Are prisoners the victims of exploitation in the UK?

Prisoners are invariably forced to carry out work in prison proclaimed for their benefit. Whilst working prisoners are theoretically both alleged and intended to be protected by human rights laws, they are alternatively vulnerable to forced prison labour and mistreatment. Nevertheless, authoritarian, and democratic governments ought to be subject to investigation and scrutiny over their disposition to exploit prisoners for state-imposed forced labour. Prisoners are trapped in state structures of exploitation by virtue of being in prisons and are universally excluded by protective human rights laws. They are consequently the victims of prison slavery. This is owing to the state’s exploitation of prisoners that perpetuates their vulnerability. Prisoners are extensively precluded from social security and work rights (that non-prisoners are entitled to) in the United Kingdom, reinforcing this notion that they are the products of modern slavery. Within the Prisoners’ Pay document, the UK justice system has not provided a justification as to why they are prevented from receiving workers’ rights benefits. I will question the extent to which incarcerated workers are the victims of modern slavery through the compulsory prison labour they conduct, owing to ‘state-mediated structures of exploitation’ in the United Kingdom, whilst comparing it to the exploitation of Uyghurs in China. I have chosen to specifically examine the Uyghurs since they are an ethnic minority heavily persecuted and subsequently enslaved in camps as a consequence of human rights abuses. 

Primarily, I will analyse how the United Kingdom abuses its power as a state and how the Prison Service creates an augmented structure of injustice by maintaining working prisoners in a place of vulnerability by precluding them from labour-protective rights. This sentiment parallels Mantouvalou’s view that prisoners remain trapped in a precarious and disadvantaged position due to the compulsory work enforced within prisons in the U.K. – exacerbated by the state’s exploitation. Furthermore, examining the landmark Cox v Ministry of Justice case, (where prisoners were classed as employees) will determine whether the critical element of compulsion attached to the right of ownership contributes to the issue where prisoners are kept in a persistent state of enslavement, owing to the state’s exploitative measures directed towards prisoners. I will further deduce whether this contributes to a systematic human rights and modern slavery predicament. 

I will subsequently determine whether Uyghur prisoners in China are taken advantage of in a communist country and are forced to partake in exploitative prison labour within the reported prison-industrial system. To this end, I will consider their violation of human rights treaties and their constitution. Observing China’s involuntary servitude in prisons and, applying it to Mantouvalou’s theory on ‘state-mediated structures of exploitation’ will complement the suggestion that those incarcerated by the state are enslaved. This effectively contributes to the perpetual issue that prisoners are forced to endure intolerable and slave-like conditions by the state – particularly in Xinjiang. Thus, I will deduce whether the human rights treaties effectively protect prisoners when countries like China breach laws intended to protect them. 

I will conclude by assessing how human rights in both the UK and China (despite there being a significantly more extreme issue with the Chinese state treating Uyghur prisoners as slaves) are being neglected. I will discuss how the states have categorically failed to safeguard their citizens despite their legal obligations to care for prisoners working under an element of compulsion, and not preclude them from protective prisoner and employment laws to comply with human rights laws. 

