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

  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    16 hours ago

    With slavery you’re kidnapped

    Arrest is just a legally allowed kidnapping.

    with no justification

    Why do accept the justification of legality? Chattel slavery was legal.

    and no trial

    We’ve already been over the fact that most inmates never see a day in court.

    somebody literally owns you, and you have fewer rights than farm animals.

    Hard to see how that’s different to prison, except for the “literally owns you”, although inmates are essentially bought and sold, and quotas are maintained for private prison contracts. It’s not exactly ownership but that’s a very marginal difference.

    Prison is a punishment for a crime.

    So do you accept that anyone the state deems a criminal somehow deserves involuntary servitude? Why?

    EDIT: Since you haven’t replied and I assume you haven’t seen this yet: involuntary servitude IS slavery, it just isn’t necessarily chattel slavery. The language of the bill even prohibits involuntary servitude, but it seems pretty clear to me that that wasn’t to say that involuntary servitude and slavery are somehow distinct, but to say that some future narrow definition of slavery as only chattel slavery such as you are doing right now couldn’t be used to justify some other form of technically but not meaningfully different kind of slavery. With the aforementioned exceptions.

    It is slavery. I wasn’t putting words in your mouth, I was simply maintaining that the words you said were wrong.