Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to popular food brands
apnews.com
apnews.com
Labour (and profit) sourced from the incarcerated creates problematic incentives, so needs proper oversight and regulation.
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor_about.js...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/2022...
"except as a punishment for crime"
A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union in June 2022 found about 800,000 prisoners out of the 1.2 million in state and federal prisons are forced to work, generating a conservative estimate of $11bn annually in goods and services while average wages range from 13 cents to 52 cents per hour.
Five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas – force prisoners to work without pay.
The report concluded that the labor conditions of US prisoners violate fundamental human rights to life and dignity.
Clearly not everybody is in line with holdovers from the cotton fields of central north america.
https://harvardpolitics.com/prison-labor-is-a-human-rights-a...
The reason slavery (disguised in many forms) is still a thing isn't because it takes time, and more because a number of people actively work in that direction. I'd assume those 1865 bits weren't left by mistake and forgotten.
I don't know how we can deal with that issue, but I think it will fundamentally be a tough battle.
It depends on how we qualify "modern" industries, but there's definitely a market for unskilled warm bodies. Recycling triage could be an example of that: the result is simple enough to assess that you can set a dozen of people on a line and adjust reward/punishment depending on the results. And it's definitely a modern problem.
The other aspect: while there will be better ways to do it, it won't beat the price of "slave" as long as there's no other risks in participating in the system.
In a very dark way, it's pretty hard to beat "almost free" through sheer technical advancement.
What about tmeu? https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65990529
Tech isn’t the only modern industry
I think far more is that a few people want power, and they are adept at manipulating the 90% who follow a herd (and are far less informed than your theory seems to imply). The bad people sell a vision of power and contempt; not long ago many other leaders sold a vision of freedom, universal rights, opportunity, democracy, and fundamental equality.
Nobody sells the latter any more, seemingly dumbfounded by their opponents - Biden, unlike every president pre-Trump, seems silent on it and sells infrastructure legislation. Progressives now sell despair - they can't get enough of telling everyone how despairing they are.
Not seeing an alternative, people follow power and hate.
We are biologically the same as every human who has followed every cause; we didn't evolve biologically; we evolved culturally. Unless someone stands up for that culture - unless we do - then it's not hard to predict what will happen to it.
> I think it will fundamentally be a tough battle.
Every battle has been tough - really much tougher than the ones we face now. Imagine being an abolitionist or for women's rights in the early 19th century - that's a tough fight. Yet they fought, and eventually prevailed. Our only real foe is us - our predecessors developed all the tools we need, the public hasn't forgotten about freedom and human rights in the last 8 years; we just need to stop despairing and whining and get to work.
The first name that came into my mind was MLK. Rest in Peace.
In a weird way, I think as we're getting better access to information, keeping a clean image as a politician is way harder. Being openly dirty and overwhelming the audience with the dirt until the overtone window shifts becomes a more viable strategy than pushing for a cleaner agenda and have it burned through the ground with all the contradictions that emerge from being a politician in the first place.
I see a light at the end of the tunnel with people getting more engaged in the pressing issues and being more vocal in aggregate. Getting a better mix of sheer individual input and elected representatives could be a way out, we could accept that they're scumbags but genuinely act under our input, even if at times it will result in stuff like Brexit.
> Every battle has been tough
Yes, wholeheartedly agree.
We don't have to go nearly as far (or high) as MLK: Obama, GWB, Clinton, GHWB, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon (iirc), Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, etc etc. ...
> keeping a clean image as a politician is way harder
Biden and Obama were/have been pretty clean. It's not that hard.
The quote given assuming it correct, was that
800,000 prisoners out of the 1.2 million in state and federal prisons are forced to work,
> Lots of states force people to work via all sorts of rules ..
US States .. states in other G20 countries not so much.
the article is about the U.S? Not sure what point you are trying to make.
I'm going to have to say there is something fishy about that quote - unfortunately https://usafacts.org/articles/what-are-prison-work-programs-...
I mean if it's 800,000 are forced to work it means that just about every employed prisoner is forced to work. This might be changing the meaning of forced.
There is force where you get moved out on a chain gang in the morning and brought home at night.
There is force where you get told if you don't work we will report to the parole board you refused to work and you won't get your parole at the hearing.
there is force where your family isn't giving you any money and so you need to work to make money.
