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
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.
and they teach us in school (ohio) that it’s totally great and makes sense that slavery is legal for prisoners. they make no mention of the record our. nation has for jailing people on bullshit charges.
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.
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.
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."
Either stay in your country or go through the proper channels. Or work as a field laborer for pennies on the dollar...sounds like there are a couple choices here, no one is forcing people to cross illegally. Edit I read no good, my b
Either stay in your country or go through the proper channels. Or work as a field laborer for pennies on the dollar…sounds like there are a couple choices here, no one is forcing people to cross illegally.
In your rush to dunk on folks who have made a difficult decision at a low point in their likely quite difficult lives, you failed to actually read what you replied to. But I'm guessing your response is now "they are criminals so they have no rights, and so who cares about their humanity."
You realize that this can happen to your uncle Cletus and not just illegal immigrants, right? Lol I'm going to assume not, based on your answer. I'm sorry that your parents, yourself, and your school district failed to educate you - there's still information out here though, just look around. Ask for help if you need to, there's lots of adults around.
I've been to prison and to be honest... When you have a job in there that pays usually 60 to 70 cents an hour, it's so much better than sitting on your ass and calling your friends/family asking for a handout...It sounds crazy, but after a while you literally crave a purpose/job.