Prison Labor Is Slave Labor and the Constitution Says That’s Fine
Prison Labor Is Slave Labor and the Constitution Says That’s Fine
Incarcerated people work for cents on the dollar or for free to make goods you use.
Incarcerated people work for cents on the dollar or for free to make goods you use.
Brittany White, 37, was arrested for marijuana trafficking in Alabama in 2009. She went to trial to contest the charges — after all, just a year prior the United States president had admitted, cheekily, that inhaling was “the point.”
She was sentenced to 20 years. But her sentence was meted out in portions, based on good behavior, and she, posing no discernable public safety risk for selling a plant increasingly legal in states all across the U.S., was allowed to work on the outside.
She got a job at a Burger King.
But the state of Alabama took a significant portion of her paltry minimum wage. “They charged me $25 a week for transportation,” she tells Truthdig. “And they take away 40% of your check. It’s egregious to be making minimum wage, and then to have so much taken away by the state.”
Minimum wage in Alabama is $7.25.
Still, White considers herself lucky. Even her paltry earnings were better than nothing. She was able to purchase soap from the commissary. The prison-provided soap is full of lye, she says, which you definitely do not want near your private parts.
Many stuck behind bars are forced to work for cents per hour, or for nothing. While corporate culprits are commonly blamed for exploiting the labor of incarcerated people, it’s actually primarily states and the federal government who take advantage, and make the public unwittingly complicit.
Got a car? Your license plate was likely made by inmates. In New York, inmates make the trash cans. High school desks are often made on the inside; so are glasses for Medicare patients.
Many stuck behind bars are forced to work for cents per hour, or for nothing, for corporations, states and the federal government.
Companies like CorCraft in New York manage labor in the state’s prisons. They’re funded by the state’s budget, and boast they’re New York state’s preferred choice for “office chairs, desks, panel systems, classroom furniture, cleaning, vehicle, and personal care supplies, and more.”
“Summer Sizzles with Classroom Furniture from Corcraft,” their website declares.
They also claim to help in “the department’s overall mission to prepare incarcerated individuals for release through skill development, work ethic, respect and responsibility.”
The people behind the “sizzling” furniture beg to differ.
In the 12 years he was incarcerated in New York state, Dyjuan Tatro was forced to work a variety of jobs, from making desks to license plates. “At the end, I didn’t have a resume,” he tells Truthdig. “I didn’t get one thing to help me be successful on the outside from the prison. No resume, no job experience… Just $40 and a bus ticket — from 12 years of prison labor, I couldn’t use any of it to get a meaningfully paying job.”
Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, an organization devoted to eradicating unjust prison practices, goes further. “It’s slavery,” she tells Truthdig.
The 13th Amendment, which ended slavery, left an important exception: it’s still legal to garnish wages, or more commonly, refuse to pay incarcerated people for forced labor. “As a result, incarcerated people live in slavery-like conditions,” Tylek adds.
Of course, there are nuances. For example, trading community service, like, say, picking up trash, in exchange for not serving time, is one example of a noncarceral approach. But incarceration changes the equation. Tylek notes that it’s not just about the miniscule (or nonexistent) wages. It’s compelling people to work, with the alternative being a stint in solitary and other punishments, like refusing to let them see relatives, consequences that are meted out by guards. She also notes that they have to work in dangerous trades they may not be trained for, including industrial-sized laundries or ovens.
Despite what someone did or did not do, to end up behind bars, coercing them into performing free labor is wrong, Tylek notes. “I like to ask people the question, ‘Under what circumstances is slavery OK?” she tells Truthdig.
“If you can’t answer that question, the answer is, slavery is never OK.”
If we're gonna have prisons at all ...
It makes a great deal of sense to offer prisoners pay for doing things to maintain the prison: cleaning the floors, washing the uniforms, leading the singing circle or whatever. That sets them up as members of a self-supporting unit, where you can actually be rewarded for doing things that benefit the other people around you. Then when they get out, they're accustomed to being a person who makes things better for those around them.
But it doesn't make sense to put the prisoners out into the non-prison world as competition for free workers, and then claw back their wages. That sets prisoners up as underclass members of general society which is exactly the condition that leads to a lot of people becoming criminals in the first place. And then when they get out, they've already been "out" as slaves of McDonald's, so that's how they and the world are accustomed to relating to each other.
79That sets prisoners up as underclass members of general society which is exactly the condition that leads to a lot of people becoming criminals in the first place
That's the unspoken point. The system is already so drunk on the exploitation of slave labor to the point that all involved actively seek to encourage recidivism. They want all of us for any reason they can shit out.
39Recidivism is a feature of the current system, not a bug. The prison system is not interested in reforming anyone into respectable members of society; they're only interested in making as much of a buck off of as many inmates as possible, preferably those of the right color. Society is rigged against anyone with a criminal record by design, on all kinds of different levels, to keep anyone previously convicted as an underclass member of society.
21Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, that's my home...
