodworking, and over the years, he’s tinkered with a variety of different projects.

“I was making things like little chess sets and storage boxes and stuff out of popsicle sticks,” he said.

Most recently, Muwahhid was practicing the craft not as a hobby, but as a worker in a Virginia prison. The 44-year-old said he made between 45 and 90 cents an hour doing a variety of jobs for Virginia Correctional Enterprises, a state-run program where incarcerated laborers make everything from furniture and cleaning products to branded clothing and drug testing kits. In the commonwealth, 90 cents an hour is the most an incarcerated person can earn, per a Virginia Department of Corrections policy — though most earn less than that.

For context, sending a single text message through GTL’s GettingOut app — the only option folks in state custody have for that kind of communication — costs 50 cents.

Muwahhid is among thousands of incarcerated people working at prisons in most U.S. states; this is explicitly enabled under the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery but includes an exception clause allowing forced labor after a person’s been convicted of a crime.

At the time the 13th Amendment was adopted in 1865, University of Chicago Law School professor Adam Davidson said, local law enforcement — primarily in the South — mobilized to imprison the recently freed Black population. It was a strategy to replace the unpaid labor of slavery.

“The South immediately realizes how powerful this can be. So, they pass the Black Codes, they criminalize every aspect of Black and poor life, generally. You see a massive expansion of the use of criminal law. It’s kind of shocking,” he said. “You also see a flip where there had been more incarcerated people in the North, but all of a sudden [incarceration in] the South explodes for obvious reasons. That is sort of an obvious labor story.”

In 2018, Colorado became the first state to individually ban forced labor in its state prisons, and other states followed suit, including a few in Appalachia: Tennessee and Alabama. In South Carolina, lawmakers in 2024 approved a measure to require incarcerated laborers be paid the prevailing minimum wage. But most other states, including Virginia, still pay incarcerated laborers less than a dollar per hour. 

Davidson said a nationwide change would involve amending the U.S. Constitution to remove the language in the 13th Amendment enabling forced labor, but that process would be difficult. Because of that, tackling the issue at the state level is likely to produce the most immediate results, he said.

“There are a lot of different situations that lead to incarceration,” said Kenneth Hunter, a formerly incarcerated activist who’s advocating ahead of next year’s state legislative session to raise wages paid to workers in prison. “As a state, do we want to be guilty of exploiting them for mistakes that they made? Should we be enslaving people in 2025?”

A History of Forced Labor

A silent second-floor room at The Virginia Historical Society in Richmond offers a glimpse into forced labor’s history in the U.S. It houses the Leon M. Bazile Papers, an archive of the attorney and circuit court judge who initially sentenced Mildred and Richard Loving to a year in prison for violating the commonwealth’s law against interracial marriage.

Along with the case notes on lined yellow paper, financial documents and Christmas cards are dozens of hand-written letters from incarcerated people seeking relief. Tucked away among those is a letter Arthur Page wrote to Bazile in 1944, after serving the first year of a 10-year sentence.

During a portion of that 12 months, Page worked on a road crew in Strasburg — a town in Shenandoah County about five miles from the Belle Grove Plantation and near the site of the Battle of Cedar Creek, both now part of the National Park System. 

“While working in quarry I was struct in the right eye with a small piece of rock and loss the … sight of my right eye,” Page wrote in neat cursive 81 years ago. “I am now on the Virginia State Farm … .”

Today, that property is part of a larger constellation of facilities across the commonwealth, where hundreds of incarcerated people are still toiling for the state, just like Page did. 

“They call it ‘dorm season’ … which is our really busy season,” Muwahhid said about his time working in VCE woodshops.

What Muwahhid described is an uptick in demand ahead of any academic year beginning. Public institutions in Virginia — including colleges and branches of state government — are required to buy certain products from VCE, unless a less expensive, comparable product is approved for purchase. In practice, that means the state’s flagship colleges and universities — like Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville — purchase a range of goods produced through prison labor.

In 2023, Tech ordered $327,000 of furniture from VCE, and the following year, it spent tens of thousands more. UVA doesn’t use the state’s public-facing purchase portal when buying from VCE, but a spokesperson said the school spent about $19,000 on VCE products in 2024 and 2025.

Another school, Christopher Newport University in Newport News, ordered more than $144,000 of furniture from VCE at the beginning of October. But state departments regularly make purchases, too. VADOC, for instance, recently placed its own order for $16,800 worth of desktop calendars and monthly planners from the people it incarcerates. 

Despite the arrangement, VCE hasn’t always been profitable, according to figures obtained through a public records request. The department made about $242,000 in fiscal year 2025; it lost $560,000 the year before; and in FY23, VCE netted $3.5 million.

