Incarcerated people still waiting on pay raises promised over a year ago

People incarcerated in New Jersey’s prisons had a rare reason to celebrate last year when Gov. Phil Murphy included $2.6 million in the state budget to pay them more for the work they do behind bars.

It would have been their first wage increase in more than two decades.

But nearly nine months into the current budget year, the state Department of Corrections has yet to pay out a dollar of those funds. If they don’t use it by June 30, they’ll lose it, because state funds unspent the year they’re allocated return to the general fund, a Treasury spokeswoman said.

Now, some incarcerated people are crying foul, and advocates are urging state officials to act.

“It’s crucial that they get that money out the door of the DOC and the governor’s office to the people it was promised to,” said Bonnie Kerness, coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee’s prison watch program. “The whole issue of reentry is very tied up with a person’s economics, and what they walk out of prison with. So any raise in state pay has very deep meaning.”

Department officials insist the raises will happen.

They’re now “evaluating all job categories and pay rates across facilities to determine wage increases that are fair and equitable for the thousands of incarcerated persons employed within the Department,” said Amy Z. Quinn, a department spokeswoman. She had no target date for when the raises would occur.

A spokeswoman for the governor’s office declined to comment.

People in prison are growing impatient. They make $1 to $7 a day for jobs ranging from food service and laundry workers to paralegals and clerks. That rate has been flat for at least two decades, even as inflation and commissary costs have soared.

One incarcerated man, who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation by staff, wondered whether officials ever intend to give them the money.

“Even if one were to take their reasoning of ‘working on a new pay scale’ as truth, does it take over six months to do that, in this day and age of computers?” he asked the New Jersey Monitor.

Almost a year ago, department officials said in budget documents that the pay for prison jobs would increase between 25 cents and a dollar per day, depending on the job, with a larger bump or commissary stipend for positive behavior. Officials also tweaked departmental policy to require officials to review wage rates every two years to ensure they’re “appropriate” in comparison with commissary and communication costs.

It’s unclear why it’s taking the department so long to distribute the raises.

Kerness regards the poky pace as evidence of a worrying trend.

Beyond the promised pay raises, she pointed to the system’s entrenched resistance to the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, a 2019 law that limits how long and under what conditions prisons and jails can hold someone in solitary confinement. A state watchdog found in a report released last fall that prisons routinely flout the law, with about 750 people held in isolation on any given day in New Jersey, often for minor infractions.

“These are things that have been passed legislatively or have been budgeted for that would benefit our imprisoned population that are not being paid attention to,” Kerness said.

Marleina Ubel, a policy analyst for progressive think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective, called prison wages “abysmal” and the department’s failure to implement raises “terrible.”

“We know that incarcerated people are already struggling to afford things like phone calls to their loved ones, emails with their loved ones. It costs them money to seek mental health care, medical services, all of that stuff. And it is so important that they’re able to make a fair wage, and right now they don’t,” Ubel said.

People used to have to pay $5 for a medical visit — that’s a week’s worth of wages for someone working one of the system’s lowest-paying jobs — although that charge was dropped during the pandemic and hasn’t yet been reinstated. Prisons do charge for some medications and other services.

And commissary costs have risen more than 10% since August 2022, further widening the gap between what incarcerated people earn and spend. The department, though, absorbed price markups made in January and February 2023 and again last month, instead of passing them along to the incarcerated population, Quinn said.

More than 11,000 people are incarcerated in the state’s nine adult prisons. Annual state spending on prison wages since 2018 has ranged from $9.2 million to $11.8 million as prison populations fluctuated, state budget documents show.

Beyond raising prison wages, lawmakers have proposed lowering costs in other ways for incarcerated people. A bill now before legislators would make calls and emails free for people in state prisons and county jails and their loved ones.

Bill sponsor Sen. Brian Stack (D-Hudson) noted in the legislation that the $1.4 billion prison telecommunications industry has been accused of price-gouging and profiteering off incarcerated people and their loved ones, and such calls can drive families into debt. Free calls and emails would ensure incarcerated people maintain a connection to their loved ones, which would help their reentry and reduce recidivism, the bill states.