#13th amendment
Well,when you put it that way… (X)
And they can’t hire the ex-prison slaves because their conviction records make them ineligible to be hired by professional fire squads.
One of my colleagues spent part of his prison term fighting fires, and almost died because they were sent into an area where the fire was supposedly out. But no, they could not hire him when he was released on parole in 1994, even though he had the skills required.
California law finally changed in 2020. Except for those convicted of violent felonies or sexual assault, the inmate firefighters are eligible to go through additional training to join fire crews as employees. They also have their records expunged and can skip parole.
But yes, the fact that we still rely on “inmate labor” is appalling.
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I won’t even caption this one cause it’s self-explanatory. Not even animals should ever be treated like this.
Credits to: Anarchist People of Color
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This is important.
It’s not a “loophole” it’s explicit within the text of the amendment
“Loophole” lmfao like it’s a fucking accident, like it wasn’t purposefully structured to reclaim and expand a source of free labor
We never outlawed slavery in America. We simply transferred ownership of slaves from individual landowners to the government and large corporations.
Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:
-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.
-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”
-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?
-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.
-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.
-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.
-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.
-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.
-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.
-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.
-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.
Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.
Sources:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime
http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html
https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-introduces-bill-to-stop-private-prisons-from-exploiting-tax-incentives-for-profit
For reference, they’re referring to the clause that goes, “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.”
This is not a new concept in media. Shawshank Redemption was full of examples. OITNB was another. My cousin was an electrican that had a pill problem. When he did time for possion he was often put in extremely dangerous situations to use those skills. In exchange he was given more time outside his cell. As a country boy being inside a small space for 18-20 hours a day was doing him serious mental harm. I should prolly add that he was detoxing handling electricity. The good news is he beat the habit but this is no way to “reform” anybody.
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