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

  • @andros_rex
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    187 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.

      • beefbot
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        fedilink
        22 hours ago

        “They Thought They Were Free: [German society 1933-1945]”

      • @andros_rex
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        126 hours ago

        Cognitive dissonance. Discrimination is illegal, so obviously anyone who experiences it is crazy or lying. Clearly, they should have just followed the law against selling loose cigarettes if they didn’t want to die.

        • @gaael
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          35 hours ago

          Sounds like gaslighting.

      • @surewhynotlem
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        65 hours ago

        For the same reason narcissists like to say they’re the best.