800,000 imprisoned people in the US produce $10 billion of value each year through their labor. $2 billion for private industry. The state of Alabama alone makes $450 million off the labor of incarcerated workers.
We have a word for this.
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
During the height of the pandemic, prisoners washed hospital laundry, made masks, and dug mask graves. Now they are building more prisons.
The free market at work, amirite?!?
“Chris Sullivan, an incarcerated worker who was recently paroled, says he resented seeing the state profit from prison labor, but he has only gratitude toward the company he worked for.
“Prison’s prison—it’s supposed to be hard,” he says. Leaving prison each day to work felt “like going home.”
If the GOP gets their way they are going to need a place to put everyone they don't like.
The first mass wave is going to be the homeless and immigrants.
It’s dystopian. It’s its own eco system. The system is literally making money off human bodies, mostly black. You think they have an incentive for prison reform? Sentencing reform? Justice reform? Are you kidding me?? If this were another country they would be reprimanded at the UN.
I wonder, if incarcerated individuals were paid the same wages as their "free" counterparts, how many would be likely to repeat-offend after release?
Seems to me a cause of re-offending is lack of resources. If they were to have access to full wages saved upon their release, they'd have no reason.
I also think about the loss of those wages for families and communities. How many children are in poverty while their parents earn billions so taxes can stay low and private prison investors earn dividends?
Indeed. I agree the phrase describes an abomination that has, inter alia, led judges to be bribed to fill cells.
The aim of any civilised country should be to close prisons, as the Victorian lunatic asylums were closed.
The US is literally a slave state. It's in the Constitution and everything, prisoners can still be enslaved.
This bears repeating for those who don't know.
If cannabis is decriminalized federally they'll come up with some other law to enslave mostly black men under on trumped-up charges.
It's also notable that felony prisoners are disenfranchised in 48 states while in prison and may permanently lose voting rights in 9 states including Alabama.
The Thirteenth didn’t fully abolish slavery—only private slavery. The work of abolition and reconstruction was never finished, and these are the consequences.
The people that make these decisions that affect millions of us have names, addresses, vacation homes, favorite restaurants, and go to ball games. Why are they allowed to do all of those things comfortably?
This doesn’t get talked about enough, if at all. But once you’re aware of it you cannot possibly believe this is a democracy we live in. What can we go about it?? This goes on in blue states as well. Dems excel in pronouns; human
rights of the incarcerated, not so much. Ugh.
