This essay is based on the working paper "Prison Labor: The Price of Prisons and the Lasting Effects of Incarceration" by Belinda Archibong and Nonso Obikili
There are more people incarcerated in the world today than at any other point in human history, with around eleven million people incarcerated globally and the number rising daily. This has spurred many governments around the world to advocate for the use of prisoners for work on various tasks supporting the “economic development” of countries, including fighting fires, building roads, and making hand sanitizer to combat pandemics. Just in the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with about 700 prisoners per 100,000 people, or 0.7 percent of the total US population incarcerated, prison labor contributes to a lower-bound estimate of $2 billion a year in industrial output.
Across the globe, from the United States to China and Tanzania, many governments are reaching the conclusion that prisoners can be a source of cheap labor to boost their economies. But does viewing and using prisoners in this way—as cheap labor to serve economic interests—affect incarceration rates, and if so, how? And how might the adoption or expansion of prison labor to serve extrajudicial interests affect citizens’ long-term views of the legitimacy of their judicial systems and their trust in legal institutions, such as police departments? These questions have taken center stage in recent times, in light of events drawing attention to injustices in policing and the criminal justice systems, which have been followed by protests in the US and around the world. This attention is buttressed by a growing body of work that highlights the long-run effects of historical institutions on contemporary economic development.
In new research, we answer the questions posed above using evidence from seventy-five years of archival data on prisons in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria, from 1920 to 1995. The country was under formal British colonial rule from 1914 to 1960, with British government presence extending as far back as the 1860s. Nigeria’s colonial experience, with regards to the prison system, presents an informative context to study the effects of prison labor. Colonial Nigeria was—and Nigeria today still is—the most populous country in Africa and had relatively high incarceration rates that varied within the country. For context, in 1940, Nigeria had an incarceration rate of around 0.4 percent of the total population, a figure larger than the US average incarceration rate of less than 0.2 percent over the same period.
To place these numbers in perspective, colonial Nigeria was incarcerating a notably higher share of its population than countries in Europe (0.06 percent of the total population on average) and around the same share that the United States was imprisoning of its Black population at that time. If we placed colonial Nigeria in a ranking of the top countries by today’s incarceration rates as a percentage of population, it would place fifteenth among the 222 countries with available data and third—behind the United States and Thailand—among countries with a population of at least fifty million. Today, Nigeria incarcerates a much lower proportion of its population, ranking 211th of those 222 countries.
In colonial Nigeria, as part of explicit government policy, using prison labor for government public works projects such as roads and railroads was a mandated part of incarceration. Galvanized by the need to minimize the cost of spending on these important public works—needed to intensify exports of agricultural commodities and maximize revenue to the colonial government—colonial officials engaged in a number of cost-cutting measures involving forced domestic labor in the African colonies. Prison labor was one such measure. In fact, so valuable was this form of forced labor to the functioning of colonial governments in Africa, one official in 1911 lamented scaling back forced labor legislation, saying “How is the work of sanitation, road making and clearing to be carried on . . . [without] the necessary labour?”
The economic value of prisoners for the British colonial government is reflected in one of our paper’s key results: that the overall, gross value of prison labor or value of unpaid wages to African prisoners was strictly positive over the entire colonial period. Even after we account for the most expansive set of prisoner maintenance costs, including food, prison guard salaries, and prison equipment purchases, the net value of prison labor was strictly positive in almost 60 percent of the years under study from 1920 to 1959. Prison labor was economically advantageous to colonial regimes.
This result had perverse implications for the way colonial authorities used incarceration to address sudden labor shortages that were endemic throughout much of colonial Africa. Agriculture was the major sector for both government revenues (over 70 percent of customs and excise taxes derived from agricultural commodity exports) and African workers’ incomes in colonial Nigeria. So during “good” rainfall years, when agricultural productivity increased, this resulted in more income for both the colonial government and African workers.
On the other hand, it also meant that colonial governments had increased incentives to push forward construction on public works projects, like roads and railroads, to intensify extraction and transport of agricultural commodities to the coast for export. The combination of severe labor shortages and a cost-minimizing colonial government with a taste for prison labor meant that more Africans were imprisoned during these “good” agricultural years.
In other words, positive economic shocks increased incarceration rates and the use of prison labor. The effect is reversed during Nigeria’s postcolonial period (beginning with independence in 1960), when prison labor was no longer a central part of state finance and policy (and though agriculture is still the major sector for GDP, over 75 percent of government revenue now comes from petroleum exports).
In the postcolonial period (reflected in our data from 1971–95), negative shocks such as droughts or floods that decrease people’s agricultural incomes tend to increase incarceration rates, primarily resulting from economic crimes like property theft. The reversal of results and differences in the rationale of incarceration between colonial and postcolonial governments is reflected in the differences in the spatial distribution of prisoners between the colonial and postcolonial periods. Colonial imprisonment rates are higher and clustered in the southern region, which had more productive export cash crops like palm oil and cocoa than the northern region. The picture for postcolonial imprisonment is much more dispersed and much less clustered.
These differences are also reflected in the categories of crimes for which Africans were incarcerated during the colonial versus postcolonial periods. Over 50 percent of convictions in colonial courts were essentially for tax default or violations of colonial “social economy” laws (including everything from shirking an employer to “vagrancy”) or “offences against revenue laws, municipal, road and other laws relating to the social economy of the colony.” The major category for incarceration in the postcolonial period, on the other hand, is property crimes.
To add estimates to these results, we find that, during the colonial period, moderate positive rainfall shocks, signaling increases in agricultural productivity in a largely agrarian economy, increased short-term incarceration rates (for prisoners with sentences under six months), by between 9 percent and 12 percent, relative to a sample mean of 135 prisoners per 100,000 population.
These shocks had no effect on long-term imprisonment (defined as prison sentences of more than two years). We also found that moderate positive rainfall shocks were positively correlated with the rate at which people awaiting trial were handed short sentences.
In contrast, moderate positive rainfall shocks have no effect on incarceration rates in the postcolonial period. Instead, extreme negative and positive rainfall shocks such as droughts and floods increase incarceration rates by 21 percent and 19 percent, respectively, relative to the sample mean of 105 prisoners per 100,000 population.
These effects remain unchanged when we use prices of major agricultural commodity exports like palm oil, cocoa, and groundnut as our measure of economic shocks instead. We find that for one of the most productive cash crops, palm oil, higher prices increased colonial incarceration rates in areas producing the crop. Positive economic shocks increased incarceration rates over this period as colonial officials strove to satisfy increased demands for labor on valuable public works.
The data show that use of prison labor by colonial regimes to satisfy economic and extrajudicial interests had long-term effects on citizens’ trust in legal institutions such as police agencies. And this trust is not easily restored. Despite Nigeria’s gaining independence in 1960 and the use of the prison system for economic interests ending shortly thereafter, contemporary trust in legal institutions, including police, courts, and tax administration, in areas with high historical levels of colonial imprisonment remain low. The mistrust is specific to legal institutions, and there is no effect of high historical levels of colonial imprisonment on measures of interpersonal trust, like trust in neighbors, relatives, or elected local governing council members.
Our historical research has implications for contemporary policy. While prison labor may seem like an attractive prospect for governments seeking to boost their economies in the face of rising prison populations, states should proceed with caution given the potentially negative effects on incarceration rates and citizens’ views of state legitimacy.
Read the full working paper here.
Belinda Archibong is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a faculty affiliate at Columbia University's Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP), The Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC), and the Center for Environmental Economics and Policy (CEEP). She is currently a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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