The U.K.’s exploitative prison labour system 

Prisoners are demonstrated to be a vulnerable group and a product of forced labour and modern slavery in the UK, as a result of the legislation and inefficient protection of prisoners surrounding the cheap, manual labour that prisoners conduct. While a prisoner is ‘required to do useful work for not more than 10 hours a day’ for the ‘Prison Service’s own internal market’ and the ‘private companies’ that prisoners work for, they can be viewed as being the victims of enslavement by the state and those companies. This is strengthened by Allain’s definition of modern slavery and his analysis of ‘applying property perspectives to the definition of slavery’. He determines modern slavery through the pervasiveness and requirement for the slaveholder to acquire ‘possession’ and ‘to hold a legally enforceable claim-right in respect of another person under his control’. That said, according to the Ministry of Justice, prison labour’s functional role is to rehabilitate prisoners and increase their employability through educational workshops, especially as of 2011 (whilst maintaining public spending on prisons): the state perpetuates structures of injustice for prisoners due to their lack of safeguarding from protective rules. The Ministerial Department fails to acknowledge the significance of precluding prisoners from worker’s rights such as the national minimum wage, (particularly when they work for private companies) when they receive an unemployment pay rate at a minimum of ‘£2-50 (50p a day) based on a five-day week’ and a ‘minimum employed rate of pay [of] £4-00 per week’. Cookson’s perspective and investigation from 2006 contends that prisoners were poorly paid: an inmate was paid £2.40 for six hours (‘35p an hour’) to package and ‘prepackag[e] minor assembly’ but prison work varies from working ‘in kitchen and laundries’ to ‘making clothes and furniture’ or working for divergent private companies. This inherently evinces that they carry out significant work of value for companies, nonetheless their pay does not adequately reflect their service. Since the National Minimum Wage Act excludes prisoners from ‘qualify[ing] for the national minimum wage in respect of any work which he does’, prisoners are not entitled to a typical pay. Cookson’s analysis notably considers that they are instead disproportionately used by the Prison Service and private companies for cheap labour. If they were sufficiently paid and had contracts that ‘benefit[ed] [the] prisoners, [taxpayers and victims]’ as stated by Frances Crook, Director of the Howard League – they would be more inclined to work towards rehabilitation and actively participate in the work conducted in prisons. This manifests that prisoners are the victims of exploitation and poor treatment due to their neglect by worker’s laws and working as contractual employees with sufficient wages. The aforementioned therefore challenges and casts doubt on whether the state is abiding by article three’s absolute right from the Human Rights Act: ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ Mantouvalou echoes this point of view through her article that describes ‘structural injustice’ as a ‘structure that the state creates or reinforces through legislation with prima facie legitimate aim’. However, it rather ‘create[s] patterns that coerce large numbers of people into exploitation’ – as is occurring within this industrial system that witnesses prisoners undertaking employment that fundamentally reaches a level of exploitation required for a breach of article three because of prisoner’s incarceration. Mantouvalou references the Ireland v UK case to highlight that there must be a ‘minimum level of severity’ of inhumane treatment for ‘article [three] to be breached’. Thus, their explicit expulsion from the National Minimum Wage Act – despite working sixty-hour weeks and conducting mundane tasks, supports this notion that prisoners are disproportionately discriminated against and systematically disadvantaged owing to the state’s exploitation.

The notion of the state not adequately treating its citizens in a morally appropriate way, reinforced by their legal and moral rights, calls to mind Mill’s argument that ‘a person’s right […] mean[s] that he has a valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it’. Despite this, prisoners are evidently in a disadvantaged position because their rights are compromised, to an extent, because they are imprisoned. They are also categorised as a neglected group by Mantouvalou because of their convictions and both general offences labelling, and occasionally unfair labelling specifically attached to criminal law offences. 

Cox v Ministry of Justice

Drawing on these findings, the landmark Supreme Court case: Cox v Ministry of Justice determined that prisoners were defined as ‘employees’ for a personal injury claim brought against the Ministry of Justice due to ‘a negligent act of a prisoner undertaking paid kitchen work’ and the prison service’s vicarious liability towards the claimant. The Court disagreed with the Ministry who tried to claim, ‘that the relationship between the prison service and prisoners working in a prison is fundamentally different from that between a private employer and its employees [and that the work is exclusively intended] to support the rehabilitation of the prisoners as an aim of penal policy.’ Furthermore, Lord Reed ascertained that whilst the work conducted was intended to ‘rehabilitate prisoners,’ the Ministry overlooked the prisoner’s role in serving the prison and that ‘their activities form[ed] part of the operation of the prison, and [were] of direct and immediate benefit to the prison service itself’.  The judgment further exhibited the prisoner’s vulnerability through Lord Reed’s contention that, irrespective of the atypical employment relationship between the prison and working prisoners where they were ‘bound to the prison service not by contract but by their sentences’ and were exclusively paid nominally, ‘rendered the relationship if anything closer than one of employment: it was founded not on mutuality but on compulsion.’ One of the limitations within the Ministry’s argument was their intentional misrepresentation and downplay of the prisoner’s work and its benefit for the prison authorities. To this end, Cox fundamentally discerned that the prisoners were to be classed as employees. Taken together, it reinforced this notion that prisoners conduct their work entirely under the element of compulsion establishing the state’s propensity to systematically keep prisoners working under restricted conditions without being protected by any worker’s rights and vulnerable for the prison authorities and private companies’ gain. This correlates with Mantouvalou’s perspective that precluding prisoners from labour rights breaches legal and human rights law, specifically including article four of the European Convention on Human Rights ‘the prohibition of slavery, servitude, forced and compulsory labour’. Thus, Cox exhibits the precarious position working prisoners are trapped and forced to remain in while trapped in the ‘state-mediated structure of exploitation’. This demonstrates that prisoners are exploited and compulsory prison labour equally transpires in democracies. 

