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.
I mean, yes. The constitution explicitly carves out one exception to the “no slavery” rule. People who proudly proclaim America was the “first country to abolish slavery” don’t even realize America didn’t abolish slavery. So even if they were right, they’d still be wrong.
A number of other countries did it first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom
And there is the real reason they made it OK to make homelessness illegal.
After they realized deporting illegal immigrants left fields to rot (see Florida, Georgia, and Alabama) they had to come up with a plan to make up the loss of labor, somehow.
I’m sure they figure 2 birds, 1 stone. Clean up the streets and make sure they have enough slaves to tend the fields. If you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps, we’ll tie those straps to your feet and drag you with em.
And only as recently as 2022 did we have a few states (four) abolish, without exception, the state constitution version of “except as punishment for a crime”. For the first time in US History!
I don’t understand, in that article it points out that Alabama allows this without pay, but then later in the article said Alabama is one of four that doesn’t allow this…?
Yes, it’s odd. I think this snippet from the second article about the four states might shed light:
“The approved measures will not immediately change the states’ prison systems, but they could lead to legal challenges about prisoners being forced to work or facing sanctions or loss of certain privileges if they don’t.”
Meanwhile the conservatives complain the IlLeGaLs are taking all their jobs.
