7 ms·

Louisiana records give insight into businesses that utilize prison labor

geogra4 9y ago
slavery
endymi0n 9y ago
Sounds what you get if you sell what essentially are sovereign duties of a state to the highest bidder: An extremely lucrative system of modern-day slaves that have to shell out their hard earned below-market dollars to a rigged monopoly system completely provided by my buddies (of 10$/min landline calls, cash transfers with 50% fee, all kinds of shady "service charges") to extract the maximum amount of cash while they're in. So what do you do if you're sitting on such a gold mine? Well, I'd probably fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences and take a really, really tough stance on those immigrants. Keep 'em coming. Completely coincidentally, the US has the highest incarceration rates on any halfway civilized nation on the planet by a large margin. Free markets for the win.
- vkou 9y ago
  When you work for no pay in a communist prison camp, we call it a slave labour camp. And why wouldn't we? There are no slaves in America. When you work for next to no pay in an American prison (And are then billed for room and board when you are released...) Well, that's something else. How many millions of lives has this institution of liberal democracy destroyed?
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    The constitutional amendment barring slavery carves out an exemption for criminal punishment. I don't think you're technically constitutionally protected from being a slave if you're in prison. That's pretty fucked up.
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      > nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law The 14th amendment's exception from prisoners is broad but kind of essential for the whole concept of incarceration to work at all it seems. Amendments are left generally broad because it's so hard to fix any mistakes and Congress can always put further protections in place should the need arise.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    > How many millions of lives has this institution of liberal democracy destroyed? How is this an institution "of" liberal democracy? I can either interpret that as liberal democracy as destroying lives, or that working while incarcerated is a feature of liberal democracy. I don't think either are true.
    - vkou 9y ago
      Liberal democracies get extremely holier-then-thou about slavery - state-sponsored or otherwise. Yet, they have no natural means of preventing it from happening inside them! My point is that we turn a blind eye to it happening at home. People working in the GULAG were also paying their 'debt to society'. Not all of them were political prisoners, either.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        So is the "institution" the different perception of local incarceration vs incarceration in other countries, or the incarceration itself?
        vkou 9y ago
        It's a difference in perception - cognitive dissonance. There are obviously differences in the incarceration (Our prisons ruin many lives - but Soviet ones ended them. Depending on the year, mortality rates were between 1 and 20% - the highest were during the war.)
        kbenson 9y ago
        Ah. The original comment seemed to imply it was the prisons that were a feature of liberal democracies, which seemed a weird leap to take. I agree with you in general. The penal system is just one of many systems that's overly politicized in a national context. It's part of the general problem of the U.S. not being very good at relative comparisons with other countries without reverting to a nationalistic dick-measuring contest. It's the nasty downside to American Exceptionalism. On one end, it spurs people to attempt to be better because they expect they should be better, on the other it causes people to infer differences between our attributes and those of others that we don't particularly like, even when in practice those differences don't amount to all that much.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration. Incarceration rates started skyrocketing in the 1970s. The number of people in private prisons, in contrast, was minuscule even in 1990: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-americas-private-prison-industry-timeline http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-ameri....
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration Nothing that OP mentioned is specific to for-profit prisons. The prison-industrial complex is perfectly capable of existing and generating incredibly lucrative profits for the industry even if the prisons themselves are ostensibly either state entities or structured as non-profits. The "for-profit/private" vs. "public/state-run" distinction only changes how the money gets accounted for on paper; ultimately, the same entities are capable of making the same amount of money on either form of incarceration.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences Also, don't forget about clandestinely supporting terrorists like the Nicaraguan Contras who were smuggling billions of dollars of cocaine into inner cities in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...
- greyfox 9y ago
  insightful, earned the upvote
- arcmelder 9y ago
  That's a very grim picture you paint; I don't believe the majority of US citizens would be OK with this, if there was an awareness. Must be incredibly hard to come out of a system like that rehabilitated, and not very bitter.
weberc2 9y ago
It's not obvious to me that prison labor is immoral or equivalent to slavery. As long as the working conditions are humane and the garnished wages are principally used to subsidize the cost of their incarceration, I see no issue. Personally, I think prison policy improvements should start with common ground (e.g., guards shouldn't beat prisoners, prisoners should get prompt medical attention, etc) before we start worrying about issues that boil down to prisoner comfort.
- redorb 9y ago