But while there are lots of people who do not want to work at the jobs available because they suck and are dehumanizing there are obviously jobs that people do want and will compete for.
The trouble with quotes given in isolation, nobody knows your motivation for giving it.
I just think it's not widely known that slavery is still legal in the United States so long as the slave is a criminal. Quoted the 13th amendment to spread awareness.
It also tends to be used by specific demographics to derail topics like prison and slavery abolition. Without context, it's difficult to tell the difference between belaboring the point and a bad faith argument.
I personally gave you the benefit of the doubt, but it makes it questionable and some may not.
It's something akin to learning how to learn. It needs to be bootstrapped first.
Or, was there some point beyond you asking for help? If so, maybe elaborate a bit.
They took out over $1/hr. (the difference expropriated from remittances I received from family) to put toward “restitution”.
Slaves break even. This was closer to being held for ransom.
I feel a deep sense of shame to reside in a country where the majority of the populace is fine with it. Some with a shit-eating grin.
> Five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas – force prisoners to work without pay.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...
Absence of evidence never equates with a fact that none exist.
Hence science is never final, just the facts.
It’s subject to revocation. That makes for a powerful carrot. Refusal to work is one of the prohibited acts an inmate can do (called a “shot”) to get it taken away.
I have numerous issues with both. Would be happy if more Americans had issues with either.
Work stoppages can and have occurred, but the CO’s had sufficient expertise, staffing, and paid overtime to prevent anything newsworthy from happening. Generally unfair treatment or conditions were the cause of stoppages, none of which occurred during my tenure.
Collective punishments for evidence of smuggled contraband (which was ubiquitous) were more common.
Numerous jails I did time in transit (appx. 7 over 100 days) had worse conditions than the FPC I did the majority of my time in.
The problem with Shawshank as applied to the modern day is that the newsman Andy sent the warden’s financials to no longer exists to receive it. There is no independent investigative media in the U.S. anymore and the likely outcome of the movie, set today, would have been the warden continuing to commit his atrocities, unencumbered by public scrutiny.
I think a screenplay and movie will be the vehicle I tell this story with. Print isn’t exactly dead but movies are a more effective vehicle for change in this day and age.
Maybe you could ping me at my email address?
I honestly don't know. The jury foreman didn't know either, so he asked the judge to clarify, which she didn't. (I have copies of the notes they exchanged).
The jury didn't want to come back the following Monday, so they voted guilty on all counts, even though they didn't know what the counts were.
The judge later declared that I had pled guilty, then revised her order that I was found guilty by jury of X on a series of dates she pulled out of thin air. Then in her next order it was not X but rather Y. I don't think it's a stretch to say she didn't know either. One explanation is that the prosecutor kept changing her mind as to what the charges were, in three separate overlapping indictments, and played a trick where she'd supersede an indictment but argue the charges from the illegal one she superseded.
This case stinks to high heaven. Just the way America likes it.
And check out dirtyprosecutor.org for proof she forged the federal magistrate judge's signatures on the search warrant.
Finding a reporter interested in this matter is 100x harder than finding someone to help you open the cage to buy laundry detergent at Walmart. First they hide, then they literally run away screaming from me rather than do their job.
The 10th circuit hearing was one of the first audio recorded and made publicly available on the website and indicate just how moronic the panel was. They denied the appeal in part and remanded the part of about the drug forfeiture back because they couldn't make sense of it. I fired my counsel and got assigned another mercenary attorney to reargue the forfeiture bit two years later. Supreme court flushed the case, as they do most.
In the interim while at large I filed a habeas action (2255) within the scope of the court's own rules and they deliberately disregarded their own rules in order to deny it unless it was limited to 1/10 of its original length. Appealing that matter was fruitless, so rather than being left without options I filed an abridged version.
On the day of self-surrender, I traveled to Vermont to file a habeas action (2241) in custody of the D.Vt. within the second circuit, which had a reputation for being less corrupt (not less enough, unfortunately).
2241 got denied because by the time the judge got reassigned I had been moved into the ambit of the first circuit and thus they tossed the case (I was moved back into the second circuit shortly thereafter).
2255 got denied by the trial judge, of course. Quite a few years later the 10th circuit flushed it by ignoring half of it and deliberately misstating facts and misinterpreting facts and pointing to procedural incantations present within my original briefing but not within the 1/10 length I was illegally limited to.
