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

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    851·
    21 hours ago

    Yep. And it’s perfectly legal, because the US never banned slavery.

    Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

    I think we’re one of the only countries in the world who still has legal slavery. Pretty awful.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      The accurate term for prison labor is involuntary servitude - and it’s right there in your quote - but nobody ever gets internet points for using it.

      • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        If you’re arguing whether something is involuntary servitude or slavery, you’ve lost the plot. Both are unethical and inhumane, and involve coercing someone to work against their will to benefit another.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
      161·
      17 hours ago

      There are a few sharia lands and a bunch of not-yet-sharia lands with like half the population dreaming of it.

      Taken together - a huge chunk of the globe.

      There are also a few countries where the Western concept of slavery wouldn’t work, but with pretty feudal-despotic cultural legacy, like, ahem, Japan and Thailand and what not, which may have something similar to slavery again in future.

      So I wouldn’t say USA is that different.

      And in Russia there are whole small towns functional because of prison colony facilities there where prisoners work.

      Still, prisoners working for private companies with prisons collecting their wages, - seems kinda uncomfortably close. Because, yes, if they are safe enough to be let out into society, they are safe enough to not be prisoners.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
      24·
      19 hours ago

      Anytime you see one of those “silly laws” - stuff about not being able to ride a horse on Sunday or whatever - that’s why. “Vagrancy” laws were basically put in place to funnel black men into legal enslavement.