Corporations have found really cheap labor - right here in the US

[sad sally]

At the same time President Obama was speaking today regarding the optimistic jobs number, LINK Tv carried a story about the benefits of more Americans ending up in prison - cheap labor for American corporations courtesy of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council - now doesn't that sound like a nice organization? It's not!). There are about 2,300,000 adults in America's prisons, up from about 614,000 in the year 2000.

From The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor?du

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

[KansDem]

1. I remember when we used to ridicule and chide "Red China" for this kind of practice...

Now we do it...:(

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Well, it worked for them... nt

[Uncle Joe]

Our evolving 21st century version of slavery.

Thanks for the thread, sad sally.

[Initech]

11. 21st century slavery - paycheck to paycheck or prison labor. You decide.

[Uncle Joe]

12. A frying pan and fire choice with the for profit prisons getting to eat.

Of course fried food is bad for your health, so I imagine the for profit prisons will prefer barbecue and no doubt, they will endlessly pass that message on via bribery and lobbying to the politicians willing to sell the American People down the river.

[Taverner]

3. Not only that, corporations are getting away with making people work for free

If they convert their jobs to "internships" they can get away with paying nothing - and people are still fighting for these jobs

And no this isn't regular internships, but jobs like Customer Service, Support, etc...

[valerief]

4. No one believes this slave labor exists. "Not in America." Idiots.

When they start realizing this, they may develop some healthy cynicism to cut through the "America is the greatest country in the world" bullshit.

[sad sally]

7. Right - the government in concert with the media only tell us the truth.

[dkf]

5. Wow this is really bad.

And we wonder why no one is hiring?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

6. But it's in the 14th Amendment! Involuntary servitude.

Gee, don't ya feel better knowing that convicted felons have access to YOUR credit card numbers and huge databases in call centers they work in???

:sarcasm:

[Fire1]

13. Exactly!!! And don't forget illegal immigrants. n/t

[Larkspur]

8. Could also explain why banks are supporting Debtor's prisons

more slave labor for our Galtian Overlords.

[hootinholler]

9. That's nearly quadruple in 10 years!

600K to 2300K Holy Fuck.

How many more judges are getting kickbacks like the ones in Pa?

:grr:

-Hoot

[sad sally]

10. A Pew Center Report on the States has more disturbing data.

The Pew study shows that state corrections budgets now consume 6.8 percent of state general funds. This means that one in every 15 dollars from states’ discretionary funds goes towards prison costs.

As a percentage, in fiscal year 2006 transportation was the only category of spending by states to increase more than costs for prisons and jails, which increased by 9.2 percent during this period. This increase outpaced spending on education and Medicaid.

A comparison of the funds spent by states on higher education with spending on incarceration provides a revealing glimpse into priorities. In 2007, states collectively spent $72.88 billion on higher education, an increase of 121 percent over the $33 billion spent in 1987. During this same period, prison-related spending rose 315 percent, with states spending a combined $44 billion in 2007, up from $10.6 billion two decades earlier.

As both a percentage of its population and in real numbers, the US prison population outranks the inmate populations of the 26 European countries with the largest numbers of prisoners. The Russian Federation, with a reported prison population of 889,598, is second. Denmark, with 3,626 prisoners, has the lowest rate of these countries.

These 26 countries, with a combined population of 802.4 million, imprison 1.8 million; the US, with a population of about 300 million, imprisons close to 2.3 million. According to the study, China, with an estimated population of 1.3 billion, has the second highest number of prisoners behind bars, 1.5 million.

These extraordinary figures are one reflection of the enormous social contradictions of American society. The United States is the most unequal of any industrialized country and ranks high on every measure of stress, depression, alienation and other social ills. Despite the US’s self-declared status as a beacon of democracy and freedom, American capitalism has no humane, rational or progressive response to social problems. Instead, social problems are treated as police matters.