Oh yes, that mercenary attorney I fired later too, but not before I went to watch her argue. She argued well, but pearls before swine. Later that day, on the Southwest flight home, I sat next to the 10th circuit judge on both cases (random coincidence) and asked him if he'd ever met someone whose life he'd ruined with one of his rulings, and now he had. As soon as we landed this 70-something old man ran off the plane faster than anyone I've ever seen, and went to tattle to the secret service to get me in trouble (though I did not threaten or attack him), but afterward, wouldn't recuse himself from the case, for which his vote was the deciding vote, 2-1 against me. The rest of the circuit gave him a pass for his ex parte conversation with me.
The amount of daylight between circuit court judges and gangsters (and I've come to know both) is far smaller than most Americans could possibly comprehend.
There are always more appeals I could file. Until they get an attitude adjustment from mounting public or political pressure on the judiciary, it's wasted effort for now. Americans are quick to outrage but easy to distract and sedate.
- Very high carceral rate
- Slave labor
- Executions, which civilized people don't do
- Undocumented migrants exploited purposefully in agriculture and manufacturing, creating a workforce unlikely to ever complain to anyone
- Even more extreme and unbelievable are the undocumented migrant children who are trafficked and exploited well past any sense of child labor regulations. Some sponsors are working them like a 19th c. London street gang because there is no meaningful oversight or regulation.
Another good read on carceral labor: https://archive.is/20230812162826/https://www.theamericancon...
To someone who immigrated for work, and decides that the specific and only work they're able to do thanks to how they arrived isn't worth it due to the pay and conditions, the threat of deportation is a very weak threat — more than literally nothing, but very very weak.
I'm simply responding to "Immigrants, legal or illegal, can walk out of jobs that are bad enough.", not trying to make it a contest over degrees of slavery / indentured servitude
However "many" is vague to the point of being useless. A hundred is many. And definitionally, there aren't good direct stats for how many illegal migrants there are, nor how they break down by how they got where they are now, only indirect proxies.
What you can do is work backwards from the pay and conditions of those workers to make an educated guess about how much their bosses feel they need to keep their workers sweet. If it's more than the prisons pay, then no matter what else, the workers do in fact have more options than literal prisoners.
Also, if they really do face death, theoretically there's this thing called "asylum" — though I assume political fights over that are at least as dumb in the US as in the UK.
I believe so, but was hard to ask as they (plural) were begging on the street, some with hand-made signs, and none spoke good English or German.
Now, my ex, she definitely had personal experience, she drove to the Calais Jungle to distribute donated supplies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calais_Jungle
> was hard to ask as they (plural) were begging on the street, some with hand-made signs, and none spoke good English or German.
I'm also careful to presume someone is homeless, undocumented, etc. Also, not my business (that is, it is my responsibility to help but their personal lives aren't my business).
She and I are still friends; she wanted to focus on activism rather than romance.
President Joe Biden’s new border plan focused on deterrence will almost certainly lead to a rise in the already record number of migrants dying at the United States southern border, enrich criminal cartels, and return refugees to likely harm, Human Rights Watch said today.
Biden’s “asylum ban,” announced in a rule in the Federal Register on May 10, 2023 is set to replace the abusive Title 42 summary border expulsion policy originally created by the administration of President Donald Trump under the false premise of protecting public health.
“Despite having more than two years to plan for the end of Title 42 and campaigning on promises to create a humane border, Biden has recycled one Trump policy after another, leading to countless abuses of mostly Black and Brown migrants,” said Ari Sawyer, US border researcher at Human Rights Watch. “His latest plan replaces Title 42 with a policy that continues to rely on failed and deadly deterrence and would bar people from applying for asylum.”
Biden’s new plan combines elements from Trump policies, including Title 42; a hyper-expedited deportation program that after due process abuses was scrapped when the expulsion policy took effect; and the asylum “third country transit ban,” found unlawful by two federal courts under the Trump administration.
The revamped asylum ban will block asylum seekers at the border from entering the United States for five years unless they obtain an appointment through the cellphone application “CBP One.” Appointments are extremely limited and usually book up within minutes, meaning that asylum seekers wait for months, trying each day to secure a spot. The result is electronic “metering” – forcing asylum seekers to wait in dangerous conditions at the border for an indeterminate amount of time.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has agreed to accept non-Mexican asylum seekers who are rapidly removed by the United States. Since the implementation of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy in 2019 and Title 42 in 2020, asylum seekers sent to Mexico have experienced kidnapping, rape, extortion, and other abuses by organized crime and Mexican officials.