  I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. If you are to lose that right via prison perhaps that's okay. It's not okay to then force that labor out of a person who is non-willing / force labor is slavery. My mother when leaving prison was given a bill for her stay - as if she were staying at a motel. So not only was she then a felon with little hope for a 'good job' but also was laden with debt, which fortunately had very tolerant pay back policies.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    > I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. Within this model, you could make provisions for prisoners to elect to pay a sum after release (thereby making it optional labor as a means of repaying the debt they entered into), but this isn't without its own moral quandaries. The crux of the issue in my mind is that someone needs to pay for incarceration, and while tax payers are going to have to pay a large portion regardless, the incarcerated should contribute what they can. Of course there are likely many injustices in the justice system which would cause this policy to impact some groups more than others (males vs females, for instance), but those issues are orthogonal to this, and consequently they should be addressed separately, insofar as they exist.
    - 9y ago
pavement 9y ago
Is this part of the same complex that runs prisons for profits, or a mixture of government operations and private companies?
dingbat 9y ago
to me one of the most interesting things about this issue is how it trended recently because someone actually read and thought for a moment about what Hillary Clinton wrote about in her best-selling book "It Takes a Village", about how they used prison labor during her time in the Arkansas governors mansion: http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-prison-labor-african-americans-arkansas-622209 http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-prison-labor-african... the fact that this was only widely noticed 20 years after publication is amazing
- vkou 9y ago
  This really needs more recognition. The fact that this practice is so normal is appalling.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    I agree. I think this story is an enormous opportunity to get bipartisan opinion against abuse of prison labor. What better way to get popular support against AG Session's incarceration increase than to tie it to a deeply unpopular politician with his constituency?
    - dingbat 9y ago
      i see you deleted your previous comment saying that the way this 20-year-old passage has suddenly been noticed is "banal" and passage itself is not newsworthy, because HRC was not newsworthy anymore until she ran for president. the point of my observation is that this passage only became a widespread topic AFTER the recent election, after a sharp-eyed and thoughtful reader commented on it via Twitter and it went viral last week.
      - linkregister 9y ago
        Yeah, I deleted it. I was agreeing with you. The comment was focusing on the circumstances, when the value is recognizing the opportunity.
- deleted 9y ago
6stringmerc 9y ago
It's definitely an improvement compared to the State of Louisiana selling children born to female prison inmates to bidders / Slave Owners on the steps of a Courthouse before the Civil War. Yes, this actually happened. About 10 times over the course of a few years. Source: I knew the guy who did the research and published the findings.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That's a really low bar to congratulate anyone for stepping over.
- hrehhf 9y ago
  > Source: I knew the guy who did the research and published the findings. That's not really a source. If this was published, then tell us where! The published findings would be the source.
CobrastanJorji 9y ago
It's an interesting breakdown by job. Most of it's just "general labor," but I'd love to hear the story about the person doing forced prison labor as a caterer, or even better, the person doing forced prison labor as an offshore oil platform engineer.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  A lot of "interesting" jobs are for the state itself: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/prison_inmates_politicians_min.html http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/prison_inmate...
maxerickson 9y ago
At a minimum, the businesses should be paying the state the prevailing wage for the jobs being done (the business owner should not be a beneficiary of below market labor). Even better if the prisoners keep a substantial portion of that.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Money is fungible. If companies weren't benefiting from low wage labor they'd be charging the state more to house the inmates.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Many of the jobs are outside of the prison system. Inside the prison system I'd be fine with making them do the accounting based on prevailing wages even if the money is going in a circle.
- jstelly 9y ago
  A bunch of this is for the "transitional work program" which sounds more like a way for prisoners to get out of prison more smoothly: http://www.doc.louisiana.gov/transitional-work-program http://www.doc.louisiana.gov/transitional-work-program I don't know anything in particular about the program, but why do you think the business should pay the prevailing wage? How many prisoners would get hired with that requirement vs. without it? As a business owner why would I prefer to hire a prisoner instead of someone not in prison? Or am I thinking about it the wrong way? It sounds like hiring a prisoner benefits the prison system and the prisoner (and also the business as long as there is an incentive of some kind).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Because it puts the business owner ahead of their competitors and neighbors (they are gaining from the favor of the state). You make a fair point of incentives to hire prisoners rather than others though.
greyfox 9y ago
I just reviewed the wages vs min wage and i dont see how this can be true, unless these are trusted prisoners who work off-prison jobs. Prison jobs are notoriously low paying such as cook or dishwasher which ranges from $0.10-0.15/hr. I interviewed several prisoners at a state prison in utah (draper perhaps?) back in 2005 and got the scoop and it was very belittling to see that prisoners were paid that low. i just dont see how it could've jumped so high in only ten years. From the info i gathered this is not a utah phenomenon either the prisoners are paid extremeley low wages in other parts of the states as well.
gmiller123456 9y ago
For those calling this "slavery" thinking that inherently makes it illegal, I quote the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Not saying I agree with the practice. But just getting other people to agree that it's slavery won't change anything.

