US prison labor is cruel and pointless legalized slavery.
There's an interesting article in The Guardian about modern day slavery -- in the United States.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/22/us-prison-labor-is-cruel-and-pointless-legalized-slavery-i-know-first-hand
This form of slavery is enshrined in the US Constitutuion, that beacon of democracy. Yes. We have widespread "constitutional slavery" in the US to this day. The article points out that this form of slavery was written into the Constitution as a compromise with former slave states. Slave labor enables our economy. The author, who experienced that slavery, writes that modern American slave colonies are built in rural areas and populated with inner-city people to provide free labor to stimulate the economy of distressed rural areas.
These slave colonies are called prisons. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution allows slavery as a punishment for crime, a feature which has been exploited since Reconstruction, hand in hand with disenfranchising felons. Think Parchman Farm.
From the article:
Prisons are designed to warehouse, traumatize and exploit people, then send them back home in worse shape than when they entered the system. Despite having worked every day, the vast majority of people are released with no job experience, no references and no hope. Some would take this to mean that the system is failing. And it is with regard to public safety, rehabilitation and justice, but it’s horrifyingly successful at two things: guaranteeing jobs for some and perpetuating slavery for others.
Over the years, I learned that prison officials were not interested in giving us fruitful educational and job opportunities that allowed us to go home and stay home. The reality is much more sinister. Prisons are a job program for officers that requires us to keep coming back.
You may be familiar with company towns and coal towns; in the US, we have prison towns, too. In New York, all state prisons were built upstate as economic stimuli in rural districts and failing farm communities. The facilities imprison predominantly Black and brown inner-city residents who toil under a class of white overseers. I remember a guard bending over to shackle me one day and saying, “I just want to thank you for being here because I’m too old to be digging ditches.” My body and my labor made him an easy living. The parallels to slavery are stark and visceral.
Prison officials ignore these critiques and justify their practices by pointing to the exception in the 13th amendment of the US constitution – negotiated as a concession to slave states – that allows slavery “as a punishment for crime”. This exception enables states like Texas to force incarcerated people, mostly Black men, to pick cotton – even at a net loss to the state, because cruelty is the point.
It may be a net money loss to the taxpayers of Texas, but someone makes a profit from that free cotton-pickin' labor.
Before we talk about other countries' labor camps, let's fix it here. We have scads of people - often the descendants of chattel slaves - doing slave labor in the US today. The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, for a reason.
Can any DUers tell us the dimensions of prison slave labor, that this article describes, in the US today?
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