By continuing these rapid removals, albeit with a new legal justification, Biden and López Obrador are knowingly continuing to put asylum seekers at risk, Human Rights Watch said. When the United States sends migrants to Mexico, criminal cartels are enriched by kidnapping them and then extorting money from their US-based family members to secure their release.
And also, there are implications in terms of market monopolization if only certain large corporations have access to the prison slave labor. It can create unfair, anti-competitive markets which harms people outside of the prison system.
The rest of the world sees this, Americans don't. That needs to change, for the positive.
Much more to do. We can't rest here.
Why aren’t there such programs? Has this been tried? It seems these companies aren’t presently trying to improve the conditions, but maybe at first they were?
Sounds like a politician's talking point. I'd be interested in some credible sources (not Twitter) if you have them.
The economic picture is less clear, due to the massive confounding factor of COVID crash and recovery. But the overall trend over Bukele's presidency is clearly positive, with 2019-2022 per-capita growth rate nearly twice the 2015-2018 rate: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Approval ratings, however accurate, are not at all democratic legitimacy, and those and testimonials are right out of the dictator's playbook. Putin, Mussolini, Modi, etc. etc. can say all the same.
Democracy - in any meaningful sense - is more than mob rule (which is popular rule!), or rule by a (supposedly) enlightened dictator. It is rule of law, and protects the rights and self-determination of everyone, including the unpopular.
No, "democracy" literally is mob rule, or at least that's how the term has been used for most of its history.
> Protects the rights and self-determination of everyone
On that front, El Salvador is doing better than ever. It used to be, the rights of the 2% of gang members were respected, while the 98% of honest citizens had no rights and lived in fear. Now, the 98% have full rights. That's +96% people with full rights
> It used to be, the rights of the 2% of gang members were respected, while the 98% of honest citizens had no rights and lived in fear. Now, the 98% have full rights. That's +96% people with full rights
The textbook language of the dictator and populist oppressor. Maybe it will be different this time, but that's a huge risk to take.
"Democracies", in reality, are usually some sort of representative constitutional republic that contains deliberately anti-democratic elements (an unelected judiciary, for example). Pure mob rule doesn't work, so in practice it's always diluted.
> Maybe it will be different this time, but that's a huge risk to take.
It is a risk, I agree. All regime changes are risky, as power inevitably ends up concentrated in one person or small group for at least a short period, so a lot ends up riding on their personal competence and morals. So far this one is working out extremely well, hopefully the trend will continue.
Exactly as expected for another dictator:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4441292-democratic-lawmak...
... during Bukele’s first term, he has “overseen the militarized harassment of the legislature, a significant erosion of judicial independence, and the de facto criminalization of civil society.”
“With the election approaching, this crushing of dissent and restriction on multiparty democracy has extended to the arrests and arrest warrants of political opponents, including the former Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States, Rubén Zamora,” ...
> All regime changes are risky
Exactly as expected for apologists: Equalizing democracy and dictatorship is really the message of statement, and we know very well that it's BS. Who is Bukele or anyone to seize power from people in El Salvador and tell them what they must do?
> So far this one is working out extremely well, hopefully the trend will continue.
Apparently not!
He's the democratically elected president with 90% popular approval.
The power he seized used to reside in the hands of MS-13 and Barrio 18. Under the former rule of the maras:
- no freedom of speech: you break omertà, they kill you. The gangs even put up signs: "see, hear, and shut up"
- no freedom of movement: you enter the wrong neighborhood, they kill you
- no reproductive rights: they think you're pretty, they rape you
- no property rights: you have something they want, they take it from you
- no due process: you piss them off, they kill you
- no right to life: they feel like killing someone, they kill you
People used to live like slaves, every day was hell. Now they can work, go to school, play outside, visit relatives, etc without fear. Ask any Salvadoran, they will tell you that they feel more free than ever now. But for some reason all the "human rights defenders" want to force Salvadorans to return to the horrible past. Better that than admitting their ideology has failed: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1750681591200768160/
There's always going to be some prisoners that are either too ill or considered too dangerous to be allowed to work, so how do they get charged for their stay? Also, the prisoners that have no reasonable chance of recovering their freedom are not going to have much incentive to work and what do you do when they go into arrears - put them in double prison?
