https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-11/californ...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2020/11/11/c...
https://www.freedomunited.org/news/forced-prison-labor-in-ca...
You cannot be forced into doing external work where the benefit of your labor falls to a private entity. Of course you can choose to do so and the primary benefit is not the wages (which are unfairly low in my opinion) but the "day for day" that reduces your sentence.
There are states that have such rules, and others (particularly in the South) that explicitly do not enforce any such rule. Often a rule exists but is meaningless; if they want to be able to have visitors, or to get outside to exercise, they are obliged to engage with outside labor.
But you know the difference?
I can say that without it being taken down by the government or some company acting on their behalf. I can say it without it hurting my "social credit score". I can say it without being "disappeared" and ending up in one of the sprawling "re-education" camps in Xianjing that are so prevalent you can track their massive growth on Google Maps.
There is clearly an organized effort to extinguish a people and culture here, just like it has been and is in Tibet. Given the history of this sort of thing, it's astounding to me how many will defend, deflect or deny this.
Every time a valid criticism of the CCP comes up some shill pops up and downvotes any criticism and/or leaves some "but what about X" lame justification. It's actually depressing.
We have much less excuse for permitting our own evils, because we could put a stop to ours if we cared.
The concentration camps in China are not for people who have committed crimes, they're for people who are of a specific ethnicity, that's it.
If NOT, and if it is an avenue for prisoners to earn money, benefits, then don't boycott it
So what? That's just serving the original sentence. That doesn't sound forced to me. Is it forced labor when someone chooses to take a community service option instead of being locked up?
It's essentially a choice between 1 option at that point.
Negative prison time, applied to a legitimate sentence, should never count as forcing.
US citizens are not uniquely criminal, but US incarceration rate is by far highest in the world. You don't get there justly.
Like, okay, we say that anyone improperly imprisoned is being forced into labor.
What about everyone else? The argument above was that it clearly is forced labor, even when your sentence is completely valid. I disagree with that.
> US citizens are not uniquely criminal, but US incarceration rate is by far highest in the world. You don't get there justly.
It's a mix of things. Even if you fixed all the bias in the system, you could still have a high incarceration rate with harsh but not inherently unjust laws.
The only reason to have a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the whole world is, specifically, because you want to have your underclass ready to hand for slave labor. Or, generally, to repress them.
If you are relying on threat of incarceration to discourage criminal behavior, having the highest such rate in the world is reliable evidence that your method is failing to achieve that aim. Other countries are demonstrating better methods you could learn from. If you wanted to, that is.
This is not unsubstantiated.
Moreover, it's upside down:
The economic labour output from US prisons is negligible and has no material effect on the GPD or industrial basis.
... and those prisoners, were they outside of the prison systems, in 'regular jobs' - would add tremendously more to the GDP in terms of productivity.
There can be other reasons for harsh laws. Don't be so weirdly absolute. If a country does something wrong that doesn't mean it necessarily has the one specific motivation you're mad at and no other.
Also this has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make, which wasn't about the US specifically.
To restate it, just to be very clear: 1. find someone that was legitimately sentenced to a fair duration of prison 2. offering them the ability to labor to reduce their sentence is not forced labor
Letting somebody innocent out "early", even if we extracted undue labor from them, could be a net good. But the incentives are all in the wrong direction, and we see the effects writ large all around us. Making fine points about a theoretical situation of justice and legitimacy is a harmful distraction in present circumstances, where we demonstrably don't have those.
US citizens are absolutely uniquely criminal.
The violent gun murder rate in the US is 5x what it is European countries. Those are stats based on deaths, not criminal prosecutions.
The number of 'high speed chases' etc. is considerably higher.
In some 'high crime / poverty' areas of the US, the amount of crime again is multiples of those of other nations.
Moreover, the US has the right to put people in prison for crimes in a different manner than say Sweden, who might only have someone in jail for 4 years for murder.
China is putting Uyghurs in jail for their ethnicity, not for any crimes committed, so the issue is moot.
The people convicted of crimes in the US are not inherently worse people than their counterparts in other countries. We have more crime because we have chosen to have more crime, blamed them, and incarcerated them because we have chosen to have that. In other countries people have made better choices, with a better outcome.
They suffer because of it, and non-prisoners suffer as well, as they're competing with what is functionally slave labour.
Slavery is forced labor, which is orthogonal to being paid. If you are forced to work but are also paid (perhaps rare, but not unheard of), you are still a slave regardless of the pay. If you aren't being paid but aren't being forced to work, you aren't a slave (that's called volunteering.)
Prison labour is fundamentally slave labour, especially in the US. The US prison system expanded massively after slavery was made illegal, especially privately run for profit businesses that are allowed to sell prisoners as laborers for below real market rates.
China does not have a Justice System - it's entirely politicized (people are put to death in private trials with fabricated evidence), but even then, we are not banning stuff 'because Chinese prison'.
We are banning specifically from concentration camps where 100's of thousands of Uyghurs are imprisoned not for any crime, but merely because of their ethnicity.
So if Cali started taking Japanese citizens property, throwing them in jail, and forcing them to work and to 'retrain their thinking' i.e. even worse than what happened to some in WW2, then we could start to talk about moral equivalence.