A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
Our Goals
Important to note this isn't new or restricted to red parts of the country. Vagrancy laws, laws against loitering, etc are all ways of criminalizing the poor to ensure we are all loyal wage slaves, and to a lesser extent feeding the prison-industrial complex. Many Steinbeck novels touch on this so it was a prevalent cultural touchstone in the 30s
To be clear, those rules were all ways of criminalizing BLACKNESS in the immediate aftermath of emancipation because the freed people had nowhere to go and nowhere to sleep. And since racism is a system designed to get the working class to do the dirty work of the owning class, it makes sense that laws intended to enforce racism get used against all poor people in relatively short order.
The forced labour part is relatively new-ish. I think the average American has no idea about the slave labour involved in their daily lives.
Forced labor is not new. When the USA amended the constitution in the aftermath of the civil war they explicitly banned private ownership of slaves but made a specific carve out for prison slavery. Immediately after emancipation the states created laws that freed black folk couldn't avoid and in 10 years the prison population went from 90% white to 90% black. And those black prisoners were leased to plantation owners to work their fields.
Convict leasing lasted almost 50 years, but not before other modalities of prison slave labor had developed and matured.
It is in no way a relatively new-ish thing
Im sorry but i read that as "incinerate" and i was like wat
Thats the next step
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
Tax subsidized slavery for anyone who can't afford a home?
What a horrible state.
Kenshi vibes
They don't care because the breakdown is:
The tax-payer is out 66k in order to imprison the homeless That 66k goes to a prison, the prison makes money The imprisoned person is enslaved to prison labor, which the prison then leases out. The prison makes money.
The prison lobbies politicians to be "tough on crime" and pass laws that criminalize more and more things instead of helping people, that way the prison will make more and more money.
The people would be happier, healthier, and pay less in taxes if we just helped people, but we never will because helping people doesn't make prisons money. Same thing for policing. Police, as an institution, did not begin as law enforcement. They began as slave catchers. Their attitude and overall goal has remained the same. The police exist to ticket and fine people wherever possible in order to generate revenue, and, when able, arrest and charge people with the goal of filling prisons with slave labor.
If you eliminate the part of the 13th amendment that says 'except as punishment for convicted crime' and make slave labor illegal period, and in fact, make it illegal for any entity anywhere to profit off of incarcerated persons, you will eliminate a metric shit ton of problems in the U.S.
One tiny note, with markdown formatting, you gotta put two spaces after a line for a newline. But that's only if you are absolutely absolutely sure, it's best to use two newlines for a new paragraph. OR make a list by adding the minus sign to the start of each line.
The prisons sue the states when not enough prisoners come in. That's the state of things.
What on earth could they possibly be suing for??
Not that I doubt you, mind, it just sounds incredulous!
The lawsuit centered around the Marana prison, a 1,400-bed facility operated by MTC. The contract between MTC and Arizona included a provision guaranteeing 97% occupancy.
Oh, so there's a contract with the state that says that they'll keep it at max occupancy. That's fucked.
Here's how I would get around it: We enact the legislation that says that prisons cannot profit off of any labor by incarcerated individuals, nor may their labor be leased, for any reason. Take that revenue away.
We hold to the occupancy contract, and they can have a prison full of people they have to care for but can't profit from.
Then we let the contract end and refuse to sign another one.
Would that work?
I'd say make the prison responsible for rehabilitation and job training.
Yeah make it a form of cheap housing you can leave any time you want rather a punishment nexus. Sack the sadists and hire social and support workers.
Yeah that could be good. A prison's success rate is determined by how few reoffenders it has.
Cool, state run slavery.
Criminalize existing, to make slaves.
I would like to permenantly house and feed myself for $16k. I have cash. Tell me how
It’s likely a room in a boarding house, and food through a volunteer kitchen - so that $16K is still being subsidised through private charities and/or local + state Government grants.
Don’t mistake me, though - I’m all for these types of programs. They’re a hell of a lot better than a swathe of people being homeless on the streets, or incarcerated in an overcrowded prison.
But yeah even if it cost double to house them rather than imprison them it would still be the right and rational thing to do
I’m pretty sure the actual cost is to permanently house and feed them until they can get a job that gets them self sufficient.
Yeah, those numbers don't make sense with the word "permanently".
I think what they mean is $66,000 value to the shareholders
Louisiana was the only state that didn't secede because of the issue of slavery per se.
they were afraid that their human breeding programs and slave market/futures market would collapse
if you go to Walmart, Kroger, or Publix and look up the company that produces those big Dora balloons and other cartoon characters, that's all Louisiana slave labor.
the overton window in Louisiana is firmly in the territory of "well you gotta have slaves though" and probably will be like that forever
Elon Musk said he'd end world hunger if that were something that could be done. The United Nations World Food Programme did the math: $6.6 billion per year. That's it! You can guess how much the world's richest man has donated toward this cause...
Just for perspective, a person who invested in the stock market recently and got a 5% return would be said to be investing poorly.
