In 2019, while incarcerated at the Centennial Correctional Facility in Colorado and assigned to shifts in the kitchen, Nadia Reed refused to work for two days in one month. All incarcerated people in Colorado are required to labor, and are typically paid mere cents an hour. Her punishment for that decision was being confined to her cell alone for 23 hours a day for 30 days, unable to interact with any other incarcerated people, not even during the hour she was allowed out for exercise and to shower. She was also denied the ability to talk to her loved ones. In court testimony, she described the isolation as “very depressing,” leading her to self-harm.
The following year, after Reed completed her assigned shift in the kitchen, she was ordered to stay longer to do additional work. She refused, for which she was handcuffed, shackled, strip searched, put in solitary confinement and once again confined to her cell for 23 hours a day, according to her testimony. As a result of the incident, Reed was reclassified from medium security to a higher level, and she says she was sexually assaulted when she was moved into that part of the prison.
Experiences like Reed’s are common in Colorado, with Bolts reporting in 2023 that incarcerated people there are routinely subjected to solitary confinement and other punishments for refusing to work. But that could soon be a thing of the past. In a groundbreaking ruling last month in a lawsuit filed against the state by Harold Mortis and Richard Lilgerose, men who were punished for refusing to work in crowded prison kitchens during the COVID-19 pandemic, a state district court judge found that Colorado is violating incarcerated people’s rights by the way it punishes them for refusing to work.
The judge ruled that Colorado has failed to abide by a change voters made to their state constitution in 2018 that erased language allowing “slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.”
While the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery at the end of the Civil War, it included a carveout that sanctions it as punishment for people convicted of crimes. Many state constitutions include the same loophole, which has allowed prisons to force incarcerated people to work under threat of discipline, often for little pay; seven states don’t pay anything for most prison jobs.
Hellbound and Down 