Forced prison labour of Uyghurs in China.

Uyghur prisoners in communist China face and have endured inhumane trafficking and involuntary servitude within prisons for both the state and multinational brands – categorically manifesting its widespread modern slavery and human rights abuses. Hayes describes Uyghurs as ‘Turkic-speaking Muslims from the Central Asian region’ that have been ‘arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned’ by the Chinese state. Their imprisonment must therefore be acknowledged and understood to contextually differ from the U.K.’s prison system, since Uyghurs have faced systematic genocide and repression by the state. They have been discriminated against because of their ethnicity and religion since they are native to Xinjiang, and ‘over one million Uyghurs [have been] detained since 2017 in nearly four hundred “re-education” or “counter-extremism” camps’. Waller additionally expresses that the Uyghurs have been persecuted and ‘an estimated eighty thousand Uyghurs [have been] forcibly transferred to factories for forced labor’. This may run counter to Beijing’s claim that Uyghurs ‘hold extremist and separatist views’, further alleging that they are a ‘terrorist’ group. This authoritarian sentiment parallels the state’s exploitative modern slavery and mistreatment of Uyghur prisoners, which evidences the certainty that the Chinese government are systematically committing crimes against humanity – consequently violating human rights. This breach of human rights complements Doyle’s assertion that the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) leading concern in 2006 was ‘China’s Re-education through Labour program, which imprison[ed] without trial those who ha[d] committed […] antisocial acts [and] in early 2004 detained 260,000 people.’ This signifies that the government has been and continues to abuse its power, to persecute, and enslave prisoners to force them into a human trafficking system. China’s unchallenged and condemned implementation of arbitrarily detaining Uyghurs permits prisoner’s systematic forced labour. Equally, Mantouvalou’s indication that involuntary servitude is legitimised by states contends that structural injustice transpires through their enslavement where (as the ILO stated) human labour ‘is performed under compulsion’, including the perpetual violation of human rights laws. China’s immoral disregard of Uyghurs’ human rights therefore conveys the notion that they are inherently exploiting the prisoners and withdrawing their legal rights and freedom. Pavlos Eleftheriadis discusses legal rights including ‘freedom through law’ by describing the right of ownership and owing a claim holder a legal duty through ‘the preventing condition [which] is not just the duty, but the legal relation with the claim-holder as a whole […] whereas the liberty allows the agent to act’. Nevertheless, this illustrates that the prisoners accordingly lack legal rights and liberty because of the state’s exclusionary ‘claim-duty legal relations’ and legal rights that restrict their freedom. This perspective contends that the prisoners endure slave-like conditions through the state’s genocide. Powers’ approach in ‘Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights’ that ‘formal rules, especially rules that are backed by state coercion and that authoritatively assign legally binding duties [...] within the political jurisdiction of a nation-state, are a major way in which institutions systematically influence human well-being and prospects for a decent life’ explicitly and controversially fails to acknowledge the modern slavery of the Uyghurs occurring in China. One of the limitations within Powers’ explanation that ‘legal regimes […] affect a broad-array of well-being interests and overall life prospects’, is that they do not consider or challenge the disproportionate structural injustice by states for instance (like Mantouvalou alternatively contends). 

