No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.

Most jobs are inside facilities, where the state’s inmates — who are disproportionately Black — can be sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for free doing everything from mopping floors to laundry. But more than 10,000 inmates have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from major car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart, the AP determined.

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-3b2c7e414c681ba545dc1d0ad30bfaf5

  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    15 hours ago

    Oh so you’re fine with slavery as long as there’s a thinly veiled justification then.

    “Crime” is whatever the state deems a crime, it is selectively enforced, and in the US the system is so set up that the vast majority plea out, because they are penalised for fighting back in a trial.

    The laws are arbitrary, racist and politically targeted:

    "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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. 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.”

    • John Erlichman, advisor to President Nixon

    https://www.unharm.org/the-racist-truth-behind-the-war-on-drugs/

    Back in the days of chattel slavery they had thinly veiled justifications too, called race science.

    Anyone with an interest in the matter and no moral compass could fall back on that and explain why chattel slavery was good for those other races, and it was the “white man’s burden” to deliver them to civilisation, ignoring how convenient it was that it also made them into slaves.

    I’ll let you think about which side of the argument you’d have been on back then, based on how you’ve swallowed the modern day version of it.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      12 hours ago

      No, I’m not “fine with slavery” or with people putting words in my mouth. My position is that prison labor is NOT slavery, and that misrepresenting it as such devalues people who actually live in in slavery, for the sake of having a good buzzword for prison rights arguments.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        With slavery you’re kidnapped

        Arrest is just a legally allowed kidnapping.

        with no justification

        Why do accept the justification of legality? Chattel slavery was legal.

        and no trial

        We’ve already been over the fact that most inmates never see a day in court.

        somebody literally owns you, and you have fewer rights than farm animals.

        Hard to see how that’s different to prison, except for the “literally owns you”, although inmates are essentially bought and sold, and quotas are maintained for private prison contracts. It’s not exactly ownership but that’s a very marginal difference.

        Prison is a punishment for a crime.

        So do you accept that anyone the state deems a criminal somehow deserves involuntary servitude? Why?