For the state, jobs that incarcerated people do are framed both as a service to the individual and as a cost-saving mechanism for the commonwealth. 

Brittany Friedman, a University of Southern California sociology professor, sees Virginia’s prison system as a direct extension of slavery.

“It’s where the level of cruelty that you see in these setups that states have in terms of treating the prison system as an economic engine — which as we noted in the beginning goes all the way back to chattel slavery,” said Friedman, who cofounded the Captive Money Lab, a research project focused on the economics of the carceral system. “It’s a very American way to run your prison system and conceive of it in a capitalist and incapacitating manner versus thinking about how we can actually solve the social problems that lead to over incarceration.”

VADOC spokesperson Carla Miles acknowledged receiving a list of questions for this story in early September, but didn’t respond with answers, despite multiple follow-up emails. Communications lead Kyle Gibson declined to answer another set of questions sent several weeks later. Among them was a query about what contributed to VCE’s swing in income.

Continued Responsibilities

Serving a sentence doesn’t pause responsibilities outside prison: People continue to owe car and mortgage payments, child support and are on the hook for a range of other financial obligations. They also need to purchase personal items, like deodorant and toothpaste, during their incarceration. And when men harmed themselves last year to protest their conditions at Red Onion State Prison in southwest Virginia, VADOC officials floated the idea of charging them for medical treatment. 

Muwahhid, who also made license plates during his time in state custody, said purchases at the commissary — like coffee — are limited to $135 per month for each person. He added that because of varying hours and rates of compensation, it’d be almost impossible for many people to earn that much in any 30-day period. 

Most incarcerated people don’t see their whole paychecks, either. While working and in VADOC custody, people are required to sign a “Pay Withholding Agreement,” allowing for up to 5% of their compensation to be put toward outstanding court fees. If an incarcerated person declines to sign the agreement, they’ll still be “required to participate but will not receive payment for participation.”

In response to a records request, the department said it could tally a “point-in-time number of inmates” it garnished wages from, but not a dollar amount for an entire year. The information would have cost 100 Days in Appalachia $360.

VADOC offers a range of education and re-entry training opportunities, including the kinds of jobs Muwahhid worked. The department credits its efforts with a lower recidivism rate compared to most other states that make that data public.

While working in the woodshop, Muwahhid, who’s currently in custody at the Greensville Correctional Center and taking part in The Virginia Model program, said what he learned wasn’t imparted by the staff. Instead, it was other incarcerated people teaching him how to operate machinery and complete projects, contradicting department policy.

“We are the ones who train each other,” he said, “and we are the ones that actually fix the machines when they’re broken.”

He described a hands-off mentality by staff at the prison’s woodshop and in the tag shop, where he said Gatorade was used as a way to accommodate high temperatures during the summer. Muwahhid said he’s seen people pass out from heat while working, and he and others regularly cut open their hands while stamping out license plates.

Department of Corrections staff didn’t respond to questions about worker safety, but VCE’s YouTube channel routinely posts videos touting the value of this work experience to incarcerated people. Among the videos is one from about a year ago, featuring Flo Wilkins, who at the time said she was working as a truck driver. In the video, Wilkins said her VCE job kept her away from “the chaos” inside prison and gave her a skill to take home. 

“Two years before I got out of prison, something clicked in me,” she said, discussing her work in transportation. “This is a great career that could make me great money. … It was an easy transition back into the world for me.”

What’s next?

In 2003, the Virginia legislature passed a bill dissolving an advisory panel monitoring VCE; a nonpartisan state agency recently released a report assessing the department’s vocational training programs.

While it found that participation in Career and Technical Education programs, which includes on-the-job training, resulted in lower recidivism rates and higher wages, waitlists to access the training were significant. About 1,500 people are currently enrolled and 3,200 hope to join the program.

The report also found that “DOC does not consider inmates’ recidivism risk when making educational program enrollment decisions, even though reducing recidivism is a primary goal of the programs.”

For Hunter, the formerly incarcerated activist, the goal is fairness and justice. 

“I think as a society, as a country, we have a long way to go in terms of learning to view the incarcerated population as indeed citizens and needing to be treated with some sort of equity,” he said.

Hunter knows there’re several stumbling blocks — apart from most states not having similar laws on the books — to working on legislation that would guarantee the minimum wage when people are forced to work in state prisons. The bill also likely would be difficult to pass: a higher guaranteed wage would cost the state money. Still, he sees it as a possible first step toward excising the 13th Amendment’s exception clause — and toward equality.

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