They’re are a few problems saying that prison labor is a continuation of slavery in the US.
The largest demographic in prison is white men.
Prisons don’t make money. Corpos that run the prisons, or the phones, or use prisoners as cheap labor do profit, but that money mostly comes from the State, the prisoners themselves, and the prisoner’s families.
Prisoners have legal rights.
Nobody is born incarcerated.
I’m not trying to defend that clause in the 13th. But equivocating all forms of slavery and forced labor is a common white supremacist tactic to minimize the particular evils of racialized chattel slavery in the US.
All races, all people, all nations, have had slavery and been slaves at some point themselves
David Barton (A Christian nationalist and fake historian)
Funny that you’d bring up white supremacist tactics right after throwing this one out there. Like, how can you bring up statistics to defend the justice system and just ignore 13% of the general population having a 38% share of the prison population?
That’s just untrue. Private for-profit prisons were a multi-billion-dollar industry for too long.
Also, they made enough money to bribe judges to sentence more people to longer terms so they could make more money.
Private prisons promised to be ‘more efficient’ and cost less per prisoner than public prisons, but typically their pattern of operations was to cut costs as much as possible and still charge the taxpayer more per prisoner than public prisons- and it got so out of hand that at one point it cost the taxpayer more per year to incarcerate a criminal than it would have to send him to Harvard for that year. Also under private prison administration, no effort was made at all to rehabilitate prisoners- their business was really based on recidivism, it was very much in their interest for prisoners to re-offend and end up back in prison.
Convict leasing on top of that is plain slavery, and the prospect of money to be made leasing convictsslaves for labor has corrupted America’s justice system, particularly in confederate states, ever since the 13th Amendment was penned.
They’re are a few problems saying that prison labor is a continuation of slavery in the US.
The largest demographic in prison is white men.
Prisons don’t make money. Corpos that run the prisons, or the phones, or use prisoners as cheap labor do profit, but that money mostly comes from the State, the prisoners themselves, and the prisoner’s families.
Prisoners have legal rights.
Nobody is born incarcerated.
I’m not trying to defend that clause in the 13th. But equivocating all forms of slavery and forced labor is a common white supremacist tactic to minimize the particular evils of racialized chattel slavery in the US.
David Barton (A Christian nationalist and fake historian)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/01/evangelicals-american-politics-tim-alberta-book-excerpt-00129319
There is a pretty good conversation about this in F.D Signifier’s video: “Fuck the police”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyEwOxp_Iyw (The conversation is about the 1:03:00 mark)
Funny that you’d bring up white supremacist tactics right after throwing this one out there. Like, how can you bring up statistics to defend the justice system and just ignore 13% of the general population having a 38% share of the prison population?
Plenty of American slaves also had rights, even as slaves.
The more you know.
That’s just untrue. Private for-profit prisons were a multi-billion-dollar industry for too long.
Also, they made enough money to bribe judges to sentence more people to longer terms so they could make more money.
Private prisons promised to be ‘more efficient’ and cost less per prisoner than public prisons, but typically their pattern of operations was to cut costs as much as possible and still charge the taxpayer more per prisoner than public prisons- and it got so out of hand that at one point it cost the taxpayer more per year to incarcerate a criminal than it would have to send him to Harvard for that year. Also under private prison administration, no effort was made at all to rehabilitate prisoners- their business was really based on recidivism, it was very much in their interest for prisoners to re-offend and end up back in prison.
Convict leasing on top of that is plain slavery, and the prospect of money to be made leasing
convictsslaves for labor has corrupted America’s justice system, particularly in confederate states, ever since the 13th Amendment was penned.