The formerly enslaved people willing to speak out and use their names on camera for this doco are incredibly brave. They are going to be targeted for this, and they know it. The system does not want to stop making money, and it will do anything to protect the cashflow.
Yeah the USA is a slave empire, they have to be stopped.
Y’all really ain’t ready for the slavery in the US agriculture sector conversation. It’s really bad, and this ICE shit is just acceleration
Or why they have decimated public education in black communities.
And just in general. Black communities were definitely hit hardest and first, but the damage isn’t solely contained there.
The Right essentially decided to destroy public education in response to desegregation.
The district I worked for was excellent in the 50’s and 60’s. Now, the only high school that isn’t a failure is the application school all the white kids get into.
Remember kids, if the republicans start complaining that someone is stealing their money, it means the state is.
Alabama ranks at a surprising 10th in most federally dependent at 61%
Note: No. 1 means most dependent. https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700
The 13th Amendment allows for forced labor in prisons. This is how Trump and the GOP will reinstitute slavery in the USA.
It’s been a feature of the US prison system since the end of Reconstruction. This isn’t something Trump invented.
Bright Blue California rejected a measure to ban prison slavery just a year ago.
They weren’t suggesting Trump invented it. They were suggesting Trump plans to expand it, nationalize it, and institutionalize it.
According to the AP article it isn’t forced per say, but it is highly leveraged onto inmates using early release/parole as a carrot.
Turning down work can jeopardize chances of early release in a state that last year granted parole to only 8% of eligible prisoners — an all-time low, and among the worst rates nationwide — though that number more than doubled this year after public outcry.
I would say threatening someone with more prison time absolutely counts as “forced”.
I’m not justifying or agreeing with it, but I think accuracy is important to minimize holes people can poke in discussions when you bring things like this topic up. It isn’t precisely being threatened with more time than the initial sentence, it is being threatened with not successfully getting a shorter time through parole.
Again though, for the sake of accuracy, that’s still Force. Saying you won’t be eligible for something that you should be eligible for normally, taking away that opportunity via a threat is absolutely Force. Especially when that’s something is your freedom.
I’m not here to argue on the situation. What I am saying is that if you discuss this with somebody neutral or opposed to you, it matters to make sure you position yourself well. Otherwise you can get completely sidetracked over words, as we are currently.
If you say “prisoners are being forced to work”, that can turn into a losing discussion quickly when you have to get into an extended discussion about how prisoners aren’t actively being dragged to work against their will. Actively being dragged out of their cells and put to work would be the initial connotation, as I’ve even seen in this thread. Once that connotation is shown not to be what’s happening, you’ll lose people quickly.
If right out of the gate you say prisoners are being coerced to work with the threat of an unfair parole hearing, you are on a much stronger foundation that people can’t truthfully pick at.
I get the feeling you feel so strongly about this that you might not care about what other people initially think initially or that you don’t want to give ground on what qualifies as forcing something, but if you want to get your message across, making it more bulletproof helps it.
When you say sidetracked do you mean something like what we’re doing right now because you continue to inaccurately describe the use of force? Cuz that’s what’s happening right now. You are misusing the word and it has caused the conversation to derail.
Offered to non violent misdemeanor offenders… First person has 15 year sentence…
Literally slavery, what a 3rd world country
USA - the country that have “except” in thier “no slavery” rule. I’m not even joking. Thats 100% true.
Driving Uber, I hear so many stories like this. For example, I never knew you paid for this “privilege,” and apparently you PAY TO BE ON PROBATION!? Among so much other insane bullshit.
Even more insane is prisoners (and their families) end up paying for their incarceration. When you consider that 40% of African American men are under some form of penal supervision, this goes a long way to explain why so many seem to be in a perpetual state of poverty.
when i was in my early 20’s i had a friend who was on house-arrest. She unknowingly convinced me that if i ever found myself in her situation just to do the time instead aiming for a house arrest plea-deal for similar reasons.
Lol I paid $5000 for a plea deal, along every step of the way I’ve confirmed with my lawyer and judge that I can just pay my way out
Slavery never went away. It’s just been rebranded, repackaged and sanitized.
Not American, but isn’t that what the 13th amendment did? Make slave labour legal for prisons?
the crazy thing about this story (aside from the slavery) is that the voters of Alabama voted to outlaw that exception at the state level but ever since then, their governor has overidden that effort.
Yep!
Section 1. 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.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
As a foreigner, you probably know more about the US Constitution than most US citizens. And I’m saying that as a natural born US citizen.
The more I learn about the US, the more I realise the shining city on the hill I believed in as a child is actually a giant dumpster fire.
It’s like Trump being what poor people envision as rich.
America is what other countries view as prosperous, when in reality it’s just 10 rich people in a trench coat, and 350 million suffering underneath.
And coincidentally, there will be a call to “crack down” on smaller crimes, make it easier to do time.
“Land of the free” fucking lol
Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the thief home of the slave
The grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is GodDefinitely “Home of the Brave” though. You’d have to be brave to want to live there.
This is the future of MAGA America. Imagine how much more profitable corporations could be if 90% of their workforce is AI, Robotic, or Federally-provided Slave Labor, privately managed by a Trump-owned company?