How much is a portion? Cost per prisoner varies a lot, but a quick google suggests the US average cost per prisoner is about 50%-100% of gross national average salary depending on who I ask. (And the cost per prisoner in the UK is about double national average gross salary).
Truly a miracle of capitalism and Western democracy.
It doesn't sound like this is a job training program where valuable skills are being taught in a learning environment. It doesn't sound like they care what the prisoners are likely to be able to do when released, as I don't think a 65 year old farm hand doing piece work for his retirement is going to reduce recidivism. Finally it's all in an environment where the prisoners are punished for not working, which is done nowhere outside of a prison, so what type of work _ethic_ are you actually building here.
This is a paper thin excuse to deprive prisoners of their civil rights.
the difference is that the people getting screwed over were judged guilty of crimes by a jury of their peers or other due process.
Appeals to tradition are probably not the way to go when deciding how we can be a better society.
Most developed democracies have banned forced prison labour; the US is a bit of an outlier here.
Nice sound bite; but not really true.
It's certainly true a process is followed but that process is pretty shitty.
Plenty of people get released after the murder weapon is actually tried for fingerprints and low-and-behold it was somebody else! How does a person go through trial with even the murder weapon being tested? It's not required by the process.
Plenty of people have been convicted because "their bite marks match". Is there actually some peer-reviewed standard of bite marks where if I gave you somebody's bite and a bite mark you could match them together at 90% accuracy? No. How are non-reproducible methods used to incarcerate people? The process doesn't require accuracy.
For more, John Oliver: Forensic Analysis [1]
If only... they don't even need an excuse, the 13th amendment has a literal exception for "punishment for crime" :)
The pay they receive is typically minuscule so I don't know the advantage there. I'm not sure why they are paid at all. Perhaps some other benefit should be given such as more free time or better inside job.
These people are in these types of jails because they did awful things to normal, decent people. They cannot always be believed when they complain about beatings. I have no way of knowing if that's always true or true at all. If it were true, why would the prison allow them to speak to reporters?
This doesn't all make sense to me to have sympathy for dangerous criminals.
This is even before starting into the many innocent people in prison.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alabama-prisons-... https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2021/06/convict-leasing-s...
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Prisons are not free, that's why it should be an incentive for a society to work towards not needing prisons, when the incentive is for prisons to be profitable (or at least cover their costs) you created a perverse incentive for the existence of prisons, for the punishment of crimes with prison time, etc.
These "criminals" were only made criminals because those in power at that time wanted to criminalize being black and against the Vietnam war - and they openly admitted to that, many decades later:
> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
WTF, seriously?
https://jp.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mississippi-pardons-id...
Society shouldn't pay twice for a crime against their citizens. Criminals should be punished, but society should profit from them while imprisoned, not pay even more to have them do time in prison.
The only reasons I see for a prisoner not to work full time while incarcerated, are:
- They have some illness or impairment.
- They want to study (and get good grades) while in prison to change their criminal lives.
Another case of freeing a man after 48 years wrongfully jailed just weeks ago https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67782907
It's not something we used to do, it's something we still do.
What checks take care of this?
And (correct me if I'm wrong) there already are some cases in which people got prison sentences to make somebody else a profit.
Btw, looks like the USA is already locking up a lot more people than we (Germany) are
(1,23 × 1000000) / (330 × 1000000) ≈ 0,003727272727
(65 × 1000) / (83 × 1000000) ≈ 0,0007831325301
So about 4,7 Times as many people. Seems excessive
Work is good, that's the best thing you can do to criminals. It provides guidance, a meaning in life, and revenue. If we can get prisoners to work a honest job after they leave prison, we win. We have turned a criminal into a productive member of society. And I don't think that treating prisoners as slaves rather than as actual workers is the way to achieve that.
If you want society to make profit of convicts, that's what fines are for, not prison. You can have both, and prison work, like out-of-prison work can be used to pay that fine, and also damage to the victims. But for that, work has to be decently paid. At less than $1/hour, there is not much to repay the victims.
Only because the profit margin of this nigh-free labor is literally filling the coffers of 'x' business. If you remove the "for-profit" from the scenario, you'd eventually get your costs back, no; at far faster rate, even?