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.
No, I’m not “fine with slavery” or with people putting words in my mouth. My position is that prison labor is NOT slavery, and that misrepresenting it as such devalues people who actually live in in slavery, for the sake of having a good buzzword for prison rights arguments.
you’re fine with a system that has the same look smell taste violent and racist enforcement and oppressive outcomes as slavery. you’re fine with slavery. sorry babes.
Arrest is just a legally allowed kidnapping.
Why do accept the justification of legality? Chattel slavery was legal.
We’ve already been over the fact that most inmates never see a day in court.
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.
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.
Okay let’s just redefine words then to pretend to be right - work is an involuntary activity most people only do to avoid homelessness, therefore “slavery” is magically just another word for “normal” - ta-daaaa!
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