slavery

Sounds what you get if you sell what essentially are sovereign duties of a state to the highest bidder: An extremely lucrative system of modern-day slaves that have to shell out their hard earned below-market dollars to a rigged monopoly system completely provided by my buddies (of 10$/min landline calls, cash transfers with 50% fee, all kinds of shady "service charges") to extract the maximum amount of cash while they're in. So what do you do if you're sitting on such a gold mine? Well, I'd probably fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences and take a really, really tough stance on those immigrants. Keep 'em coming. Completely coincidentally, the US has the highest incarceration rates on any halfway civilized nation on the planet by a large margin. Free markets for the win.

vkou 9y ago
When you work for no pay in a communist prison camp, we call it a slave labour camp. And why wouldn't we? There are no slaves in America. When you work for next to no pay in an American prison (And are then billed for room and board when you are released...) Well, that's something else. How many millions of lives has this institution of liberal democracy destroyed?
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  The constitutional amendment barring slavery carves out an exemption for criminal punishment. I don't think you're technically constitutionally protected from being a slave if you're in prison. That's pretty fucked up.
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    > nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law The 14th amendment's exception from prisoners is broad but kind of essential for the whole concept of incarceration to work at all it seems. Amendments are left generally broad because it's so hard to fix any mistakes and Congress can always put further protections in place should the need arise.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > How many millions of lives has this institution of liberal democracy destroyed? How is this an institution "of" liberal democracy? I can either interpret that as liberal democracy as destroying lives, or that working while incarcerated is a feature of liberal democracy. I don't think either are true.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Liberal democracies get extremely holier-then-thou about slavery - state-sponsored or otherwise. Yet, they have no natural means of preventing it from happening inside them! My point is that we turn a blind eye to it happening at home. People working in the GULAG were also paying their 'debt to society'. Not all of them were political prisoners, either.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      So is the "institution" the different perception of local incarceration vs incarceration in other countries, or the incarceration itself?
      - vkou 9y ago
        It's a difference in perception - cognitive dissonance. There are obviously differences in the incarceration (Our prisons ruin many lives - but Soviet ones ended them. Depending on the year, mortality rates were between 1 and 20% - the highest were during the war.)
        kbenson 9y ago
        Ah. The original comment seemed to imply it was the prisons that were a feature of liberal democracies, which seemed a weird leap to take. I agree with you in general. The penal system is just one of many systems that's overly politicized in a national context. It's part of the general problem of the U.S. not being very good at relative comparisons with other countries without reverting to a nationalistic dick-measuring contest. It's the nasty downside to American Exceptionalism. On one end, it spurs people to attempt to be better because they expect they should be better, on the other it causes people to infer differences between our attributes and those of others that we don't particularly like, even when in practice those differences don't amount to all that much.
rayiner 9y ago
Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration. Incarceration rates started skyrocketing in the 1970s. The number of people in private prisons, in contrast, was minuscule even in 1990: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-americas-private-prison-industry-timeline http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-ameri....
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration Nothing that OP mentioned is specific to for-profit prisons. The prison-industrial complex is perfectly capable of existing and generating incredibly lucrative profits for the industry even if the prisons themselves are ostensibly either state entities or structured as non-profits. The "for-profit/private" vs. "public/state-run" distinction only changes how the money gets accounted for on paper; ultimately, the same entities are capable of making the same amount of money on either form of incarceration.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences Also, don't forget about clandestinely supporting terrorists like the Nicaraguan Contras who were smuggling billions of dollars of cocaine into inner cities in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...
greyfox 9y ago
insightful, earned the upvote
arcmelder 9y ago
That's a very grim picture you paint; I don't believe the majority of US citizens would be OK with this, if there was an awareness. Must be incredibly hard to come out of a system like that rehabilitated, and not very bitter.

weberc2 9y ago

It's not obvious to me that prison labor is immoral or equivalent to slavery. As long as the working conditions are humane and the garnished wages are principally used to subsidize the cost of their incarceration, I see no issue. Personally, I think prison policy improvements should start with common ground (e.g., guards shouldn't beat prisoners, prisoners should get prompt medical attention, etc) before we start worrying about issues that boil down to prisoner comfort.

