Tucked away five miles south of Newton, Iowa, Newton Correctional Facility holds 938 low- and medium-security inmates.

The facility is also the site of Homes for Iowa, a nonprofit organization that trains incarcerated individuals in home-building trades such as drywall, electric, plumbing, and framing to build affordable homes for Iowans and to reduce recidivism rates, the rate at which incarcerated individuals re-enter incarceration.

This program is in partnership with Iowa Prison Industries, which has manufactured supplies, like furniture previously sold to institutions such as the University of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa, and Iowa State University, according to the Iowa Prison Industries website.

This work is prior to an incident at the Anamosa State Penitentiary leading to the permanent closure of the Wood and Metal Furniture programs at both the Anamosa State Penitentiary and the Iowa State Penitentiary.

However, despite its prevalence in everyday life, most of the public doesn’t know many everyday items are sourced from prison labor. In fact, $2 billion worth of goods being produced by incarcerated workers.

Alongside receiving training for building the homes, the incarcerated individuals who work with Homes for Iowa typically work 10 hours a day, four days a week, building the foundation and framing of the houses and installing utilities and appliances within the homes.

Fridays are typically optional work days for the incarcerated workers depending on the number of orders Homes for Iowa receives with 21 homes sold for the next year, according to Chad Squires, a plant manager at Iowa Prison Industries and Homes for Iowa.

“Ultimately, we don’t want them to come back to prison,” Squires said. “Our goal is to keep our recidivism rate down as low as possible, and it’s been proven that our training programs work and give guys some opportunity to better themselves while they’re here.”

Incarcerated workers are also allowed to participate in apprenticeship programs and network at job fairs, which are offered twice a year with the hope of providing inmates with secured employment once they are released from prison.

“This gives [companies] the opportunity to come here and talk to the guys who are close to being released to give them a path from when they leave here to have the opportunity to work in one of those trades,”  Squires said.

Squires described three “success stories” of incarcerated workers who participated in Homes for Iowa and who had left prison: one who left with an electrical journeyman license and now works for Deaver Electric in Des Moines, another who now works for HVAC Mechanical in Des Moines who had previously worked in the HVAC Mechanical area with Homes for Iowa, and the third who now works for Habitat Humanity in Des Moines as a project manager.

While the programs provided by Iowa Prison Industries benefit incarcerated individuals through training, classes, apprenticeship programs, and job fairs, groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have been calling for the abolition and reformation of prison systems and prison labor for years.

One of these reforms includes increasing the payments incarcerated individuals receive for the work they do while in prison.

Despite homes made by Homes for Iowa being sold for prices ranging from $83,000 to $99,000, inmates in Iowa prisons are typically paid between 28 to 95 cents per hour, according to a national report by the ACLU.

“This is exploitation of a literally captive audience,” Veronica Fowler, the communications director at ACLU Iowa, said. “Granted, it does cost the state money to incarcerate these people, but they’re being incarcerated against their will, and they’re also being charged for things like soap and phone calls, so it’s not like all their expenses are covered.”

According to ACLU’s report, at both the federal and state levels, incarcerated people are often required to pay for their own basic necessities, such as food, medication, toiletries, phone calls, and co-pays for health care, with a study by Prison Policy Initiatives estimating incarcerated people in Illinois and Massachusetts spent an average of $1,000 per person at the commissary in one year.

Incarcerated people also deal with the impacts of inflation on the prices of commissary items, with prices of items such as deodorant and toothpaste sometimes costing more to purchase at the prison commissary than at a local Walmart.

The wages earned by incarcerated people are also excluded from programs such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, and Security Disability Insurance, which means the earnings incarcerated people receive while in prison do not contribute toward earning benefits provided by these programs.

“Iowa prisoners deserve to be paid a more fair wage for their labor,” Fowler said. “This simply isn’t fair, and it simply isn’t right.”

The ACLU report also describes the dangerous working conditions incarcerated workers face, including exposure to dangerous chemicals and machinery, lack of protective equipment, and poor training, which has led to serious injuries and death. The report also states 64 percent of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people report concerns over safety while working.

IPI’s operational updates describe its most recent safety incident as a chemical reaction at Anamosa State Penitentiary, which was successfully diluted and did not result in injuries.

However, an incident in March 2021, where two employees of Anamosa State Penitentiary were  killed by two inmates attempting to escape the penitentiary, was more serious and led IPI’s Wood and Metal Furniture program to be closed indefinitely.

As Squire explained, this is the reason why IPI stopped selling furniture to schools such as the UI. However, many schools, including the three regent universities, had previously purchased furniture, supplies, and moving and installation services from Iowa Prison Industries, with much of the furniture still filling students’ dorms and classes.

“[We’ve purchased] mostly just furniture,” Renee Funk, the chief procurement officer at the UI, said. “[IPI] helped us with some items during the pandemic that wouldn’t fall under the furniture category, like hand sanitizer, but it primarily is furniture that we historically have ordered from them.”

Funk explained the purchasing office at the UI is a facilitator of the purchasing process, not a decider of where items are purchased from, but that all items procured by the university are made publicly available through the e-bidding page. Even with purchasing made visible to the public, many remain unaware of the presence of prison-manufactured items in their everyday lives.

For Fowler and ACLU Iowa, by bringing awareness to the unjust nature of prison labor, which stems from slavery and a loophole in the 13th amendment, these practices can hopefully be reformed.

“We’re just trying to highlight [prison labor], make it more public knowledge, and speak out against it,” Fowler said. “[ACLU is] certainly on the lookout for any legislation and any specific instances that could potentially change the practice.”