{"id":1707,"date":"2011-07-26T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/prison-slave-labor.html"},"modified":"2011-07-26T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-07-26T12:00:00","slug":"prison-slave-labor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/prison-slave-labor.html","title":{"rendered":"Prison slave labor"},"content":{"rendered":"You, too, can end up as a 21st century slave in the U.S.A.!\nFor drugs, or debt, or especially for being black.\n

\nRania Khalek wrote for AlterNet 21 July 2011,\n\n21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor:\nIn the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit.<\/a>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThere is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that\ncorporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival\nthose of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally\nstripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately\nrelegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing,\nviolently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to\nno wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as\nthey are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve\ntheir circumstances or change their plight.\n

\nThey are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where\nwe cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st\ncentury.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnd who are these prison slaves?\n\n\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThe costs of this incarceration industry are far from evenly distributed,\nwith the impact of excessive incarceration falling predominantly on\nAfrican-American communities. Although black people make up just 13\npercent of the overall population, they account for 40 percent of US\nprisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black\nmales are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white males\nand 2.5 that of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at\napproximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of\nHispanic females.\n<\/blockquote>\nMostly black. Like the one pictured working on Lakeland City Hall.<\/a>\n

\nMichelle Alexander calls it\n\nThe New Jim Crow.<\/a>\nSeems like she’s understating it.\nWhenever I repeat her easily documented assertion that\n

\n\n<\/a>\n…more black men are in jail, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in 1850.\n<\/blockquote>\nSomeone always pipes up and says “but the black population is much larger now!”\nOK, let’s hear you justify black (and white) people being enslaved\nin the U.S.A. today.\nDoes it make it OK that there are many more blacks to choose from?\n

\nRemember, it’s even Constitutional, according to the Thirteenth Amendment:\n

\n\u201cNeither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment\nfor crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist\nwithin the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nThat’s right: the thirteenth amendment didn’t actually abolish slavery.\nIt just said some crime has to be trumped up to convict people for first.\nLike possession of tiny amounts of marijuana.\nOr not being able to pay your probation officer because you can’t\nget a job because you’re an ex-con.\nOr…\nSo many choices!\n

\nIf you aren’t black and don’t smoke weed, don’t despair, you can\nbecome a prison slave, too:\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThere has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors\u2019 prison,\nwhich should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on\nprisons to manage any and all of society\u2019s problems. According to\nthe\n\nWall Street Journal<\/a>\nmore than a third of all U.S. states allow\nborrowers who can’t or won’t pay to be jailed. They found that judges\nsigned off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in\nnine counties. It appears that any act that can be criminalized in the\nera of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly end in jail time,\nfurther increasing the ranks of the captive workforce.\n<\/blockquote>\nAh, “captive workforce” sounds so much nicer than 21st century slave,\ndon’t you think?\n

\nYou, too, could work for $0.93 to $4.73 per day, or if you’re lucky\nand go to a\n\nfederal slammer,<\/a> maybe $0.23 to $1.25 per hour!\n

\nI know somebody is going to say “they can’t be slaves if they get paid.”\nThat’s actually\n\nnot true:<\/a>\n

\n[Thomas] Jefferson encouraged hard work through incentives and paid\nslaves for jobs that he considered beyond their normal workload.\n<\/blockquote>\nSo come on, think up some other excuse for modern-day slavery in the U.S.A.!\n

\n\n<\/a>\nOr do the right thing:\nlet’s call off the War on Drugs<\/a>\nand ramp down the prison system back to pre-1980 levels.\nAnd end prison slave labor.\n

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

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