Heather Ann Thompson, Historian and PSC Researcher, examines the impact of Covid-19’s andwork stoppages on the incarcerated workforce and how the financial losses extend beyond the walls. “As mass incarceration begins, businesses that are lobbying for more prisons and tougher laws are also lobbying to lift those regulations [on prison labor],” says Heather Ann Thompson, a historian who studies mass incarceration and the criminal justice system at the University of Michigan. “They don’t do things like that unless they’re profitable. We know, anecdotally, that a lot of money can be made in prisons because so much effort was put into accessing that labor.”

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