There are worker cooperatives in prisons all over the world, including in Ethiopia, South Africa, Iran, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Italy, and more. Folks incarcerated in California want them, too. At the Law Center, our vision is a future without prisons. To move toward that future, we want to help our partners in prison to create an ecosystem of “prison cooperatives,” i.e. worker cooperatives owned by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. That's why we're working with Earth Equity and others to make prison cooperatives possible.

The exploitation inherent in the California prison labor system perpetuates cycles of poverty. This election cycle 2024, voters had an opportunity to reform California prison labor laws. Specifically, Proposition 6 would have repealed a current provision in the California Constitution allowing slavery as a punishment for crime. We were disheartened when the results came in. 54% of Californians voted against Proposition 6, allowing slavery and exploitation to continue.

Incarcerated workers get paid meager wages - often a few center per hour - which is not enough to support their families, pay for basic needs, or save for their eventual reentry into society. Without securing dignified earnings, people in prison may become a financial burden on their loved ones, further straining the resources and cohesion of struggling households and communities. This economic strain exacerbates intergenerational cycles of trauma, violence, homelessness, and incarceration. Prison cooperatives stand out as a powerful alternative to this exploitative system. 

Case studies from around the world show how cooperatives inside prisons benefit society and reduces recidivism. For example, prison coops in Italy, England, Iran, and Puerto Rico allow incarcerated workers to earn a living wage and gain valuable skills. (Shout out to the research of Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Esther West, who have shed light on these examples). Unfortunately, people in prison are not allowed to operate worker owned coops in California. 

When California leaders look to Norwegian models of incarceration to replicate, they miss the fact that their success is largely due to the economic opportunities made available to those being released from prison. That’s why the creation of cooperatives run for and by formerly incarcerated people is a critical component of this work. 

SELC has joined the Let Us Contribute Initiative (LUCI) to draft legislation that will:

1. enable the creation of worker cooperatives inside of California prisons, and
2. create a “Green Reentry Coop Fund” to distribute grants to persons released from prison who are developing ecologically regenerative worker coops.

Allowing people in prison to practice collective governance over their own labor will show them that work without exploitation is possible. The nature of prison coops would replace isolation and fear of others with cooperation and solidarity. In this way, prison coops offer a transformative abolitionist strategy by:

- reducing the quantitative justifications for prisons through decreased rates of recidivism, and
- reducing the qualitative justifications for sites of punishment to address antisocial behavior caused by a culture of alienation.

This strategy furthers Moten and Harney’s definition of abolition:

“Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

However, significant legislative hurdles remain under the California Code of Regulations and CDCR’s interpretation of its powers. At the Law Center, we are focusing our research on identifying and overcoming these barriers, particularly within:

- Chapter 3 (Civil Rights of Prisoners §§2600 - 2644), and
- Chapter 5 (Employment of Prisoners §§2700 - 2792) of the California Penal Code, and
- California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Division 3, Chapter 1: Rules and Regulations of Adult Operations and Programs.

Our goal is to draft legislation that will allow people in prison to own and operate cooperatives, creating pathways to economic justice that are currently denied to them. 

Our partners

We are not doing this work alone nor did we even come up with this idea! Kelton O'Connor co-founded Earth Equity, a project working at the intersection of decarceration and ecological restoration. Kelton contacted us from inside San Quentin Prison, interested in exploring cooperative options. Thus started a series of conversations between Law Center staff, Kelton, and Earth Equity staff.

These conversations led to the creation of the Let-Us-Contribute Initiative (LUCI), a coalition founded and led by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people dedicated to fighting poverty through legislative advocacy. Now, we work with a number of stakeholders, including prison rights activists, cooperative development specialists, prison reformers and prison abolitionists, workers' rights organizations, academics, and more. Specifically, we wanted to shout out Repaired Nations, Acterra, Collective Remake, and the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives for their support.