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But it doesn’t make sense to put the prisoners out into the non-prison world as competition for free workers
Makes a lot of sense if you're a piece of shit boss who wants to pay less than minimum wage.
8Not that it doesn't have problems, but should be like H1B visas. There should at least be a requirement that non-prison labor be looked for first, even if it's more expensive. Only if prison labor is the only feasible option should they get the job.
1Having prisoners do work for the prison gives incentive to pay them less, which gives government incentive to put more people in prison, which gives government incentive to make things illegal that shouldn't be illegal. None of that should be allowed. They should be allowed to do work at whatever rate they are able to get work for(likely remote work), and should receive 100% of their compensation like any other employee, with a certain amount taken out for the cost of housing and food.
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Just because it's legal, doesn't make it right.
I never understood why prisoners get paid so little. They are usually there because they don't have financial stability in the first place. Wouldn't a bit of savings help put them on better footing so not to turn back to crime?
50Recidivism is the point, also known as it's not a bug it's a feature.
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15But who would make cheap license plates then. Who would pay for the profits of the private prison owners or all the predatory companies providing "services" for the prisons and prisoners. I would bet, that most people in Alabama prisons are not white, so you really think Alabama law makers give a rats ass about their prospecs after prison?
10Perverse incentives at work. If you allow the inmates to build a saving and skills to break the recidivism cycle, you are also working to reduce the size of your labor force.
5I was a corrections officer in a very liberal state with a lot of evergreen trees. It is all just $$$$ related. There is a distinct lack of wrap-around services for the incarcerated simply to keep the door revolving.
Sure, they'll come up with these silly "action plans" and "goals to reduce x" x being recidivism, prison violence, PREA, etc. What that turns into is them moving the goalposts so it looks like they're doing something when reality is they want to keep bodies in cells.
Examples of this include changes to what counts as recidivism. Got out of prison, but went back in on a different kind of charge? Not recidivism, according to my state. Gotta be the exact same charge to count. In some cases even a change in the degree of the charge exempts them from recidivism stats.
Regarding violence, they simply made sure to label one inmate in every altercation the aggressor. In doing so they cut prison violence stats in half, since every beating barring multiman fights are now a fighter and victim, not two fighters. Voila, looks good on paper, the prison industrial complex keeps churning.
Prison rape is apparently solved by spray painting a helpline by all the payphones that doesn't do shit except make you look like a snitch for telling about being raped because they bungle every investigation so often that it's impossible to report anything with any kind of anonymity, inmate or not.
Tl;dr it's fucked, it's not changing, private or state ran doesn't matter.
4So do you think that better halfway houses/better post-incarceration services would make a dent in our prison population? And I'm guessing that it shouldn't be a private as that makes perverse incentives all the worse.
Are there issues at public prisons with the revolving door at the same scale as private ones? Why do state run prisons have perverse incentives if they're not there to make a profit? I have a hunch that it's about being funded like schools are (I don't know how prisons are funded)
A lot of the violence seems to be a culture that's hard to change. Is sexual assault training lacking in prisons? Do they not hire the right specialists to deal with these cases? Do you see any practices that might reduce violence in prisons or after prison?
I want to know how things can change if there's the political capital to do so. I really appreciate your comment too!
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They're there because they commit crimes. Jail isn't a hotel.
-29Sweet summer child....
8Many of them are there because they've committed crimes of poverty (stealing necessities, passing bad checks for necessities, "trespassing" due to homelessness). Or because they did something that everyone does (like smoke weed) but only poor and/or people of color are incarcerated for. Poor people are much more likely to be arrested and being arrested makes people more likely to be poor:
People who enter the criminal justice system are overwhelmingly poor. Two-thirds detained in jails report annual incomes under $12,000 prior to arrest. Incarceration contributes to poverty by creating employment barriers; reducing earnings and decreasing economic security through criminal debt, fees and fines; making access to public benefits difficult or impossible; and disrupting communities where formerly incarcerated people reside.
6the choice always comes down to "do you want less crime?" or "do you want the same amount of crime but to punish people who aren't white by continuing slavery?"
because the solution to the first is to stop doing the second
and you can argue about it, but unfortunately all scientific studies support that conclusion. So the question actually is "do you want less crime, as borne out by reality or do you want the same amount of crime but fantasize it is helping society somehow to punish people who are overwhelmingly not white with slavery?"
5I hate crime too, but prison often just creates worse criminals. If we do t address the root cause of a lot of minor crime, then it just gets worse over time.
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Just FYI, don't post the full article in the post body when sharing on Lemmy. That's how you get C&D letters sent to your instance admins for copyright infringement. Just post a snippet of the relevant text to stay within fair use.
16If an admin tells me to do so I will, but you don't need to backseat my posting, I will not make people open the article to read it if they don't want to, I'm gonna assume you're not a lawyer or an admin for that matter, just a fan of cooooooooopyright, like oh no, I totally believe in intellectual property, such a cool concept and I'm sure the people at TruthDig are big mad their work is reaching a wider audience
-14It's one thing to freeboot an article in a world where journalism is already dying due to lack of funding.
