{"id":1490,"date":"2011-09-19T08:02:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T12:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/gov-deal-the-bad-prison-slave-labor-competing-with-free-labor.html"},"modified":"2011-09-19T08:02:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T12:02:00","slug":"gov-deal-the-bad-prison-slave-labor-competing-with-free-labor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/gov-deal-the-bad-prison-slave-labor-competing-with-free-labor.html","title":{"rendered":"Gov. Deal: the bad, prison slave labor competing with free labor"},"content":{"rendered":"Gov. Nathan Deal said he was for free-enterprise chickens,\nbut he wants the government to supply prison slave labor to grow them.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nContinuing \nGov. Deal: the good, the ugly, and the bad on prisons<\/a>,\nquoting again from\nDavid Rodock’s interview with Gov. Nathan Deal\n\nin today’s VDT.<\/a>\n

The Bad<\/H3>\nRemember Gov. Deal mentioned poultry operators as an illustration\nof his bogus point that government intervention is always bad?\nWell, I guess he forgot that when he answered this question:\n
\nTHE TIMES: Your proposal to have probationers replace illegal immigrants\nfor farm labor. Did that idea work? If it didn\u2019t or it did, what\u2019s\ngoing to happen next year during the picking season?\n<\/strong>\n

\n\nDEAL:<\/strong> \u201cWell, it worked with some success. I think there was a great\ndeal of skepticism about it on whether these people will work and there\nis a threat associated with their presence. We have to remember that\nprobationers are not under arrest. They are free in our society.\n<\/blockquote>\nReally?\nExcept for little things like not being able to vote if they are felons,\nand having to pay their probation officers.\nBut back to the Gov.:\n\n\n

\nThey do\nhave a mandate as a part of their conditions of probation or parole that\nthey have a job. I think the untold story is that we not only have those\nprobationers working in a variety of different things around our state,\nwe actually have prisoners working in private industry in our state. We\nhave at least one major poultry manufacturer that uses prison labor and\nthey are brought in.\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat? I thought Gov. Deal was against government intervention in the\npoultry industry?\nYet he’s for the government supplying prisoners as labor.\nPrisoners who compete with free labor.\n
\nThey are supervised, and I think that is a model we\nneed to look at. First of all, these are individuals who want to work and\nthey get to keep a small portion of the salary that they earn.\n<\/blockquote>\nHow small?\nTypically about\n\na dollar a day, or maybe five dollars.<\/a>\n

\nAnd where does the rest of what prisoners are paid go?\n\n<\/a>\nWell, if the prisoners come from a state public prison,\n\nlike the ones the Lowndes County Commission just contracted for,<\/a>\npresumably the rest of the prison detail cost to the Commission goes\nto the state.\n

\nBut if the prisoners come from a private prison, such as the one\nCCA and the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority\nwant to build in Lowndes County, the rest goes to CCA, a private corporation.\nYour tax dollars profiting a private corporation for slave labor.\n

\nGov. Deal continued:\n

\nThey are\nallowed to earn money that then they can pay restitution for the\n\n<\/a>\ncrimes\nthey may have committed, pay child support because most of them do have\nchildren that they are obligated to support and then, a small portion of\nit, they get to keep when they get out. Plus they’re learning a skill. I\nthink that if we handle it discreetly and educate everybody as to what\nthe possibilities are, then we may have some real opportunities. I am\ntalking with the Department of Corrections and we’re going to try and\nget some of those stories told so people feel a little more comfortable\nabout those possibilities.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nDiscreetly, eh?\nToo bad for the Gov. the VDT was indiscreet enough to ask about it….\n

\n\n<\/a>\nI don’t know about you, but I don’t feel comfortable about prison slave labor\ncompeting with free labor.\nEspecially when the state continues on its path of privatization of its\nprisons, with CCA featuring Georgia as\na model partner.<\/a>\nHiring out prisoners from a private prison gives the private prison company\nincentive to lock up more people for more profit, while competing\nwith free labor.\nDoes that seem right to you?\n

\nThe VDT’s very next question was the one about decreasing the prison population.\nThe Gov. apparently sees no contradiction in providing incentive to\nincrease the prison population at the same time as he claims to want\nto decrease it.\n

\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. Spend that\ntax money on rehabilitation and education instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gov. Nathan Deal said he was for free-enterprise chickens, but he wants the government to supply prison slave labor to grow them. Continuing Gov. Deal: the good, the ugly, and the bad on prisons, quoting again from David Rodock’s interview with Gov. Nathan Deal in today’s VDT. The Bad Remember Gov. Deal mentioned poultry operators […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,202,324,1113,48,40,71,8,2,72,3,133,178],"tags":[8817,77,8701,2129,8730,2650,7,46,3785,2651,2712,2867,60,8749,82],"class_list":["post-1490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-agriculture","category-animals","category-cca","category-code-enforcement","category-community","category-gdoc","category-georgia","category-government","category-incarceration","category-transparency","category-vdt","category-vlcia","tag-cca","tag-drugs","tag-georgia","tag-governor","tag-incarceration","tag-legalize","tag-lowndes-county","tag-nathan-deal","tag-prison-reform","tag-regulate","tag-rehabilitation","tag-sentencing","tag-tax","tag-vlcia","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-o2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}