You’ve seen the disturbing images on the local nightly news. Upon sentencing in court, too many young people of color are often unfazed, even proud, of going to prison. Shackled hand and foot, they shuffle defiantly from the courtroom, head held high. It is a badge of honor — a way of establishing street credibility.
They may not hold their heads quite as high when they find out the corporations who run America’s vast for-profit prison industry see them another way: as slave labor.
Tough drug sentencing policies in the 1980s swelled the number of prison inmates in the U.S. to two million in a decade, and about 2.5 million today. African Americans comprise 40 percent of people either in prison or under the supervision of probation or parole. That represents a nearly limitless labor pool, with many more inmates entering the system than leaving it.
As we all learned in history class, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids slavery, but less well known is the clause in that amendment which allows involuntary labor as a means of punishment for convicted criminals — and here is where some legal experts, social scientists and others see a problem. Prisoners work at manufacturing textiles, building furniture, assembling electronics components, even operating telemarketing boiler rooms, for 15 to 25 cents an hour in some facilities.
For-profit prison management has become a multi-billion dollar business, and industry leader Corrections Corporation of America has put up $250 million in an offer to 48 states to buy their state prisons as a means of increasing cash flow to state treasuries. Ohio has already said yes, and Louisiana is looking at the offer.
Call it modern-day peonage, or indentured servitude, or even 21st century slavery if you like. It’s all perfectly legal, and 100 percent constitutional. In the coming weeks in our news section, Philadelphia Tribune staff writer Larry Miller will be examining this phenomenon of penitentiary-as-plantation, including what goods and services those inmates are providing, and who profits from all that nearly-free labor.