What do you think all those new regional concentration camps and an enormous paramilitary organization are going to do when the “immigrant problem” has been largely handled? Trump and Stephen “PeeWee Himmler” Miller and Trump are getting into the slavery business.
This crap predates MAGA by a long long time - after all, as somebody else pointed out, the 13th Ammendment of the US constitution explicitly allows slavery for those convicted of crimes.
Whilst MAGA is obviously going to abuse the shit out of this, this kind of infrastructure for Fascism has long been in place and was already used even before MAGA was a twinkling in the eyes of whatever Koch Brother’s Funded Think Tank employee who came up with it.
Valid, the 13th Amendment is an abomination, but it was mostly used as a rationalization to suppress wages in prison workshops, and exempt them from minimum wage. It was never intended to be the foundation for establishing a new system for our entire nation’s entire economy.
But we are approaching a labor crossroads in this country, and while MOST American workers haven’t been paying much attention to the upcoming revolutions in AI and Robotics, Sociopathic Oligarchs and the Corporations have been laser-focused on it for a few decades, and their objectives are finally at hand.
As if replacing much of their workforce with tireless tools like AI and Robotics wasn’t wonderful enough for their profits, now MAGA is dangling a shiny bauble that only the most psychopathic of Ferengi Oligarchs could dare to dream about - a return to literal slavery, a nearly free labor pool of workers who can be treated in any way. No worries about rights, benefits, safety, regulations, etc. Imagine how much more profitable they could be?
suppress wages in prison workshops, and exempt them from minimum wage
And how is that in any way form or shape a good thing?
Prison forced labor is just Indentured Servitude with extra steps to give it the appearance of legitimacy and fairness.
It seems to me (not at American) that the intention to exploit people who have no other choice was there from the start. Create a structure were you can get cheap/free labor of people who have been deemed by others to be LABEL (in this case, a felon) and deprived of their freedom and you always end up with more and more people being given LABEL and deprived of their freedom so that the can be used as cheap/free labor.
The United States has long been the nation in the World with the highest percentage of people in prison, so one either believes that human beings in the US are different and more prone to crime or that there is a higher incentive in the US than elsewhere at the level of who controls those things to put people in prison and getting cheap or even free work sure sounds a lot like such an incentive.
The well was poisoned from the very start.
As I see it, this is far from the only way in which America is Exceptional but not in a good way and if one thinks further out from that, one can conclude that movements such as MAGA, the way workers are treated and a lot of other phenomenons in the US rooted in not treating ones’ fellow human being as a person are in fact all part of one broad systemic cultural and political problem.
suppress wages in prison workshops, and exempt them from minimum wage
And how is that in any way form or shape a good thing?
I’m not saying that it is, I’ve even called it an abomination on many occasions, I’m just saying that the use of it in the past was limited to people who wouldn’t get much sympathy from society at large, rightly or wrongly.
And I am further saying that one of MAGA’s primary characteristics is finding loopholes in otherwise benign laws and policies, and they have identified 13A as one that ripe for serious exploitation. They simply can’t resist abusing every opportunity that comes their way. Slavery comes with the added advantage of being very lucrative, and Trump REALLY can’t resist that.
IMHO, the almost idolatry of the Constitution in the US meant that a what’s essentially a Prototype of Modern Democracy kept getting used without a systemic update for too long and was essentially relying on everybody being a gentleman to work.
Personally the whole part were the Political Pillar being in charge of nominating the top of the Judicial Pillar - the Supreme Court Judges - even though in Democracy those Pillars are supposed to be independent, always felt like a major weakness in the face of Authoritarian encroaching, as did the First Past The Post voting system.
That’s the point I’m trying to make: the flaws in the American system are systemic, making it more easy from autoritarians (not just Trump’s Fascists but also the Oligarchy that stands behind both the Republicans and the Democrats) to control it.
The main difference with the Fascists is how brazen then are in doing so, which the other bunch would be far more discrete (hence which the Prison population in the US was already so large under the “other” political party of the US Duopoly system).
That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang All day long they work so hard Till the sun is goin’ down Working on the highways and byways And wearing, wearing a frown
Trump did say they are teaching about slavery wrong, they are too negative.
3/5ths…
holy shit yikes
If this was fiction I’d be complaining about how on-the-nose it was.
I find myself saying words to this effect more and more, and more and more lately
Holy shit! The ratio is really 3/5! wtf!?
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Sorry for my ignorance, but can someone please explain 3/5ths to me like in 5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Sin_(disambiguation)
I tried to pay attention but they classes wasn’t interestin They seemed to only glorify the europeans Claimin africans were only three-fifths a human being
jfc
Slavery is illegal except for prisoners. Forcing prisoners to work is perfectly constitutional.
The bill of rights is wrong and must be admended. Closing this loop hole will kill the for profit prison industrial complex.
Btw, the bill of rights is only the first 10 amendments. The 13th is just an amendment.
The only thing Capitalists love more than wage theft is slavery
It’s been that way since the end of the civil war.
It won’t kill the for profit prisons, this is just an aspect of how for profit prisons make profit.
They should ban for profit prisons outright.
More like bill of wrongs amirite