5% may not seem like much, but just for comparison, 5% of a trillion dollars is 50 billion dollars. I think you can see the point. Musk could solve world hunger, and it would be like chump change to him, even if he did fairly poorly with his investments. He wouldn't even have to touch his savings.
He's refusing to help people whose lives are being ruined without that help, or who are dying, even though the only penalty for Musk is that he would be getting inconceivably richer at a slightly slower rate.
It's like he's sitting on a mountain of life preservers amid an ocean of drowning people
Last I heard he NEGATED $43.8 Billion dollars of aid by cutting USAID, causing the deaths of 4.5 Million Children around the world.
How Much Would It Cost to End World Hunger?
The U.N. World Food Programme feeds over 100 million people facing severe hunger in more than 120 countries and territories every year. In 2021, WFP did this with a budget of $9.6 billion dollars, which was still $5.2 billion dollars short of their total funding requirements. Clearly, ending world hunger will require more money.
Back in July of 2021, former U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley mentioned it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
Edit: I should add, that they should still do it. Split it between the billionaires. Fuck, Elon is worth a trillion dollars
That's still only $360b. We could do that with only a portion of the wealth of ONE MAN.
But you see the billionaires don’t have any money, just a number they keep pumping up.
They don’t have any money, except when they do. They have all kinds of money for stock buybacks and bribes to government officials but when it comes to paying taxes suddenly there’s no liquidity.
You're not counting the value of the slave labor.
Nor is the fact mentioned that most prisons in the U.S. are run by and as for-profit private companies.
That is why so many people are incarcerated in the U.S., and unpaid slave labor is part of this multibillion-dollar business.
It is a business that, for entirely obvious reasons, no other democracy in the world allows in this absurd form—only the U.S., the "Land of the Free."
Most? I'm gonna need a source for that cause unless that's changed recently, they've been mostly public prisons.
You're right that only a minority of inmates are held in private facilities:
In fact, less than 9% of all incarcerated people are held in private prisons; the vast majority are in publicly-owned prisons and jails. Some states have more people in private prisons than others, of course, and the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration, but private prisons are essentially a parasite on the massive publicly-owned system — not the root of it. Nevertheless, a range of private industries and even some public agencies continue to profit from mass incarceration. Many city and county jails rent space to other agencies, including state prison systems, the U.S. Marshals Service, and ICE. Private companies are frequently granted contracts to operate prison food and health services (often so bad they result in major lawsuits), and prison and jail telecom and commissary functions have spawned multi-billion dollar private industries. By privatizing services like phone calls, medical care, and commissary, prisons and jails are offloading the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, trimming their budgets at an unconscionable social cost.
However, this does nothing to make the fact that private individuals profit from the incarceration of people any better. This practice could hardly be more unethical or counterproductive, as it creates a financial incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible—and it is obvious that this runs counter to the social purpose of prisons.
-$50,000, if the figures presented are to be believed. I guess that's what happens when your party is led by a certified business genius. They're just in it for the love of oppression.
Hm its almost like slaves aren't quality labor or something. Weird.
they import them from South america.
actually GOP likely uses things like prison pop as part of the census for thier start, this likely another source too. another value to them, is that news never reports how they bus them to other blue states, so they can give sound bites to right wing media, to say "shithole liberal media cant control thier drug ridden state".
Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted
Republicans are a cancer to this world
"They try to build a prison for you and me to live in"
System Of A Down - Prison Song (2001)
Slavery with extra steps
For many people choice between publishing someone at higher cost, or help them at lower isn't really a choice.
I vibe with it but let's be accurate here:
Based on FY 2023 data, the average annual COIF for a Federal inmate housed in a Bureau or non-Bureau facility in FY 2023 was $44,090 ($120.80 per day). The average annual COIF for a Federal inmate housed in a Residential Reentry Center for FY 2023 was $41,437 ($113.53 per day).
(Please note: There were 365 days in FY 2023.)
James Wills,
Assistant Director/General Counsel,
Federal Bureau of Prisons.
[FR Doc. 2024-28743 Filed: 12/5/2024 8:45 am; Publication Date: 12/6/2024]
And you may not trust the suit who wrote that but keep in mind if they were corrupt and under-report themselves they'll basically be robbing themselves on federal contract negotiations in the future but if they were on the straight and narrow then they're morally obligated to keep the number accurate and as low as possible.
And the low end is closer to $20,000 while the high end (higher security) was near $75,000 and most interesting of all is that the food and healthcare combined is less than $8,000 but the cost of the institution itself (beds and housing) varies wildly dependent on location as would the amount needed to house people outside of prison, and almost half the cost is paying wages to prison staff including records keeping, attorneys, management, and a metric butt-load of guards.
So, the system is broken and they're trying to abuse prison labor to the extreme, especially private sector and this specific administration, but in theory some federal prisons are already approaching the efficiency of the 16k number.
You'd also have to put a number on the value of prison labor - it's unethical, but that never stopped the suits.