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

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      77·
      4 days ago

      So slavey never ended! Cool cool. Totally not a corporate dictatorship masquerading as a democracy…

      • pyre@lemmy.world
        43·
        4 days ago

        the laws never pretended it ended. the thirteenth ammendment very plainly allows it:

        Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

        emphasis mine. it never said you can’t have slavery any more, it just said if you’re gonna do slavery you have to convict someone first.

        • Crikeste@lemm.ee
          21·
          4 days ago

          That’s how propagandized Americans are. lmfao They act as if this is some shadowy hidden part of our culture

          • Klear@lemmy.worldEnglish
            10·
            4 days ago

            It’s not like you’d expect people to be closely acquainted with an obscure legal document like the constitution.

            Oh, wait…

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
          42·
          4 days ago

          Not saying it’s not true, but it was pretty much in the spirit of English legal tradition. This probably even wasn’t a huge point of contention when written.

          If that part is changed, no kind of convict labor (or “public work” or whatever it’s called in Europe and elsewhere) will be legal. All the convicts will do is rot in the same building for many months and years.

          Without some deep prison reform you’ll have an increase in suicides and mental health cases. I’ve spent only 10 days in a mental hospital (from medical commission for conscript service, I live in Russia), and every opportunity to go do something unusual was happiness there. Even to help nurses with carrying somewhere some vaguely piss-smelling bed sheets in bags. It was nothing like prison. It was nothing like a usual mental hospital even. Still boredom gets you.

          Like I said, without a deep reform. With said deep reform - convict labor being allowed only with competitive wages somehow limited in use (say, only available upon release?), so that these wouldn’t go to overpriced prison goods or something like that to indirectly reproduce slave labor, - then yes.

          Actually, about prison goods - I think prisons can afford to provide inmates with a free delivery service, while what they buy they pay for themselves. Prisons in general shouldn’t sell anything to inmates or buy anything from them, the power imbalance is unacceptable. Or maybe it won’t be a free delivery service, just prison authorities will be obligated to accept those deliveries.

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
              1·
              3 days ago

              I’m already talking about that. Voluntary work in the situation where inmates will spend their wages on overpriced goods in prison is slavery with additional steps.

      • Ignotum@lemmy.world
        20·
        4 days ago

        Yup, it never ended, it just rebranded
        I believe it’s called neoslavery, I think the last privately (legally) owned slave was released in 1946 if i recall correctly, now the only legal slavery is prisons

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
      15·
      4 days ago

      I guess it became more egalitarian and less racist though? One can say they failed to end slavery, but they managed to end exclusively black slavery.

      So it turns out that USA is actually not land of the free, but land of the equal. Seems what they like to accuse USSR of. Those damned commies.