It's another thing to have a shit attitude on top of it.
I will not make people open the article to read it if they don’t want to
Then don't post it in the first place?
I’m sure the people at TruthDig are big mad their work is reaching a wider audience
Literally the opposite effect is happening when you do this. Fewer people will click the link, resulting in less traffic to the site.
9I will not make people open the article to read it if they don’t want to
What's wrong with making people open the article? It's just one click away. It's not like it's paywalled or something...
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13centuries of propaganda
9Simple.
We weren't bombed out from WW2 and back then, we had factories. More than anyone else in fact. America's 'golden age' had nothing to do with American exceptionalism (lols) and everything to do with no competition (but we still ran Keynesian capitalism, the New Deal, back then, so about a 10x bigger piece of the pie went to workers, affording them the American Dream, aka the middle class).
Add to that, the Marshall plan, which paid for Europe's reconstruction but attached to that money came the demand to end colonialism (at least overtly). So America was pretty liberal at the helm for a minute there.
But then came Nixon and the conservatives in the late 60s, Henry Kissinger going on about there being an "excess of democracy" (seriously when I first found out about this in 9th grade it made me sick to my stomach) was saying the quiet part out loud. The rich wanted to scale back the New Deal and return to laissez-faire. Enter Milton Freidman. Cue up Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher - all peas in a pod. Citizens United. Regulatory Capture. Which brings us to today. Profit over people, wealth caused sociopathy (seriously, the paranoia, greed, and inability to form relationships with any real depth unmoors the psyche from society, thus, empathy atrophies and moral/emotional growth cease. "Money is the root of all evil". Hoarding money, withholding help, in the face of suffering will slowly chip away at you, until yr just as evil as well) and legislatures that are disgustingly cheap to buy. We're seeing the world remade into a giant money extraction farm. And we are the tax chattle. All so the rich never have to work a day of their lives.
Side note; Reagan slogan campaigning was "Make America Great Again". Yep, Trump stole it (prob w/o paying royalties). Trump would go on to mimic Ronnie in another way, by ignoring, thereby exacerbating, a pandemic. Trump with Covid. Reagan with AIDS. Imo Trump's leadership thru Covid resulted in the unnecessary deaths of more Americans than any other thing, ever, of which I hold him responsible. Donald Trump is/was/has been the deadliest thing to Americans, ever. Putin got his money's worth, ffs.
8Just FYI, we actually still have the factories. We manufacture about 3 times more stuff here in the US today than we did in the 60s and 70s and about 6 to 7 times more than we were during WWII. We just do so with roughly 1/100th to 1/1000th the workforce, because we automated everything.
Some of those manufacturing jobs moved overseas, but many many more were simply automated out of existence.
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1Firepower, too
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This is actually probably a big reason why. The USA has tons of high quality natural resources, and the prisons (formerly slavery) provide the free labor. Syphoning 20-30% of everyone else's paycheck for the military presents an image of strength as well.
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All things considered, since prisoners almost always get some form of compensation (albeit very little) it’s technically indentured servitude which is tantamount to slavery. My only quibble is that, however, and I find it just as reprehensible.
11I'm not opposed to prison labour, but I think prisoners still ought to be paid minimum wage less tax, and this amount can be put in a sort of savings account for them to responsibly use "on the outside", such as for rent, restitution, &c. Interest on the money can then be put towards a crime victims' fund. That way, I think, everyone gets a fair shake and it's not just a forced labour camp.
3It doesn't matter. Slavery - not "something tantamount to slavery", not "technically slavery", not "conditions similar to slavery", but full on 100% legally recognized slavery - is legal under the 13th amendment for convicts.
The 13th amendment literally says that slavery is illegal, except for as punishment for a crime.
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This is why the Constitution also allows for itself to be amended. So bullshit like this can be changed. It's just pretty fucking hard.
913th amendment
7Well yeah. It's right there in the 13th. Add a 28th.
Although you should be aware that the 27th says "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened." Just in case you were in any doubt as to what kind of day-to-day "running a country" things they actually care about.
5I think the 27th was supposed to prevent them from just giving themselves pay raises constantly. Basically saying, sure you can raise your pay, but it won't go into effect for X number of years.
2Might be why it took them 200 years to pass it...
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Of course, there are nuances. For example, trading community service, like, say, picking up trash, in exchange for not serving time, is one example of a noncarceral approach.
This is the way, and the reason the amendment shouldnt be changed.
The vast majority of prisoners should be out of prison, because prison is a barbaric relic of the Middle ages, and should do compulsory work for the state for minimum wage while living at home.
5Personally I know several people who have been to prison, and many of them absolutely needed some institutionalized treatment.
Well, really they needed a strong community with support, mentors, and motivations to succeed, but in our broken society where community is all but dead, they needed prison.
Prison is a broken hellhole system, but with total reform, it could be a positive tool for society.
Maybe in a utopian society we could do away with prison, but there are a ton of changes we need to make before then.
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It’s still better than what the weegers went through. /s
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