There’s an old saying in Urdu: Zaroorat ijaad ki maa hai (necessity is the mother of all inventions). I would often hear it as a child growing up in Pakistan.I’ve always been fascinated by how some phrases leap across languages without losing their truth.You see, survival has a universal dialect, and here, behind the castle walls of New Jersey State Prison (NJSP), necessity isn’t just a mother, it’s a warden, a foreman, and a constant whisper in your ear.Pennies on the dollarLike the chains and hooks once used for corporal punishment in the basement of the “Warden’s House” at NJSP, prison labour is a relic of another time. It is a system that still smells faintly of chain gangs and sweat-soaked fields.Here at NJSP, we work because we’re told to, for pennies on the dollar.According to the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a non-profit that researches mass criminalisation in the US, prisoners can earn as little as $0.86 per day, with those in skilled work – like plumbers, electricians and clerks – making barely a few dollars per day.Meanwhile, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) research shows that many states pay between $0.15 and $0.52 per hour for cleaning and maintenance jobs, such as sanitation work, with some states paying prisoners nothing at all.T …
