Making
Big Ones From Little Ones
 When
I was a kid reading about World War II it was
continually impressed upon me how inhumane
and desperate the practice of forced labor
was as employed by the Axis powers, Germany
and Japan. "What dirty bastards",
I thought, "forcing prisoners to work day and
night to build weapons for bread and water."
In a sad irony it's now the U.S. military
that employs slave labor, in the guise of private
prisons.
It began with the drug wars in the 1980s,
a
thinly-veiled racist plan to sweep as
many African-Americans off the streets as possible. It
worked very well. In
1980 there were 400,000 prisoners in U.S. jails
but today that number exceeds 2.3 million
people, almost
1 in every 100 Americans. The U.S. incarcerates
more of its citizens than any
other country in the world, and there are currently
more African-American men on parole, on probation,
or in jail than
there were male slaves in 1850. (As an added
extra bonus those convicted of felonies can
no longer vote.)
As the jails started filling up new ones had
to be built. Eventually someone had the bright
idea of privatizing the system, because there
was money to be made. (For instance, the CEO
of Corrections Corporation of America took
home $3.7
million in
compensation in 2011.) And so the private prison
industry grew at a rate of 1600% between 1990
and 2010.
So much money was made that the industry
could hire
its own
lobbyists
to
bribe
legislators
to write laws that favor the prisons. In some
areas of the country local governments
are
now contractually
required
to keep
occupancy rates as high as 90%. That's a cheery
thought.
The revenue stream, the one that pays the CEO so
handsomely, comes from paying/forcing inmates to
work for pennies to do
jobs previously
handled by small businesses. One of the deepest
pools of money came from contractors, hired
by the military to provide all manner of materiel.
Prison labor now supplies 100 percent of the
military's helmets, shirts, pants, tents,
bags, canteens, bullet-proof vests. Compensation
for the workers can be as low as 12
cents an hour.
Worse than that, some prisoners are made to
clean and recycle military vehicles that are
covered in poisonous and even radioactive
materials, without the benefit of protective
clothing.
(A lawsuit is under way.)
Prison labor is also used by companies like
Boeing, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell,
Microsoft, Dell, Starbucks, Motorola, and Nintendo.
(But not Apple.)
Many small businesses are failing because
they cannot compete with slave labor. As one
employer put it "The only way for workers to
get their jobs back is to go to prison. There's
got to be a better way."
Let's start by rethinking the wisdom of our drug
laws, or the lack thereof, especially when it
comes to violent vs. nonviolent crimes. Then
we should agree to simply not slave labor. Let's
use
prison
for
what
it was
meant
to do,
which
is
to rehabilitate. It works in other countries.
It can work here.
=Lefty=
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