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How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it

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If you buy products or services from any of the 50 companies listed below (and you likely do), you are supporting modern American slavery

American slavery was technically abolished in 1865, but a loophole in the 13th Amendment has allowed it to continue“as a punishment for crimes” well into the 21st century. Not surprisingly, corporations have lobbied for a broader and broader definition of “crime” in the last 150 years. As a result, there are more (mostly dark-skinned) people performing mandatory, essentially unpaid, hard labor in America today than there were in 1830.

With 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prison population, the United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world. No other society in history has imprisoned more of its own citizens. There are half a million more prisoners in the U.S. than in China, which has five times our population. Approximately 1 in 100 adults in America were incarcerated in 2014.  Out of an adult population of 245 million that year, there were 2.4 million people in prison, jail or some form of detention center.

The vast majority – 86 percent – of prisoners have been locked up for non-violent, victimless crimes, many of them drug-related.

Big Business is making big bucks off of prison labor:

 

While prison labor helps produce goods and services for almost every big business in America, here are a few examples from an article that highlights the epidemic:

Whole Foods – You ever wonder how Whole Foods can afford to keep their prices so low (sarcasm)? Whole Foods’ coffee, chocolate and bananas might be “fair trade,” but the corporation has been offsetting the “high wages” paid to third-world producers with not-so-fair-wages here in America.

The corporation, famous for it’s animal welfare rating system, apparently was not as concerned about the welfare of the human “animals” working for them in Colorado prisons until April of this year.

You know that $12-a-pound tilapia you thought you were buying from “sustainable, American family farms?” It was raised by prisoners in Colorado, who were paid as little as 74 cents a day. And that fancy goat cheese? The goats were raised and milked by prisoners too.

McDonald’s – The world’s most successful fast food franchise purchases a plethora of goods manufactured in prisons, including plastic cutlery, containers, and uniforms. The inmates who sew McDonald’s uniforms make even less money by the hour than the people who wear them.

Wal-Mart – Although their company policy clearly states that “forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart,” basically every item in their store has been supplied by third-party prison labor factories. Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms, where laborers are often subjected to long hours in the blazing heat without adequate food or water.

Victoria’s Secret – Female inmates in South Carolina sew undergarments and casual-wear for the pricey lingerie company. In the late 1990’s, two prisoners were placed in solitary confinement for telling journalists that they were hired to replace “Made in Honduras” garment tags with “Made in USA” tags.

AT&T – In 1993, the massive phone company laid off thousands of telephone operators—all union members—in order to increase their profits. Even though AT&T’s company policy regarding prison labor reads eerily like Wal-Mart’s, they have consistently used inmates to work in their call centers since ’93, barely paying them $2 a day.

 

BP (British Petroleum) – When BP spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf coast, the company sent a workforce of almost exclusively African-American inmates to clean up the toxic spill while community members, many of whom were out-of-work fisherman, struggled to make ends meet. BP’s decision to use prisoners instead of hiring displaced workers outraged the Gulf community, but the oil company did nothing to reconcile the situation.

The full list of companies implicated in exploiting prison labor includes:

Bank of America
Bayer
Cargill
Caterpillar
Chevron
Chrysler
Costco
John Deere
Eli Lilly and Company
Exxon Mobil
GlaxoSmithKline
Johnson and Johnson
K-Mart
Koch Industries
McDonald’s
Merck
Microsoft
Motorola 
Nintendo
Pfizer
Procter & Gamble
Pepsi
ConAgra Foods
Shell 
Starbucks
UPS
Verizon
WalMart
Wendy’s

While not all prisoners are “forced” to work, most “opt” to because life would be even more miserable if they didn’t, as they have to purchase pretty much everything above the barest necessities (and sometimes those too) with their hard-earned pennies. Some of them have legal fines to pay off and families to support on the outside. Often they come out more indebted than when they went in.

Prison farms” aka “modern plantations”

In places like Texas, however, prison work is mandatory and unpaid – the literal definition of slave labor.

According the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, prisoners start their day with a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call and are served breakfast at 4:30 a.m. All prisoners who are physically able are required to report to their work assignments by 6 a.m.

“Offenders are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a result of good work habits,” the website says.

Most prisoners work in prison support jobs, like cooking, cleaning, laundry, and maintenance, but about 2,500 of them work in the Texas prison system’s own “agribusiness department,” where they factory-farm 10,000 beef cattle, 20,000 pigs and a quarter million egg-laying hens. The prisoners also produce 74 million pounds of livestock feed per year, 300,000 cases of canned vegetables, and enough cotton to clothe themselves (and presumably others). They also work at meat packaging plants, where they process 14 million pounds of beef and 10 million pounds of pork per year.

While one of the department’s stated goals is to reduce operational costs by having prisoners produce their own food, the prison system admittedly earns revenue from “sales of surplus agricultural production.”

