Is it slave labour, I mean are they being forced to do it and not being paid for it, then sure boycott it.
If NOT, and if it is an avenue for prisoners to earn money, benefits, then don't boycott 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.)