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

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    20 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.

    • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      you’re fine with a system that has the same look smell taste violent and racist enforcement and oppressive outcomes as slavery. you’re fine with slavery. sorry babes.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      19 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?