Let Prisoners Work for Themselves

For nearly two decades, some Puerto Rican prisons allowed a very different sort of prison labor.

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PEOPLE ASSOCIATE THE words prison labor with coercion and exploitation, with inmates paid peanuts to do menial work for the government or its contractors. If you hear that phrase, you probably don’t think of people working for themselves on their own terms.

Yet for nearly two decades, some Puerto Rican prisons permitted a very different sort of prison labor, with incarcerated workers running their own enterprises behind bars. It was a tremendous success until COVID-19 put it on ice. And it might soon return.

At the beginning of the century, prisoners at an art program in the Guayama Correctional Complex started thinking about ways they might make money from their creations. Someone suggested launching a business. Someone else proposed that they make it a cooperative, so everyone could have a say in how the operation would be run. But Puerto Rican law barred people with a criminal background from becoming member-owners of a coop.

The convicts wrote to the then-Gov. Sila María Calderón, to ask if the rules could be revised. Calderón was receptive to the idea, and in 2003 the commonwealth amended the law to let prisoners join cooperatives as long as they displayed continued good behavior.