Thursday's post focused on force-feeding of hunger strikers protesting extreme isolation in "Secure Housing Units" at Pelican Bay, but we shouldn't forget "ordinary" issues with the American prison-industrial complex.
Here is an excellent Alternet article on prison labor, touching on the race to the bottom in labor costs (US prison labor undercutting even 3rd World labor), the re-birth of chain gangs, the post-1979 history of deregulation of prison labor, and the relation of our prison system to the history of slavery. Louisiana figures prominently in the article ("Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men"); of interest to New APPS readers is something the article doesn't mention, the use of inmate labor at my university.
Excerpts from the Alternet article:
There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.
They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century....
It’s no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars....
Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for 40 percent of US prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic females....
There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street Journal more than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed. They found that judges signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties. It appears that any act that can be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive workforce....
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