Somerville, Mass. – Following BINJ.News’ discovery of a $78.93 city purchase of signs made in a Massachusetts prison, Somerville “will seek to expand” a 2020 ban on contracting prison labor services, said city spokesperson Denise Taylor. That statement came in response to a BINJ.News request to clarify the legality of the purchase, which Taylor said did not constitute a violation of the ban in a Nov. 26 email response.
“[T]he Administration wholly supports and agrees with the overarching values in this ordinance,” Taylor said of the 2020 ordinance, and “will recommend expanding the ban to include products and goods and will begin work with City departments to implement that change” at the next City Council meeting on Dec.11.
The Somerville Department of Veterans’ Services purchased purple heart signs made by incarcerated workers in the Massachusetts Treatment Center prison in Bridgewater at an unspecified time in fiscal year 2025, as revealed by a BINJ.News public records request. The expansion would mark the first update to the 2020 ban since its passing. It would also come on the heels of a Nov. 25 City Council decision to implement a separate restriction on the city’s bank account, the Nov. 4 referendum Question 3, the call to end business with companies involved in “Israel’s apartheid genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine.”
Scott’s ordinance
The 2020 ban originated when Councilor JT Scott discovered through a budget review that Somerville used incarcerated workers for maintenance. Through the Middlesex Sheriff’s Office’s Community Work Program, the Department of Public Works had been using incarcerated people from Massachusetts prisons via MassCor (Massachusetts Correctional Industries, a program run by the Mass. Department of Correction) to paint city buildings inside and out from the summer of 2011 through 2019.
“I felt it was important, from a moral standpoint and to protect and strengthen our working class,” Scott said, “that we’re paying an honest wage for work done in the city.” In October, he successfully sponsored an ordinance that would ban the city from using prison labor for services. The direct language of the single-sentence ordinance says the city can no longer “procure, contract, hire, use or retain any labor or services performed” by prison labor. “I choose to believe that Somerville does not want to be complicit in the exploitation that comes along with the prison industrial complex,” Scott said.
The Department of Correction did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ethics and goal of MassCor, which says on its website that it is “Encouraging skill development on the inside for success on the outside.” Former Commissioner of Correction Harold Clarke said in a 2009 interview with the Enterprise that MassCor provides “something they can rely on to make a living once discharged.”
Sometime in fiscal year 2025, the Veterans’ Services Department purchased an unspecified amount of Purple Heart road signs from MassCor, the Department of Correction’s prison labor program, as revealed by a November records request into Department of Correction financial information. The signs were manufactured 40 miles south by incarcerated workers at the Massachusetts Treatment Center prison facility. The Department of Veterans’ Services did not respond to a request for comment.
“As Mayor, [Ballantyne’s] administration has faithfully sought to follow and adhere to the ban,” Taylor said. Ballantyne voted in favor of the ban in 2020 when she was a city councilor. The city’s procurement office was not aware of the purchase when questioned about it. Scott said he was not aware of any violations of the ban since its passage, though emphasized that enforcement is the executive branch’s responsibility.
MassCor’s history
Since 1887, MassCor has been using prison labor to manufacture cheap goods, largely purchased by government departments and offices, as confirmed by the public records request. Located in five main prison facilities, MassCor shops produce dozens of products for the state. Park benches and license plates are produced in MCI Norfolk, flags and embroidered clothes in MCI Framingham, eyeglasses in North Central Correctional Institute, and signs, like the Purple Heart signs purchased for Somerville, in the Massachusetts Treatment Center.
The wage for this prison labor is set by the Commissioner of Correction, who has full control over changes to payment rules. While the current pay rate is not public, pending a separate records request, a 2018 court case in which an incarcerated worker alleged harassment from prison superiors says that the wage was 70 cents to $1.45 per hour. According to state revenue data, MassCor sold $14.2 million worth of products in fiscal year 2025.
In the argument for MassCor’s founding in 1887, then-Senator Frank W. Jones said a state-run correctional industry producing products for the state would be in “the interests of the taxpayer, the manufacturer and the honest mechanic, as well as the prisoner.” Since then, prison wages have remained low.
According to a study conducted in that year, the average prisoner at that time made 22 cents per day, equivalent to $7.50 in today’s money. That means pay for incarcerated workers, adjusted for inflation, hasn’t improved. In fact, present day incarcerated workers make less relative to average pay in Massachusetts: in 1887, an incarcerated worker made 15% of what someone outside the prison made on average, compared to about 4% today, according to state labor data. Concerns over low pay for prison labor motivated the popular 2020 ordinance, Scott said.
The city won’t be the first entity to inveigh against purchasing MassCor products. In 2019, the Amherst Regional Public School District decided to no longer purchase from MassCor after a high school student’s investigation the previous winter revealed that Amherst-Pelham Regional High School had its auditorium reupholstered by incarcerated workers at MCI Norfolk. MassCor now advertises its work reupholstering school auditoriums in a dedicated section on their website, added sometime between June and August of 2023.
An ethical purchasing trend
The affirmation toward a broadening of the language of the 2020 prison labor ban came less than 24 hours after the city council voted 9-2 to implement a binding version of Question 3, the call to end business involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which voters overwhelmingly approved on Nov. 4. In the campaign to pass Question 3, the Somerville Boycott Question for Palestine Committee and Somerville for Palestine often referenced the city’s 2020 prison labor services ban as an example of the city’s ability to restrict how city funds are used.
“We cited it a lot in our campaign as precedent, local, recent precedent in the city, for removing our tax dollars from companies that are complicit in human rights abuses,” said Lucy Tumavicus, treasurer of the Somerville Boycott Question for Palestine Committee. Tumavicus said the ordinance was proof that the city could base its investments/contracts on ethics, rather than just accepting the lowest bid.
As for the enforcement of the binding version of Question 3, Tumavicus said that she and fellow organizers “intend to craft it to be as comprehensive as possible.”
This article was produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine published by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