redorb 9y ago
I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. If you are to lose that right via prison perhaps that's okay. It's not okay to then force that labor out of a person who is non-willing / force labor is slavery. My mother when leaving prison was given a bill for her stay - as if she were staying at a motel. So not only was she then a felon with little hope for a 'good job' but also was laden with debt, which fortunately had very tolerant pay back policies.
- weberc2 9y ago
  > I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. Within this model, you could make provisions for prisoners to elect to pay a sum after release (thereby making it optional labor as a means of repaying the debt they entered into), but this isn't without its own moral quandaries. The crux of the issue in my mind is that someone needs to pay for incarceration, and while tax payers are going to have to pay a large portion regardless, the incarcerated should contribute what they can. Of course there are likely many injustices in the justice system which would cause this policy to impact some groups more than others (males vs females, for instance), but those issues are orthogonal to this, and consequently they should be addressed separately, insofar as they exist.
  - 9y ago

pavement 9y ago

Is this part of the same complex that runs prisons for profits, or a mixture of government operations and private companies?

dingbat 9y ago

to me one of the most interesting things about this issue is how it trended recently because someone actually read and thought for a moment about what Hillary Clinton wrote about in her best-selling book "It Takes a Village", about how they used prison labor during her time in the Arkansas governors mansion: http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-prison-labor-african-americans-arkansas-622209 http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-prison-labor-african... the fact that this was only widely noticed 20 years after publication is amazing

vkou 9y ago
This really needs more recognition. The fact that this practice is so normal is appalling.
- linkregister 9y ago
  I agree. I think this story is an enormous opportunity to get bipartisan opinion against abuse of prison labor. What better way to get popular support against AG Session's incarceration increase than to tie it to a deeply unpopular politician with his constituency?
  - dingbat 9y ago
    i see you deleted your previous comment saying that the way this 20-year-old passage has suddenly been noticed is "banal" and passage itself is not newsworthy, because HRC was not newsworthy anymore until she ran for president. the point of my observation is that this passage only became a widespread topic AFTER the recent election, after a sharp-eyed and thoughtful reader commented on it via Twitter and it went viral last week.
    - linkregister 9y ago
      Yeah, I deleted it. I was agreeing with you. The comment was focusing on the circumstances, when the value is recognizing the opportunity.
deleted 9y ago

6stringmerc 9y ago

It's definitely an improvement compared to the State of Louisiana selling children born to female prison inmates to bidders / Slave Owners on the steps of a Courthouse before the Civil War. Yes, this actually happened. About 10 times over the course of a few years. Source: I knew the guy who did the research and published the findings.

anigbrowl 9y ago
That's a really low bar to congratulate anyone for stepping over.
hrehhf 9y ago
> Source: I knew the guy who did the research and published the findings. That's not really a source. If this was published, then tell us where! The published findings would be the source.

CobrastanJorji 9y ago

It's an interesting breakdown by job. Most of it's just "general labor," but I'd love to hear the story about the person doing forced prison labor as a caterer, or even better, the person doing forced prison labor as an offshore oil platform engineer.

maxerickson 9y ago
A lot of "interesting" jobs are for the state itself: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/prison_inmates_politicians_min.html http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/prison_inmate...

maxerickson 9y ago

At a minimum, the businesses should be paying the state the prevailing wage for the jobs being done (the business owner should not be a beneficiary of below market labor). Even better if the prisoners keep a substantial portion of that.

gozur88 9y ago
Money is fungible. If companies weren't benefiting from low wage labor they'd be charging the state more to house the inmates.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Many of the jobs are outside of the prison system. Inside the prison system I'd be fine with making them do the accounting based on prevailing wages even if the money is going in a circle.
jstelly 9y ago
A bunch of this is for the "transitional work program" which sounds more like a way for prisoners to get out of prison more smoothly: http://www.doc.louisiana.gov/transitional-work-program http://www.doc.louisiana.gov/transitional-work-program I don't know anything in particular about the program, but why do you think the business should pay the prevailing wage? How many prisoners would get hired with that requirement vs. without it? As a business owner why would I prefer to hire a prisoner instead of someone not in prison? Or am I thinking about it the wrong way? It sounds like hiring a prisoner benefits the prison system and the prisoner (and also the business as long as there is an incentive of some kind).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Because it puts the business owner ahead of their competitors and neighbors (they are gaining from the favor of the state). You make a fair point of incentives to hire prisoners rather than others though.

greyfox 9y ago

I just reviewed the wages vs min wage and i dont see how this can be true, unless these are trusted prisoners who work off-prison jobs. Prison jobs are notoriously low paying such as cook or dishwasher which ranges from $0.10-0.15/hr. I interviewed several prisoners at a state prison in utah (draper perhaps?) back in 2005 and got the scoop and it was very belittling to see that prisoners were paid that low. i just dont see how it could've jumped so high in only ten years. From the info i gathered this is not a utah phenomenon either the prisoners are paid extremeley low wages in other parts of the states as well.

gmiller123456 9y ago

For those calling this "slavery" thinking that inherently makes it illegal, I quote the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Not saying I agree with the practice. But just getting other people to agree that it's slavery won't change anything.