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Washington State Institute for Public Policy

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Publications

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Contracting and Labor Practices in Washington State's Correctional Industries
Open Publication PDF

Travis Taniguchi, Alex Patel - June 2025

Under RCW 72.09.100, the legislature has vested the Department of Corrections (DOC) with the authority to establish a voluntary comprehensive work program. This legislation defines five types of work programs which includes free venture industries (Class I), tax reduction industries (Correctional Industries, Class II), institutional support industries (Class III), and community work industries (Class IV). The most comprehensive and diverse set of work opportunities are operated by Correctional Industries (CI) which offers a variety of goods and services such as institutional food service, furniture manufacturing, and production of textile goods. In addition to work opportunities, CI offers training, certification, and mentorship to people that participate in its programming. In this report, we describe the goods and services produced by CI; the comparability of CI goods relative to items available through traditional vendors; the amount and value of labor provided by people experiencing incarceration; the skill level of assignments available to people that are incarcerated; and the relationship between CI participation and post-incarceration employment.

In FY 2023, CI generated over $100 million in revenue from nearly 3 million labor hours from incarcerated people. The largest purchaser from CI was DOC, predominantly for food and clothing. Items manufactured by CI were generally priced comparably to similar products available through other vendors. The one exception was for prescription eyewear produced by the Optical Division; these were the lowest cost for nearly all items reviewed.

Across all DOC work programs, incarcerated people contributed over 9 million labor hours (equivalent to 4,300 full-time employees) to producing goods and services, maintaining DOC facilities, supporting community projects, and performing forestry fire service. Compensating incarcerated people at minimum wage would increase costs from $9.4 million per year to more than $150 million per year. People that had participated in CI were more likely to find employment after release, find employment sooner, work more hours, and earn more per hour. Due to data limitations, however, these results should be interpreted as descriptive and not causal.

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