Incarcerated Muslims Are Forced to Manufacture the Very Weapons Used Against their People
By Cynthia Griffith
May/Jun 25
The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. This prison population increased substantially during the Nixon Administration (1969-1974) after he declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. By his last days in office, the incarcerated population in the American prison system exploded from 300,000 to 2.3 million.
This staggering rise in incarceration has been championed by every president since Nixon and has disproportionately affected American communities of color, especially the African American community.
“Politicians from both parties used fear and thinly veiled racial rhetoric to push increasingly punitive policies,” said a report from the Brennan Center for Justice. “Nixon started this trend in 1971, declaring a ‘war on drugs’ and justifying it with speeches about being ‘tough on crime.’”
A Harper’s Magazine article reported that Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, admitted the war on drugs was designed to have precisely this impact on Black Americans. It amplified the presumption of guilt assigned to Black people since slavery and entrenched the racialization of criminality that began in earnest with lynchings.
In January 1973, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller – who unsuccessfully sought the presidential nomination of his party three times – launched his campaign for the Rockefeller Drug Laws. He demanded tough prison sentences even for low-level drug dealers and addicts. It was an idea that quickly spread, influencing state and federal law across the U.S.
Extending these harsh policies while decrying that “gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools,” President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, allotting $12.5 billion to states to increase incarceration. Today, the nation’s prison population includes nearly two million men and women behind bars in 2025.
Like the corrupt dynasties mentioned in the Quran, including that of the arrogant Pharoah, much of this nation’s wealth is built on the backs of the poor and the systematically oppressed. One source of exploitation is Muslim Americans’ forced participation in underpaid prison labor. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/how-economic-exploitation-shaped-americas-landscapes-disadvantage
Incarcerated Muslims: Uncounted but Profitable
The U.S. extracts $11 billion annually from an underpaid prison labor force that contains a disproportionate number of Black Americans, many of whom are Muslims. Both PBS and The Atlantic reported that forced prison labor has bolstered corporate America for at least 60 years, catapulting capitalism to newfound heights, and laying the foundation for the superpower it has since become.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to believers, for God in his perfect Book warned us of such affairs, giving the example of the Pharaoh, the dictator who still serves as a symbol for power-hungry politicians, who set out to manipulate the Banī Isrāʾīl (Israelite) into oppressing and committing injustices against one another (Quran 17:5-7). Pinning members of the same sect against one another is a tactic that might be as old as time. The pressing question for America’s prison population though is: whose hands are assembling the military equipment that is massacring Muslims overseas?
Mass Incarceration and Coerced Labor: A Shameful Legacy on which to Build an Empire
The destruction wrought in the aftermath of the United States’ “forever wars” cannot be understated. Millions have been killed, rendered permanently disabled, or forced to abandon their livelihoods and homes. Entire school systems have been dismantled. Children’s limbs have been amputated, and they have been terrorized and starved. But what makes the U.S. wealthy and powerful enough to wield oppressive forces over the historically Islamic world? The answer to this question lies in an unlikely source – the prison industrial complex.
Behind the bars of government-run and privatized correctional facilities lie innumerable untold Muslim stories, as 2 million incarcerated Americans dwell there in a perpetual state of captivity. With limited data available on the subject, imagine how many millions of Muslims have, for decades, toiled away, building vanity sets, army helmets, textiles, and military-grade surveillance equipment. Imagine how many of them potentially lived and died in their cells, the only worldly mark left to identify them is etched into a picnic table they put together for 13 cents an hour. Was it their forced labor that paved the railways, coal, and iron, that heralded this young nation to the forefront of global wealth?
While wealthy private prison profiteers reap the benefits of cheap labor, the incarcerated Muslim polishes their weapons in a bizarre, barbaric scene that one inmate likened to slavery movies of the past. A recent Wired exposé revealed that Unicor, alternatively known as Federal Prison Industries, forced more than 20,000 inmates across 70 different prisons to build everything from military electronics to Patriot missiles and more for only 23 cents an hour. The Patriot missiles they built sold for a whopping $5.9 million each, further cementing America as a military and financial superpower.
Another such example of prisoner exploitation is the GEO Group, a for-profit prison corporation headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla. that faced criticism and legal challenges over its business practices. These legal challenges included California federal appeals court Judge Vince Chhabria’s decision of Jan. 6, 2021, upholding a $23 million judgment against the company for paying detainees $1 a day for their labor. For profit jailers not only lease prisons from the government but also own many of their own. GEO owns prisons in Florida, Colorado, and Washington State Following President Trump’s recent victory and his declaration for the imprisonment of undocumented immigrants, their stock rose from $14.45 per share to $35.35.
Prison Labor is Forced Labor
An Aspen Institute documentary dispelled the myth that prison labor is a voluntary activity. “Today, the majority of incarcerated workers in the U.S., who are disproportionately Black and people of color, are often required to work or face retaliation such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation,” stated the Aspen Institute researchers.
Renowned prison reform advocate Terrance Winn, described the grim scenario he endured while serving part of a life sentence at the notorious Louisiana prison known as Angola, where he was sent at the age of 16. Angola, a converted plantation, has its own graveyard due to the high death rate of its inmates. Prisoners are pushed to work in unfathomable conditions and forced to pick cotton under the threat of being beaten or sent to solitary confinement where more horrors await. Winn, who was tried as an adult, claimed that life at the largest maximum-security penitentiary in the United States “was like taking a step back into history.” A two-year PBS investigation revealed that facilities like Angola supply millions of dollars’ worth of crops to major companies such as Tyson Foods, Ballpark hotdogs, PepsiCo, Frosted Flakes, and Louis Dreyfus.
Waging Wars on Muslims Abroad while Stifling Muslims in the U.S.
As the corporate rolodex spins, American capitalism reigns, and much of this is to the detriment of Muslims in America and abroad. Muslim Americans are disproportionately impoverished, with a third of them living below the poverty line. Some experts correlate extreme poverty with a 15-fold increased risk of being charged with a felony. Impoverished Muslims face an increased risk of being forced into prison labor, where their hands will work for meager wages crafting products that bolster the American economy and are used to wage wars on Muslims abroad. And while they are under this institutionalization, they will not be counted as Muslims in America at all, effectively rendering them invisible wheels in the unrelenting war machine.
Cynthia C Griffith is a social justice journalist with a passion for environmental and civil rights issues. She’s a regular contributor at Invisible People, where she broaches the subject of homelessness from a human-centric perspective.