Prisoners who refuse to work – again, unpaid – are placed in solitary confinement. When asked if Texas prisons still employ “chain gangs” in the FAQ section, the department responds:

“No, Texas does not use chain gangs. However, offenders working outside the perimeter fence are supervised by armed correctional officers on horseback.”

Similar “prison farms” exist in Arizona, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and other states, where prisoners are forced to work in agriculture, logging, quarrying and mining. Wikipedia says while the agricultural goods produced on prison farms is generally used to feed prisoners and other wards of the state (orphanages and asylums) they are also sold for profit.

In addition to being forced to labor directly for the profit of the government, inmates may be “farmed out” to private enterprises, through the practice of convict leasing, to work on private agricultural lands or related industries (fishing, lumbering, etc.). The party purchasing their labor from the government generally does so at a steep discount from the cost of free labor.

 

 



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    Total 9 comments
    • annachibi

      This information is very useful. I hope next time when I come back I’ll get more infomation. https://hinhanhdephd.com/hinh-anh-ngay-tet/

    • truck driver

      So that’s why agents for cops that look like they used to be in jail or homeless. Walk up to truckers in the fuel island saying I ran out of gas and I was wondering if you could spare a few bucks and if you give them a few bucks you get arrested for some local ordinance law. Bath, New York pilot and the truck stop across the street the cashier pulls there cash tray out full of cash and try to hand it to the customer . Set Up so the truck driver goes to jail for robbery at the pilot in bath new york. Then they sometimes put merchandise Next to the fuel island at night Baiting people to run off with it

    • Rockledge

      FORCED to? I don’t think so. If a prisoner who has a life sentence is commanded to work and does not, what are they going to do to him, revoke his drivers license.

      I am all for prisons requiring prisoners to work in order to up their own comfort level with rewards. PROVIDING they are doing work that takes some of the burden of their sustenance off of taxpayers.
      They should be required to have a function in society for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is to teach them that the labor they seek to avoid by committing crimes is going to happen anyway, and it is far easier to work than thieve and con.

      But only in a fascist government would prisoners work to enrich private enterprise.
      No way prisoners should be forced to work for less than typical wages to enrich a corporation.

      If the corporations would relay all the profits they make from prisoners back into the system to help defray the cost of their upkeep, that would be fine.

      But corporations already find enough ways to cheat the shit out of the labor force, we can’t let them use prisoners to suck wages down too.

    • BungalowBud

      Can’t even compare the two. At least this punishment for the crime they committed allows the cheaper labor of products. Let it compete with foreign labor. Great. Also, they will feel better knowing that they help their relatives and friends on the outside. It also gives them the feeling how this country grew. Keep it going as a double reward.

      • Rockledge

        Absolutely not. Again, prison labor should be in place to benefit the taxpayer, not to help make filthy rich preferred stockholders and CEOs even more wealthy.
        It is bad enough the pad the workforce with subhumans who don’t even belong here in order to keep driving compensation for labor down, now they want to have prisoners help circumvent the laws of supply and demand by dumping even more low wage workers on the work force, which drives EVERYONES wages down ( except of course for those who abuse the labor force for their own gain).

        NOBODY should be forced to work for corporations. Doing so is slavery.

        Make prisoners grow their own food and raise cattle like it once was. Make them provide for their communities by making prisons self sufficient places.
        Teach and require prisoners to build and keep up prisons, Require them to provide their own food. Require women prisoners to make garments for prisoners. Require the men do maintain the grounds, buildings, and parking lots in prisons.

        But do NOT under any circumstances turn them into another wage destroying slaves for corporations.
        Doing so will only create more crime, because people who cannot get paid enough to survive will indeed find clever ways to survive, including criminal activity.
        Destroying the work forces already low wages by turning prisoners into work force compensation will simply create more prisoners and not benefit taxpayers.
        Again, requiring them to provide for themselves instead of the big brother reaching into my pocket to maintain them is the smart thing to do.

        Making wages lower by allowing them to compete in the work force will merely screw all of our children and grandchildren out of fair wages.

        People are simply not thinking this through. Capitalism dictates the laws of supply and demand, and when the labor force is flooded with slave labor there is no demand, therefore wages dive.

        When there is a deficit of labor, like there was during the Clinton administration, wages go up because companies are competing for employees rather than employees competing for jobs.

    • Lastnerve

      If you are in prison, non violent, would you rather rot in a cell or work 30 hours a week. Probably close
      to a dollar per hour in the prison industry or 15 cents per hour in the kitchen. 10 years is a long time and
      the inmates store is the only place to get comforts. Now a real reporters job is to find the graft and you
      can bet there is plenty.

    • Turbo136

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    • tuan nguyen

      hinh nen de thuong - ao dai mong This is very good from info you provided

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