Thursday, August 23, 2018

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

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

The American Conservative run a good article today by Doug Bandow called,  The Madness of Military Intervention in Venezuela, where he said criticism of the Venezuelan dictatorship was justified, but war wouldn't improve the situation. He says, there are many odious  regimes in the world and North Korea uses slave labor prison camps. That might be true, but I also pointed out on the American Conservative site that the U.S. has the most slave labor prison camps in the world. US prisoners are not forced to work, but most choose do because they need the money for ordinary everyday items and for food even if the wage paid is pittance. KV. 

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:
Sarah Burrows - How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it

1 comment:

Konrad said...

“Doug Bandow said criticism of ” what he calls ”the Venezuelan dictatorship was justified, but war wouldn't improve the situation.”

There. Fixed it.

President Maduro was democratically elected. Only fools and neoliberals call him a “dictator.”

Regarding the alleged “slave labor prison camps” in North Korea, where is the proof of that?

During World War II the USA had 152 slave labor camps for Americans who refused to die to make rich people richer. Victims were not released until two years after the war ended.

This is not to be confused with the WW II slave labor camps for U.S. citizens of Japanese heritage.

Americans with as little as 1/16 Japanese heritage, and orphaned infants with "one drop of Japanese blood," were thrown into concentration camps.

(But only Germany was “racist.”)