Why the US needs basic income as reparations for racial injustice

The US colonial project kidnapped nearly 11 million people from Africa as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery was fundamental to nearly all industries in the US, and accounted for 32% of America's workforce by 1800. The profits generated through slave labour helped fuel the industrial revolution, establish Wall Street, and fund prestigious universities including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

When the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery in 1865, its drafters included an exception that allowed for the continued use of involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime”. This exception clause has shaped the lives of millions of Americans ever since.

Today, more Black men are currently in prison than were enslaved in 1860. Black men make up around 33% of the incarcerated population, despite comprising 14% of the national population.

In nearly every way, incarcerated workers are treated like an enslaved force. More than three quarters of workers face punishment if they refuse their work assignment. Some are required to risk their lives through jobs like fighting wildfires after only three weeks of training, which saves states such as California millions of dollars a year. They have almost no workplace protections. They can be injured, maimed, sexually assaulted, and even killed on the job.

Incarcerated workers earn between $0.13 - $0.52 per hour to produce $11bn worth of goods and services each year for the rest of the country. Companies mark up prices of phone calls and food in prisons and jails, exploiting the family members of those behind bars to the tune of $2.9bn each year. This punishment industry isn’t merely a remnant of slavery – it is the direct successor to it. An incarcerated, captive labor force makes arresting people profitable.

Economists attribute 20% of the racial wealth gap to disproportionate criminal justice interactions. A bold proposal for repairing this collective injury is universal basic income. Or, at the minimum, a targeted basic income for those impacted by the state of incarceration.

Basic income could be a transformative tool for repairing the harms of slavery, mass incarceration, and police violence

Basic income is a policy of direct, recurring cash transfers. It’s not dissimilar to other universally championed rights like education or healthcare, but it’s an idea that generates a lot of resistance and half-baked criticisms. Especially from those who profit from a system that spends twice as much on police, prisons, and the courts as it does on cash-based welfare programmes.

The right to an income challenges the very foundation of American capitalism and its focus on employment as the only acceptable means of survival (for the masses). The call for basic income is a powerful demand to re-evaluate outdated approaches to social assistance that assume being out of work primarily results from laziness or even fraud on the part of welfare recipients.

In the US, it is also a transformative tool for repairing past harms and addressing the human rights violations of slavery, mass incarceration, and police violence. It can set a blueprint for justice.

Reparations for victims of the US prison system

According to the United Nations framework, a reparations process must provide:

1) Restitution, so that the victim is restored to the original situation preceding the violation of their human rights

2) Compensation

3) Rehabilitation, such as medical, legal, and social services

4) Satisfaction for the moral damage caused, such as through a publicly acknowledged account, official declarations and public apologies

5) A guarantee of non-repetition or cessation of the exploitation

Perhaps the most famous example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, launched in 1995, shortly after Apartheid ended. The Commission proposed yearly payments of R21,000 for six years, essentially a temporary guaranteed income for survivors. In the end, only a one-off payment of R30,000 (worth £1,271 at today’s exchange rate) was issued to some 17,000 people.

But despite this reduced implementation, the commission’s proposal itself stands up as one of the most significant, state-ratified reparations processes in the 20th century. It showed that acknowledgement of past harms and calls for a different future are predicated on a premise of freedom and dignity.

As Nelson Mandela said upon receiving the commission’s report: “It is for those who have the means to contribute to the efforts to repair the damage wrought by the past. It is for those who have suffered losses of different kinds and magnitudes to be afforded reparation.”

This is not the current attitude in the United States, where rates of incarceration are five times higher than South Africa at the height of Apartheid. But there is hope.

Providing direct, recurring cash support to formerly incarcerated people aids in preventing future arrests

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is now the namesake for a guaranteed income pilot in Louisiana, discussed in Maggy Bacinelli’s opening piece for this series. The pilot programme – operated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana and the Fund for Guaranteed Income (F4GI) – transferred money from a family who profited from slavery to 12 victims of police brutality, building on historically-informed sense of existing harms.

The pilot’s many positive outcomes demonstrate the urgent need to address the economic extraction people endure in the criminal legal system, as well as the incredible potential of doing so. The participants' ability to afford monthly bills, healthcare, reliable transportation and housing doubled.

Over 165 basic income pilots have been implemented in the US since 2020. Many of these have looked to address the contemporary harms that persist from the cycle of poverty and incarceration, and some self-identify their work as a form of reparations. The table below summarises four pilots, including the project in Louisiana, that focus on guaranteed income as a form of restorative justice.

Basic income: challenging the carceral state

The evidence is clear. Basic income has been shown to be an effective public safety intervention that can build a new and more promising future. Providing direct, recurring cash support to formerly incarcerated people aids in preventing future arrests. In the Chicago Future Fund, recidivism rates in the pilot’s first year were 6.67% – and 3% in the second year – compared to the state average of 43%.

As things stand, the companies and consultants currently profiting from the exploitative carceral system can never be trusted to act in the best interest of their survivors. And the US currently spends more than twice as much on law and order through police, prisons, and the court system as it does on cash welfare programmes. That’s a lot of vested interests. That’s a lot of inertia.

Our only hope for dislodging it is changing the system’s underpinning economic logic. UBI is the most reasonable step towards this. We need people with lived experience, people with experience of advocating for survivors with compassion, and people who are accountable to their colleagues and the movement to design the alternatives.

Explore the feature

Throughout this special feature on guaranteed income and reparations, you will hear from academics and practitioners at the forefront of the call for restorative justice. They demonstrate how systems of control, oppression, and exploitation did not die with the end of slavery but instead evolved.

Richard Wallace, founder of Equity And Transformation (Chicago E.A.T.), argues that we must have constitutional acknowledgement of the historical debt owed to the Black community. Bianca Tylek, founder of Worth Rises, describes how this debt lines the pockets of a prison industry that thrives off billions of dollars’ worth of stolen labor from incarcerated workers every year.

Kamm Howard, Executive Director of Reparations United, brings our attention to the many children who are left fatherless as a result, and the generational impacts families face. Andrea James, founder of the National Council for Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, brings our attention to the fact that women are the fastest-growing prison population. Fully 25% of incarcerated women have not been found guilty of a crime, yet remain in prison because they were refused bond or could not afford it.

Basic income is not a silver bullet. It alone will not solve racial disparities or act as a panacea to all historical harms. But underpinning the authors’ proposals is the acknowledgement that people who have suffered at the hands of the criminal legal system are owed their rightful share of this nation’s collectively produced resources. This framing, argued the late scholar James Ferguson, is what makes basic income politically transformative nonetheless.

Rather than positioning UBI’s beneficiaries as the grateful recipients of charity or welfare, the cash payments can be connected to a new social identity – owners.

Explore the feature so far

• Why the US needs basic income as reparations for racial injustice
  Nika Soon-Shiong
• As we fight for our lives in the South, reparations offer hope
  Maggy Baccinelli
• Prison labour: the last stronghold of slavery in the US
  Bianca Tylek
• The US is built on stolen labour. It’s time to settle the debt
  Richard Wallace
• Reparations for racial injustice: Black fathers must be first in line
  Kamm Howard
• Why we’re giving incarcerated women cash relief
  Andrea James

Nika Soon-Shiong founded the Fund for Guaranteed Income, a nonprofit organisation that has implemented UBI programmes in 14 states. She is also a doctoral candidate at Oxford University researching biometric surveillance and the publisher of Drop Site News.