Like most working people, Christopher Barnes has a daily routine.

I get my thoughts together, get down, and then get my hygiene together.

He brushes his teeth, washes his face, and at around 7 in the morning, he makes the short commute to his workplace.

I work in EG sheeting. I sheet the metal and trim it and get it ready for screening.

I've been in that apartment the whole time I've been down here.

Barnes and his colleagues make highway signs, those really big green ones that tell you which

exits are coming up.

My family, they'd be like, what you're doing in the sign plan?

And I tell them, I make the signs in the streets.

It's like, wow, I thought somebody else did that.

I mean, it's amazing that we do all these signs, you know. It's amazing, in part, because Barnes isn't an ordinary employee.

Technically, he's not an employee at all.

He's serving a life sentence for first-degree murder.

And the sign plant where he works is located inside Franklin Correctional Center,

a medium security prison in Bun, North Carolina.

Barnes is one of around 800,000 incarcerated people with jobs in America's prison system.

They grow crops, repair roads, fight wildfires, and manufacture a surprising number of the

products we encounter in daily life,

from office furniture to reading glasses.

It's estimated that more than $11 billion worth of goods and services every year

can be traced back to workers who are mostly paid pennies per hour for their labor,

or even nothing at all.

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