it's not just punishment.
per the constitution forced / slave labor is only abolished for non-prisoners. prisoners are no citizens. many loose the right to vote, too.
and _that_ again is a major reason why marijuana was made a felony crime.
per the constitution forced / slave labor is only abolished for non-prisoners. prisoners are no citizens. many loose the right to vote, too.
and _that_ again is a major reason why marijuana was made a felony crime.
We call it slavery, but is it? Yeah, prisoners make $1 an hour to work for private industry. That sucks for prisoners, sure, but they're being fed, housed, and receiving healthcare at taxpayer expense even without opting-in. The extra $6/hr they don't get paid subsidizes their stay...literally repaying their debts to society.
What's the real objection to this? Competitive disadvantage?
All slaves receive these things. Its in the interest of the slave owner to keep the slaves healthy enough to work. Modern companies shouldn't get a discount by using slave labor. If the prisoner wants to learn a "skill" that is profitable to a company then they should be paid the minimum wage.
Its less awful, but I also believe unpaid internships should also be illegal unless they are purely observational. If the intern is contributing in anyway to the profits of the company, they should be paid.
Sure, but unlike slavery, you get the food and housing independent of whether you lift a finger to do any work. The work is optional. It's rewarding if you do it. Working shortens your sentence. Work output never changes one's status as a slave.
Articles suggest prisoners who don't opt-in to work programs are penalized at parole hearings. This is a dishonest reframing of parole, something intended to be an earned benefit, not a clearance sale. The system is optimizing for prisoners who have been conditioned/rehabilitated into being functional in society-- the ones paroled demonstrated some willingness to play the same game as civilians, working to get ahead through their labor. They appear to have been broken of their criminal ways, so retaining them is expensive and unnecessary.
The ones who insist on avoiding work serve the duration of their actual sentence as proscribed. This is not slavery, it's literally the point of prison. You stay until your term expires or you demonstrate to the parole board that you've changed.
> I also believe unpaid internships should also be illegal unless they are purely observational. If the intern is contributing in anyway to the profits of the company, they should be paid.
I'd argue unpaid internships are worse. The intern doesn't need to prove any sort of reformation, nor are they being punished for crimes against society. They do not have food and housing provided for them. Not paying them is entirely exploitative.
Though what I earn from work does change how much the feds take as their cut. If you don't own the earnings from your labor, you aren't a free person.
In the US, it is already illegal, and has been this way for a while. The enforcement in practice is another story though.
Here[0] is the source with all nitty gritty, but a simplified tldr is that unless an intern’s output during the internship is not making money for the company and is pretty much purely an educational venture, the intern gotta get paid at least the minimum wage.
0. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/25/slavery-unit...
The objection is that it’s forced labor, meaning you’re subject to punishment if you don’t comply. Basically, slavery.
Yes. When you are forced to work and aren't allowed to quit your job, you are a slave. Slave owners may feed/house their slaves, and even pay them slave wages but none of those things make the slave any less of a slave.
> What's the real objection to this?
It's rare that someone asks what possible objection someone might have to slavery. Even if you thought that exploiting, abusing, and degrading enslaved human beings for profit wasn't morally abhorrent, there are purely economic reasons why slavery is a terrible idea. There are also purely selfish reasons to oppose it because if we allow it to happen to others it could just as easily be allowed to happen to you.
It's not even terrible unlikely that it will. The US locks up more of their own population behind bars than any other nation on Earth. There are plenty of entirely innocent people in prisons too. The best way to protect yourself against slavery is to make sure that enslavement isn't even an option on the table.
That said, there's no reason why that should mean that prisoners can't be employed by choice. If they were free to decide what type of work they wanted, and they were free to decline employment they wanted no part of, and they were provided the same pay for their labor as anyone else would be, and they were afforded the same protections against exploitation and hazardous working conditions as anyone else, then there'd be no harm in letting them make money and it'd be very helpful if they could put some money aside for the many expenses they'll be on the hook for after their release.
No. If there were forced-work programs, we wouldn't be arguing about slavery-not-slavery, we would be calling them concentration camps. Unlike the lies of Auschwitz, work will actually set you free.
Work is optional in prison. If anything, it's a privilege, since if you're enough of a problem it isn't even on the table for you. You are allowed to quit your job.
Black American slaves did not earn wages. Their sentence was indefinite. As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
Auschwitz victims did not earn wages. Their sentence was terminal. As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
American prisoners earn wages. Working reduces their sentence. They are eventually released from confinement regardless of output.
Prison conditions are unpleasant, but that's not the argument. American prisoners are not slaves.
I'm forced to work or I suffer "punishments" like starvation and homelessness, and I've had wages skimmed by an employer. We can all identify as slaves if we try hard enough.
Not usually, no.
>Their sentence was indefinite.
Or even infinite, as far as they were concerned.
>As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
Whoa, hang on. I'm not a slavery apologist, but... are you sure? As in, routinely, not as a bizarre, rare event? Not events like lynchings, but just "well Old Tom here ain't producing anymore, time to string him up"?
I have read some of the work of actual slavery apologists, and one of the points often made is that laws prohibiting manumission of slaves were originally written in response to owners who would free their slaves when they were too old to do the work - and promptly dump them out with no money, no education, no place to live, and no skills beyond basic agricultural labor, to die. I could imagine that was an issue.
The wrongness of slavery is often talked about strictly in terms out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, though a point often made in early abolitionism was that the creation of an entire inheritable status of sub-citizens was evil in itself, regardless of how well or poorly the sub-citizens were treated. Also treated interestingly in Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker (which are not great books, but sure do give you some insight into Card's Mormonism), where the South remained royalist in the American Revolution. It certainly could have, if George III had better positioned his treatment of the colonies. The basic organization of the early South as an agricultural region centered on individual properties owned by some noble (who might or might not live there) and organized like medieval village life. Roads to get to neighbors were relatively unimportant, as water transport was the norm for both people and cargo. The entire coastal and tidewater area from the Sea Islands of Georgia to the Chesapeake worked like that, at least until colonists started trying to push past the limit of navigation (which made large plantations more difficult until you got south of the foothills of the Appalachians).
criminalize strong healthy young men for petty reasons. put them into prisons, private ones, mind you, where there is profit from housing the workforce.
and then make them work "or else" again, no choice, no freedom
fwiw circulating a sea of hand guns keeps the criminality rate high.
nra, private prisons, prison factories dance a happy dance. everyone profits off those "goddam n*ggas" (that was sarcasm)
and it's even subsidized, running prisons is expensive...
harsh punishment even for petty crime is da best for this, don't you ever start this crazy crime prevention social work resocialisation BS. it has socialism in the name already. that was sarcasm again.
its a set up for slavery, masked as "criminal justice"
and a prime exercise in newspeak.
https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/legal-documents/2022...