I spent eight years behind bars. From the age of 16 to 24, I went from facility to facility within the California Correctional System. About three years of which were spent in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Prison, at SATF/Corcoran. During my time there, Involuntary Servitude prevented me from accessing rehabilitative programs, vocational classes, and even prevented me from receiving visits from my family. While I did not know the term involuntary servitude then, I did understand that I was being forced to work and was surprised to hear the priority it held. When I arrived at the prison, I was given a job shortly after, with no say in where or when I wanted to work. They simply slipped a piece of paper in my door that told me that I now worked in the kitchen first thing in the morning, into the afternoon. If I refused or failed to show up for work, I would be placed on C-status, where all my privileges would be revoked, and I would only be allowed out of my cell for two hours a day. Not only was the job inconvenient, but it also prevented me from having access to my counselor, who I needed to talk to, to get into rehabilitative programs like self-help groups and vocational classes. I started work before the counselor arrived for the day and didn’t get off until he had already left for the day. To see him, I would have to be excused from work early, and hope that the counselor was not busy that day.

Not only does having a job take priority over any other group or program, it takes priority over visits as well. My family made the drive to come and see me one weekend, and even though I had cleared it with my boss that day knowing I had a visit, I was turned away at the visiting hall by the officers, who told me that since I was scheduled to be at work at that time, I would not be allowed into my visit to see my family. The only way I could be allowed to see them is if I put in an “Excused Time Off (ETO)” slip, which takes over a month to process, and can only be done roughly once a month for a regular-length visit. It should come as no surprise that stopping someone from seeing their family is counterproductive to rehabilitating them. In CDCR, the focus should be on making sure that people are rehabilitated and learning the skills they need to be successful upon release, not subjected to a loophole for free labor.

The jobs were just that; labor, no real skills or anything involved, just something that needed to get done and didn't give anything back. I was not paid for any of the work I did, and even those with paid positions were making about 7 cents an hour. Fifty-five percent of which would be taken if the person owed restitution. (Fifty percent goes towards that restitution and 5% to a processing fee.) I eventually got the classes I wanted by switching to another job that allowed me time to see my counselor, before finally being placed on a waitlist to get into the vocational class I wanted to get into. My release was based off of an appeal, but had I stayed in prison, the rate that I would have earned credits from vocational classes would have been impeded by the 10+ months I had to spend working, switching positions, and waiting on the waitlist to get into vocation to start earning those credits. Work offers 0 'milestone' credits or sentence reductions; vocational classes gave additional time off the sentence for earning certifications. 

Many people I have talked to that are against Proposition 6 seem to compartmentalize ‘prisoners’ into a separate class of person, almost seeming to forget that they are still a human being. It can be easy to say that people in prison ‘deserve’ to be put to work as a punishment for what they have done, and accept that when someone gets out and reoffends, that it is due to their criminal nature. I believe that it is instead a failure of the system to rehabilitate them. Instead of getting the help they needed, they were busy being forced to work. Most people in prison will return to the community at some point, so instead of throwing every punishment we can at them in an effort to make sure they are worse than they were when they went in, we should be making sure that they are equipped with some measure of skills and experience that can actually help them to become a better member of society, otherwise we cannot be surprised that people who go to prison and get further traumatized go on to commit another crime.

Prop 6 would ban forced prison labor, prohibit prisons from punishing incarcerated people who seek rehabilitation over forced labor, and amend the State Constitution to read "Slavery and Involuntary Servitude are Prohibited.”