The state maintains this prejudiced structure of exploitation by imprisoning the incarcerated Uyghurs and violating universal human rights from which other countries are supposed to non-derogate and by which they are obliged to abide. That said, the forced labour issue in China supports economic exploitation because the government forces Uyghurs to produce goods for multinational Western brands including ‘H&M and Zara’. That, according to Hawkins, perpetuates ‘coercive work from large supply chains [particularly because] Xinjiang […] where most of the country’s ethnic Uyghur minority live, accounts for more than 80% of China’s cotton’.  This widespread ‘traffick[ing] in supply chains relied on by major multinational brands’ further accentuates the genocide which violates international human rights law such as: ‘the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; all of which China has ratified’ according to O’Connell. Despite China’s association and position as a permanent member of the United Nations (UN) since 1945, the state continues to neglect human rights laws through their enslavement of prisoners. Reinforcing this notion that Uyghurs are exploited because of the ethnic prejudice of their religion, further compliments this demonstration that if this intolerance and involuntary servitude were to occur in Europe, it would be breaching the European Convention on Human Rights articles four and fourteen. Nevertheless, China’s structural injustice is perpetuated through its persistent abuse of power of Uyghur prisoners. Furthermore, Beijing’s rationalisation of its exploitative means and modern slavery by determining that using incarcerated workers in detention camps are ‘transfers [of] a poverty alleviation tool’. This statement parallels the totalitarian coercion over the prisoners’ autonomy, and liberty, and their coercion to make them work for an exploitative prison labour system that governs the world’s economy and fashion industry for cheap labour. Xu’s ‘Uyghurs for sale’ further complements this suggestion that while the prisoners live under ‘abusive working conditions’ they are also forced into labour assignments after they complete their education in ‘re-education camps’ to adopt employment skills pertaining to making products. One can hence deduce that the state-induced exploitation and unbearable human rights conditions that Uyghur prisoners endure categorically display an explicit violation of China meeting its human rights obligations as an active UN member state – as is explained by Richardson. Nonetheless, collectively challenging China through the World Uyghur Congress’s engagement with the UN could address the systematic issue, in addition to supporting the prisoners. Richard echoes this point of view through her critique of China’s grave human rights violations via their explicit censorship and manipulation of propaganda through widespread state media. Richardson thus contends that to control and coerce Xinjiang and Uyghurs, the state adopted surveillance to oversee, threaten and dictate the prisoners into working for an exploitative prison labour system. Therefore, the state predominantly creates injustice through its forced prison labour and intrinsically sustains this inequality by benefitting and gaining earnings from the exploitation.  

Conclusion

The explicit violation of prisoners’ and human rights surrounding the abuse of the state’s power, enforces an inhumane system where the imprisoned in the U.K. and China are exploited to a system dependent on their labour and services. Throughout this essay, I have examined the precarious prison labour situation in the United Kingdom and China (despite being in significantly diverse countries: politically and culturally). I have additionally emphasised the element of universality for the imprisoned who are excluded from protection laws. Furthermore, the prisoners face obstacles especially owing to the structural injustice within ‘state-mediated structures of exploitation’ . This approach has echoed the critical point of view adopted throughout this essay that has critiqued divergent scholars and authors to analyse the challenges faced by vulnerable prisoners trapped in an exploitative prison industrial structure that systematically legitimises exploiting prisoners for states and private companies so they can make a profitable gain from coercively forcing prisoners to work. Moreover, while I acknowledged that prison labour has prima facie aim in the UK, it was nonetheless recognised in Cox that the prisoners could be likened to employees for their relationship with the prison service – despite being precluded from typical employee rights and not having the right to an employment contract. 

Ultimately, the fundamental issue explored throughout the essay highlighted that China and the UK’s structural injustice, by exploiting prisoners, significantly accounts for the pre-existing modern slavery and their compulsory prison labour – illustrating a breach of human rights laws. Nevertheless, I recognise that an increase in awareness of the coercion and further accountability from States within the UN to condemn violations of human and prisoner rights would have an impact on creating potential and effective improvements for prisoners by protecting them and resolving the humanitarian issue in the U.K. and China.  

Cases: 

Cox v Ministry of Justice [2016] UKSC 10 [2016] A.C. 660

Ireland v UK European Court of Human Rights, Application no. 5310/71

Legislation

Human Rights Act 1998

National Minimum Wage Act 1998 

Policy Documents

European Convention on Human Rights, Article 14, Council of Europe, 6705 Strasbourg cedex France.

HM Prison Service,  ‘Prisoners’ Pay’ [2020] 

Ministry of Justice, ‘Making Prisons Work: Skills for Rehabilitation’ (Department for Business Innovation and Skills, May 2011) 

The Prison Rules 1999 No.78 31 (1) 

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