Cuomo unveils New York-made hand sanitizer...made by prison "slave labor" not allowed to use it themselves

New York’s governor has put prison inmates to work making gallons of hand sanitizer to combat alleged “price gouging” by mass-market brands, but what many see as slave labor doesn’t quite square with the state’s progressive image.

Andrew Cuomo debuted a state-branded hand sanitizer in a showy press conference on Monday, touting the prison-made formula as a way to fight skyrocketing prices on the dwindling supplies of mass-market hand sanitizer flying off the shelves. After pretending to solicit solutions from his audience, the second-generation statesman staged a cheesy curtain-opening reveal on an eye-catching display of multiple size bottles of ‘New York State Clean’...

Cuomo presented NYS Clean as a “superior product” to Purell and its brethren. Unlike those mass-market brands, which contain the Centers for Disease Control’s recommended 60 percent alcohol, New York’s contains 70 percent – plus a nose-pleasing “floral bouquet,” he said. But Cuomo tellingly downplayed the “prison labor” component, merely mentioning the brand – Corcraft – as one that also makes glass cleaner, floor cleaner, degreasers, laundry detergent, vehicle fluids, hand cleaner, “and now they make hand sanitizer.”

The prisoners, who receive approximately 16 to 65 cents per hour for their labor, have apparently been busy churning out the vital fluid: Cuomo said that current capacity is 100,000 gallons per week, and that they’d be “ramping up,” providing the liquid to government agencies, schools, prisons, and the like “because you can’t get it on the market, and when you get it it’s very, very expensive.”...

A coalition of prisoners rights advocacy groups slammed the move. “We are disgusted at Governor Cuomo’s decision to exploit prison labor to push back the imminent public health crisis presented by Covid-19 while doing absolutely nothing for incarcerated people across the state,” they said in a statement.