cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11237867
This literally happened en masse after slavery was abolished in the South. They would just charge black people for minor offenses (e.g., “looking at a white woman”), jail them, and lease them to middle-class landowners who treated them worse than slaves. This country was built on slave labor and the legacy of slavery still continues to this day.
Yep, slavery was largely re-instituted (in a less dominant form) during the reconstruction era.
The US still has a significant portion of its economy based on slave-labor, including at least 54 state-run prison farms, and US-state-run companies like Federal Prison Industries which operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories, where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
The US also has the highest incarceration rates in the world, with states like Louisiana basically being slave states. Most individual US states outrank all other countries.
Not to diminish how messed up prison labor is, or how private prisons shouldn’t be a thing at all, to say that prison labor makes up a significant portion of the US economy is a pretty big stretch.
FPI/UNICORE only has about a half billion in gross revenue, and the entire private prison sector is around ~$8 billion.
The US economy is in the $25 trillion range. Arby’s is about half the size of the private prison industry, and eight times larger than FPI. ($4 billion)
Neither should exist in the modern era, and getting rid of them would be an almost unnoticeable impact on the economy.
SCOTUS just made being homeless illegal. There’s about to be a lot more sla… er, prisoners.
