>All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars
What? Had no idea about this whatsoever and I consider myself a well-read person. Damn.
What? Had no idea about this whatsoever and I consider myself a well-read person. Damn.
I remember checking NYTimes and CNN's frontpages and being shocked to see nothing written about it. The strike lasted nearly a month
Really wild to think about how this could've gone down in history books for immense historical significance if we just... paid any attention at all. Instead hardly anyone knows about it
Similarly there's an immigrant detention center near where I live in California. The detainees recently went on strike. They have to work to earn money in order to buy food. The work is "volunteer" so they can get away with paying them $1 for a full day's work. A bag of beans costs $3 and a 15-minute phone call is $2.50. So a full week of work gets you a phone call and some beans. The prison guards use intimidation tactics like "the judge won't like hearing about your bad behavior when your case is up" to keep them from organizing. Lots have gotten sick from the black mold growing in their cells too. It's straight up modern slavery and the only media source I've seen even mention it is LaborNotes[0]
[0] https://www.labornotes.org/2022/08/immigrant-detainees-strik...
Someone needs to create a hall of shame for these laws index by federal and for every state.
This is perverse on so many levels. It’s not only ongoing punishment but it disincentivizes people from getting their lives in order and probably increases recidivism rates quite a bit. So in the end I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs more.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/17/pennsylvania...
I'm fairly sure that's intentional, as prisons are "big business" in the USA (which also probably explains the ridiculously high rate of imprisonment here).
/s
Lmao there's definitely a ton of people who would make that comment unironically.
Jokes aside, the government and the largest market players are extremely intertwined.
Another extremely dystopian reality we live with daily and rarely stop to question.
When the 13th Amendment was proposed, one of the big compromises the South fought for was the "except as punishment for crime" clause. And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals. Basically just a rush to recreate the slavery apparatus by imprisoning Black people
The south didn't really get a say in the text of the 13th since they weren't around. That clause was included so as not to screw with the established prison labor systems of the states that were in the union. The 13th was in the over at a time when union support for the war was low and it wasn't a boat anyone felt like rocking. It wasn't a contentions clause and was basically seen as a common sense exception at the time. If it wasn't then you'd think some of the more abolitionist states would have tried to abolish that too or you'd at least have some period correspondence about it you could refer to.
>And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals.
You're early by a century. The lazy and up to no good criminal black man is a stereotype that mostly came around in the 1960s after we incentivized urban minorities to quit working above the table (and quit getting married) with asinine welfare eligibility rules. As an aside, president Johnson actually has some very quotable quotes on this subject.
In the many decades between the civil war and great depression blacks increasingly moved north and moved to urban areas (mostly in the north and midwest but some in the south) to get jobs in the industrial economy and because the alternatives in the south sucked. Throughout this time period they were stereotyped as tireless workers with some cultural differences much the same way other cultural groups have been over the years.