Oh no, you can say “slavery”. The US Constitution specially permits it for inmates
Fun fact: the 13th Amendment permits slavery as punishment for a crime. Yay, America!
Funner fact: in 2024, Californians actually voted for slavery! https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california-election-result-proposition-6-fails/
Painful.
The California Attorney General’s Office writes ballot language and summaries, and the word “slavery” did not appear on the California ballot. Instead, the language read, “Eliminates Constitutional Provision Allowing Involuntary Servitude for Incarcerated Persons. Legislative Constitutional Amendment.”
“When I saw the words ‘involuntary servitude,’ I thought, ‘This might take some explaining for the voters,’” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California. “We know that when people are unsure or uncertain, the default is to vote ‘no.’”
IMHO if the system is fair and there was a real crime (Not people getting punished for some BS „crime“ or for just belonging to a minority, wrong skin color etc.) then let them work. But not for corpos/financial reasons: Let them do things that make everyday life of everybody outside a bit better. This way they can at least give something back to society.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I don’t think that something like this would work in the US.
Prison shouldn’t be about punishment. It should be about protecting the general population from those who would do them harm. And prisoners should spend their time in prison in ways which could help to rehabilitate them, even if it makes us unhappy that a victim suffers while the victimizer gets therapy and an education.
I’m absolutely in favor of providing inmates with conditional employment and education opportunities. I’ve heard of several programs where inmates are allowed to continue their previous jobs under heavy supervision (mainly in court cam videos where living brain donors of the sovereign citizen persuasion voluntarily lose said privilege). The problems start when said labour becomes compulsory.
So long as they are paid the same wage as non-prisoners. Anything else is slavery.
Yes, being incarcerated and working while being paid $0.50 an hour is STILL slavery.
At that sort of wage, the prisoners are doing it more for the opportunity to get out than for the money.
I’m not excusing it one way or another. I worked for a school which operated inside of a juvenile prison for a while and they had these work release programs.
The place I worked was actually rehabilitative, though, and gave the kids at least almost all of their earned money, and helped them get things like food handlers cards and useful experience for when they were released.
If only we could (would) do something like that for adults.
The problem starts when inmate labor provides others with essentially free money. Which then leads to labor being compulsory.
if the system is fair and there was a real crime
If the system is fair, “real crime” drops precipitously and we baited into constantly ask the question “How do we make prison profitable?”
The black line in the image made me think I cracked my smartphone glass, jfc
The purpose of a system is what it does.
You should really read the 13th amendment in all its glory before you feign shock.
It’s like reading hammurabi’s code where the punishment for stealing is getting your hand cut off. It’s completely barbaric by modern standards but it was an improvement at the time because it used to be if you fucked with a rich dude he could do whatever the fuck he damn well pleased. Only getting to cut your hand off was an improvement.
The 13th amendment was an improvement in the sense that slavery was no longer simply your birthright, they had to find some kind of crime to convict you of first and they threw a couple white guys in here and there with the blacks to make it slightly less horribly racist.
If anything it’s a testament to how horrifying slavery was that the “improvement” is still terrible.
Yup. Imagine standing proudly and supporting a country with slavery. Pledging your allegiance to it. Paying your hard earned money into it.
Then calling it a free country, so proudly.
lmfao
Reminds of the “socialism” in China or the national pride the average Russian feels despite the checkered history.
It’s almost like we’re locked into tribes divided by manufactured boundaries or something, constantly inventing new reasons as to why “we” are better than “them”.
It’s tired and it’s tiring.
Lol that’s not just new York
FYI: direct equivocating chattel slavery and prison forced-labor is an old tactic for confederate apologia. Prison conditions are, as OP points out abhorrent and racist. But they’re utopian compared to race-based chattel slavery. It makes the slavery apologist’s job easier when they just have to defend prison conditions to an audience ignorant of the realities of antebellum slavery.
Saying that prisons are the same as slavery doesn’t make prisons look worse, it makes slavery look better.
direct equivocating chattel slavery and prison forced-labor is an old tactic for confederate apologia
Jim Crow was explicitly a strategy of reinstituting plantation labor through the criminal justice system.
Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.
During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.
What else do you call this except chattel slavery?
Again it’s not because there’s not serious parallels between American style race-based chattel slavery and the modern forced labor system that we use to enslave people.
They muddy the waters because they are Confederates they are ye old fascists their entire f****** bit is to play with reality. These people genuinely believe that they are scientifically better at being human and that they can prove it with their bones.
Frankly, I think the slavery systems that the US has the most in common with is not even its own historical chattel slavery. Just normal forced labor systems historically that were not multigenerational. Like multi-generational race-based slavery is basically unique in world history and frankly every single example I’ve ever seen of historical parallels or or like any sort of historical precedent for any kind of practice even remotely similar to race-based chattle slavery basically is just an exercise in examining our own biases because they don’t f****** have them. Race is from chattel slavery race as a concept in the English language is from chattel slavery . Most human societies throughout history and most languages even are not going to have concepts of race as opposed to just normal ethnicity because you don’t even have enough of a range to realize that’s a thing that happens. It’s like being aware that there are people in the world with these other characteristics, and half the time it’s in the same sort of breath or sentence as here there be dragons and freaking people with their heads on backwards who walk shuffling or whatever. Like it’s it’s actually basically impossible to both not give someone hope that their life or any of their children’s lives could ever improve and also maintain that situation with any sort of permanence . Modern empires modern science modern pseudoscience is an integral part of that kind of system functioning and it the keys just didn’t exist more than 400 years ago all at the same time.
Like some of the best evidence I’ve ever seen for why the slave trade stopped in the first place is just they realized how many f****** people were dying and enough of the different human links in that economic chain just noped the f*** out of it within 200 years.
F*** I had a bad day
So that black line is from when you loaded this image into paint and changed the text?
So “overseer” is still a valid career path in America?
It’s pronounced “officer” nowadays
Do these words share an origin?
Apparently not, but it is interesting how similar they sound.
That’s a cool site. Thanks for sharing that!
KRS-One was not wrong. Just because the words had different origins centuries ago doesn’t mean that people didn’t use them in largely synonymous ways more recently. It’s not like racist pigs are researching linguist history.
system of a down lyrics
Wake up (wake up), Grab a brush and put a little makeup?
not that one, but off the same album (its called “Prison Song”)
Prisons are scattered throughout upstate
Well they’re also building a tall one in Chinatown.
It’s not about economy or labor, it’s about taking away people’s rights. They’re not looking to gain anything, they’re looking to take something away from someone else.
For conservatives, they can’t win unless someone else loses. So if they see immigrants and trans people getting rights, they see it as they (conservatives) are losing rights.
Absolutely maddening to see the logic in their heads.
It’s both.
It’s a for-profit prison system. They are absolutely looking to gain something–money that they don’t have to earn.
It’s a pittance ($74 billion) compared to the incomes of the families and corporations they protect. Yes they make money but they are not there to make money. They are there to take rights away from people and make sure they don’t revolt.
I agree. The labor part, however, is totally about exploitation and profit. I’m sure they also get some joy in further eroding the rights and therefore humanity of the inmates while they are at it.
