Alabama Generates Billion$ by Trapping People in Prison
I didn’t believe this story when I first saw it. Alabama’s Department of Corrections (ADOC) is farming out prisoners to work at hundreds of companies, including McDonalds and Wendy’s burger joints. The state takes 40% of wages and often denies parole to keep people as cheap labor.
Now, according to court documents filed this week in a class action McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King and Wendy’s face a lawsuit challenging an Alabama prison labor system as a form of coerced labor and ‘convict leasing’.
According to the suit, filed by incarcerated workers and joined by several labor unions, the state of Alabama received “a labor-trafficking fee equivalent to 40% of the gross earnings paid by the private employers for the forced labor,” creating a fiscal incentive for the state to maximize the number of workers subject to forced labor.
Watch this from More Perfect Union:
Despite a 2015 state law requiring that the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles make evidence-based parole decisions, the lawsuit alleges that the state denies Black Alabamians parole at a 2 to 1 rate compared to white candidates in order to maintain its pool of workers.
Alabama has one of the country’s highest rates of incarceration and “disproportionately harm[s], traumatize[s] and incarcerate[s] Black people,” according to the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
“[Incarcerated people] are trapped in this labor trafficking scheme,” says the lawsuit, which was obtained by The New York Times. “Although they are trusted to perform work for the state, local governments, and a vast array of private employers, some of the same people who profit from their coerced labor have systematically shut down grants of parole.”
From slavery to incarcerated servitude.
Make America Great Again.
I’d still call it slavery
If there is a privatised prison service and a state that is not too concerned about human rights then the legal system can ensure a steady supply of convicts. Since private businesses have a legal requirement to ‘maximise shareholder returns’, I.e. reduce overheads and wages as much a possible and have a workforce which has few rights.
Isn’t capitalism wonderful?
I read about this recently in the (highly recommended) book from philosopher Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil, which compares Germany with Southern (Confederate) USA.
p321 “Southern states fiercely enforced the laws known as the Black Codes, which were largely successful attempts to evade the Thirteenth Amendment”, which punishment exception was exploited, new crimes invented and Blacks convicted. Period extended into WW2. “In some Alabama prison camps the mortality rate was 40 percent.” Blacks now expendables for corporate hire for toughest jobs, great revenue stream for states unwilling to raise taxes. Tiny infractions and non-offences used to sentence Blacks (90% prison inmates in Southern jails) to hard labour, see Blackmon*. This jail population used by unscrupulous Whites to argue innate criminality, though under slavery viewed as naturally loyal (and inferior). Arrest sweeps timed for labour demands like harvests. Close law-business relations sometimes same person. Permanent intimidation, many incarcerated never saw families again. Unionised labour could be undermined in South.
*Neiman draws on the work of white Wall Street Journal bureau chief, Douglas A Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II; 2008).
Or you could read the long-running series Notes from the US from Freedom News, which often features this kind of thing:
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/08/14/notes-from-the-us-the-sewer-of-supremacist-lies/
But why would you have a hard time believing this story? What impression of the USA do you have, and who creates it?
Sounds like the kind of wheese thet New Labour or the Tories would dream up if they were smart enough. News today has it that England’s prisons are busting at the seams. They just continue to cut the income of the poor.
@Dougie Blackwood, I suspect the UK government could trap people in bureaucratic nightmares, perhaps learning a thing or two from US corporations:
https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/communism-meaning-republicans
and bombard them with legal threats if they fail to fill in multi-page forms to their minions’ satisfaction. Should fill a few more prisons from that Kafkaesque approach (while generating income from fines, proprietary software kickbacks and cuts from expensive intermediaries parasitising off the impenetrable, jargon-swamp bureaucracy). I suppose Starmer’s irony will manifest in those imprisoned by this method being forced to process the paperwork of still-unincarcerated subjects.
Universal Credit in particular, and the entire welfare system in general in this country, is moving worryingly in this Kafkaesque direction. Every step of the processing of poeple in need is filled with Catch 22 type rules and threats of ‘sanctions’. That’s made clear in the way the ‘Job Centre’ civil servants communicate with claimants; before they even assess what a person is entitled to the claimant is made to feel like a criminal with no rights to any personal life or active agency. People are devalued, demeaned as economic units. There is no right to the necessities of life unless you conform to the capitalist agenda of humans as commodities. Not participating in their economy, not being an obedient little worker, is to render oneself a non-human in the neo-liberal British State in September 2024. One might be forgiven for thinking that the fascists did, in the long-run, win World War 2.
I thouroghly recommend Chaingang Allstars by Nana Brenyah. An electrifying novel about custodial dystopia, complete with lots of gladitorial combat.
It’s not just black people it is white people to,That work van that wreaked and killed inmates last year killed both a white worker and black worker.
ANOTHER PRIME RECRUITING TRIP FOR TOMMY TUBERVILLE WITHOUT LEAVING THE STATE!!!ALONG WITH HEAD RECRUITER KAY IVEY TAKING DIRECTLY OUT OF THE MASSIVE PRISON SYSTEM!!ILLEGALLY TAKING 40%OF INMATES CHECK BEFORE TAXES,CONSTANTLY DENING INMATES PAROLE,BUT GOOD ENOUGH TO WORK ALONG SIDE THE PUBLIC FOR PRISON GAIN!!!