Louisiana records give insight into businesses that utilize prison labor

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jun/08/Louisiana-inmate-labor/

59 50 9 years ago

geogra4• 9 years ago

slavery

endymi0n• 9 years 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.

vkou6• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

kbenson4• 9 years 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.

rayiner• 9 years 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-ameri....

chimeracoder• 9 years 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• 9 years 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_co...

greyfox2• 9 years ago

insightful, earned the upvote

arcmelder• 9 years 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.

weberc25• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

weberc25• 9 years 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.

kbenson4• 9 years ago

Regardless of whether it's immoral or not, it creates perverse incentives as if institutes a captive workforce with less rights than normal workers, which can be extremely lucrative to businesses and the state. That last thing we need on top of the other problems we have with the prison industry in this country are businesses lobbying for harsher sentencing because it gets them cheaper labor. We already have prison guard unions lobbying for harsher sentencing, and that has not gone well.

In the end I don't think having prisoners work is in itself a bad thing either. I do think most the systems we have in place that allow for that cause major problems through externalities, and I'm not sure how to allow one while effectively preventing the other.

maxerickson5• 9 years ago

Regardless of what you want to call it, it is forced labor, which is still a definition of slavery, even if it is a more expansive one.

weberc25• 9 years ago

Fine, call it what you like, my point is that it's not the moral equivalent of conventional slavery.

DrScump• 9 years ago

Where in this article does it saying anything about any labor being "forced" or even compelled (such that any necessity of life is denied any who choose not to participate in these activities)?

You are stretching a definition of "slavery" to encompass simple incarceration. That cheapens the word.

Is there actually forced labor in present-day civilian prisons? (Courts-martial have traditionally been allowed to impose sentences "at labor", but I have not observed this in the civilian case).

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

It's literally slavery: you're compelled to labor while being unfree to leave. We call lots of other things in history slavery that meet those criteria.

It's slavery as the punishment for a crime, but it's slavery without qualification.

ashark• 9 years ago

There's even an exception for it in the 13th amendment. Some slavery is still legal under the US constitution, as amended, which is probably a fun/easy bar bet to win.

Not sure how the wider legal landscape treats this, especially whether other laws narrow the exemption to apply only to the "involuntary servitude" portion of the amendment, but if a state wanted to try to actually enslave people as punishments for crimes in the US they'd probably at least have a lively court case on their hands, and they might even win it, depending on how the rest of the laws are structured—the constitution alone wouldn't be enough to guarantee defeat.

Mz• 9 years ago

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slav...

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.

Technically, it is apparently legal. But it is still slavery.

dingbat2• 9 years 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...

the fact that this was only widely noticed 20 years after publication is amazing

vkou6• 9 years ago

This really needs more recognition. The fact that this practice is so normal is appalling.

linkregister2• 9 years 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?

6stringmerc• 9 years 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.

anigbrowl2• 9 years ago

That's a really low bar to congratulate anyone for stepping over.

hrehhf• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

maxerickson5• 9 years ago

A lot of "interesting" jobs are for the state itself:

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/prison_inmate...

maxerickson5• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

Money is fungible. If companies weren't benefiting from low wage labor they'd be charging the state more to house the inmates.

maxerickson5• 9 years 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.

jstelly2• 9 years 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

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).

maxerickson5• 9 years 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.

SilasX• 9 years ago

Kind of a nitpick, but that would make it pointless since, if you're paying the prevailing wage, you might as well use free (as in freedom) labor[1], since you need a lot more compliance procedures and security for the prison labor.

I think a better standard is that the labor should be competitively bid for with multiple buyers at any given time so there's actual competition for it. The prevailing wage would be lower than for free(..dom) labor, but not the pittance they're currently stuck with.

[1] yes, which to some, is a feature not a bug

greyfox2• 9 years 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.

pavement• 9 years ago

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

gmiller123456• 9 years 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.

Louisiana records give insight into businesses that utilize prison labor

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