For the past decade I worked at the print plant at South Central Correctional Facility, one of the few jobs here that pay prisoners more than $1 an hour. Unlike most prison jobs, which are state-funded and designed to keep the facility running—like kitchen work, building maintenance or groundskeeping—the print plant is a correctional industries (CI) job run by Tennessee Rehabilitative Initiative in Correction (TRICOR).
CI jobs exist in every state prison system. There’s also a Federal Bureau of Prisons version called UNICOR. They’re shadowy, confusing public-private partnerships that exploit loopholes in laws that don’t allow the government to profit off incarcerated labor, so that prisoners can be put to work on goods and services needed by the outside world—license plates, breakfast cereals, braille transcriptions, textiles, call center jobs. This is because agencies like TRICOR, which is a nonprofit, say they’re providing incarcerated workers with job experience in a “realistic work environment,” as well as rehabilitative programming and help finding a job upon release.
In reality, hundreds of incarcerated TRICOR employees across the state are saving millions for private companies while receiving few or none of the promised benefits. TRICOR did not respond to Filter‘s inquiries into various aspects of this story.
TRICOR claims that workers nearing release have one-on-one meetings with “transition coordinators” who continue to support them in the community by helping them find jobs and social services. There’s supposed to be one assigned to each TRICOR site, but in my experience they only swing by briefly every once in a while.
Norman* worked for TRICOR for more than 20 years. He told Filter that when he was released in 2025, no one from TRICOR offered help finding a job. A rep called a few times, but only to ask if he’d gotten one.
TRICOR claims to boost employment and lower recidivism. Former TRICOR workers do have much lower recidivism rates than the state or national average, but the agency carefully cherry-picks the prisoners who were least likely to come back to prison anyway.
Fonzo, who worked for TRICOR for a decade, told Filter that he found employment on his own and if he’d waited for TRICOR to help he’d “be homeless by now.” But a few months after he was released, a rep still called him asking to use his name and photo to promote the success of the agency’s transition services.
“I said, ‘Hell no!,’” Fonzo recalled. “They just wanted to use me like they used me when I was in prison.”
Curtis was a dedicated TRICOR employee for nearly 15 years. After he was released from prison and started applying for jobs, he listed his TRICOR supervisor as a reference. But when a prospective employer called to inquire, the supervisor said that they couldn’t comment on former workers. Curtis didn’t get the job.
“TRICOR wasn’t serious about helping me,” Curtis told Filter. “All they had to say is, ‘He worked and did good.’ They couldn’t even do that.”
“One way that our [business] partners help offset the cost of incarceration is that 35 percent of all offender wages go to offset the cost of training programs. Another 5 percent goes to the Victim’s Restitution Fund,” TRICOR states on its website. “The remaining money may go back to an offender’s family to help out with the family’s education, children’s activities or simply the family’s survival.”
That “remaining money” is what we rely on in order to buy food. And not all of it can go to our families, despite a great many requests in emergency situations.
TRICOR workers aren’t offered the chance to save money—it’s imposed involuntarily. Separate from the other deductions, for everyone with a release date TRICOR takes 15 percent of their earned wages to put into a mandatory savings account that cannot be accessed while incarcerated. This applies even to workers serving life with parole or other de facto life sentences, who would have to survive over 50 years in prison before being allowed to touch their savings.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Harold asked TRICOR leadership for access to his account so he could send his savings to his family. His mother was ill, and with other relatives unable to work his family was in desperate straits. His money would have really helped.
“My kids were close to being evicted,” he told Filter. “I wasn’t asking for a handout. It was my money that I earned.”
Like many others who made similar requests during the pandemic, Harold was denied.
South Central partners with a bank where prisoners can open regular savings accounts to deposit their earnings (or “remaining” earnings after deductions and mandatory savings, for TRICOR workers). They can’t access the money themselves, but it can earn interest and be sent to their families as needed. Yet even though this process is already in place, TRICOR mandatory savings accounts aren’t at this bank—they’re all internal and not interest-bearing, no matter how long someone’s savings are held there. Only after they die can that money be sent to a TRICOR worker’s family, if they left a will with instructions to do so.
Though TRICOR has described the 35-percent deduction as offsetting cost of training programs, on the paperwork given to workers it’s to cover “room and board.” To call it this is outrageous. Prisoners with non-TRICOR jobs do not have their wages garnished to subsidize their own incarceration.
In July 2024, a housing pod with a number of TRICOR workers, including myself, was abruptly moved en masse to the most violent part of the prison. In addition to the rampant stabbings and other assaults, workers now faced a new dilemma: lose their job if they stayed in their cells to guard their property, or go to work and risk everything being stolen while they were gone.
“It’s hard to concentrate on work when I don’t know if my stuff will be there when I get to my cell,” Ben said. “I feel myself getting real anxious, even nauseous, about an hour before I leave work … I’m not a coward, but I can’t fight a gang of men.”
In prison it’s common to find yourself suddenly assigned to new housing simply because a work supervisor decided that’s where they wanted you. But when asked for help, TRICOR supervisors said they would not get involved in security matters. At least two dozen TRICOR workers wrote to the CEO explaining the situation and begging for the agency to step in, but received no response.
“I pay room and board, but still live in the same shithole as everyone else,” Joseph said. “That’s why when we asked for help in our living conditions, we felt TRICOR should try and help—we’re paying!”
No sick days. No workers’ compensation. No human resources department. Certainly no vacation days. And among dozens of current TRICOR workers surveyed for this story, the universal complaint was that no matter how hard they work or how many years someone has been a “company man,” there is still no regard for their humanity. Corporate staff often drive in from Nashville to visit, but walk past workers without saying a word unless it’s to call them out for slow production.
Louis had worked for TRICOR for over a decade when he began chemotherapy. He was warned that if he took an extended absence, he would be replaced. So Louis, who is in his 70s, went to work shivering and throwing up.
“Do I go to work so I can buy soap to wash my ass?” he said. “Or stay home to puke after chemo?”
Tommy left a good library job to try his hand at TRICOR’s call center. This is a risk—call center jobs offer bonuses if you reach certain quotas, but if you don’t reach the minimum you’ll be fired. Tommy kept up with the requirements. Then one day he was fired anyway, told he should have been doing more.
“It just seemed so ruthless—no credit given for lots of good work,” Tommy told Filter. “Now I’m just hoping to get a job, but who knows when that will happen. I’m worse off than when I started.”
TRICOR may pay a few more cents an hour and advertise impressive-sounding programs, but make no mistake—it’s a façade.
*All sources’ names have been changed for their protection
Image via Tennessee Rehabilitative Initiative in Correction