Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to popular food brands

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

by wolverine876 • 2 years ago

144 126 2 years ago

akira2501• 2 years ago

They also say workers are learning skills that can be used when they’re released

It doesn't sound like this is a job training program where valuable skills are being taught in a learning environment. It doesn't sound like they care what the prisoners are likely to be able to do when released, as I don't think a 65 year old farm hand doing piece work for his retirement is going to reduce recidivism. Finally it's all in an environment where the prisoners are punished for not working, which is done nowhere outside of a prison, so what type of work _ethic_ are you actually building here.

This is a paper thin excuse to deprive prisoners of their civil rights.

dopidopHN2• 2 years ago

Civil right? Well those prisoner should have thougt of 13 amendment first before committing a crime! ( sarcasm )

codexb2• 2 years ago

Hard manual labor has long been accepted as an appropriate punishment for crimes. Prisoners are deprived of rights... by due process... by a jury of their peers. That's intentional. It's a feature, not a bug.

plasmatix• 2 years ago

Allowing anyone to benefit from forced labor sounds like an invitation for corruption.

Modified3019• 2 years ago

Outright slavery has been accepted for most of the history of humanity.

Appeals to tradition are probably not the way to go when deciding how we can be a better society.

pinkmuffinere2• 2 years ago

I think the question is whether we continue to see that as a feature. It is recently popular to see prison as a rehabilitation rather than a punishment —- ie can we (safely) turn this life around instead of punish it. I’m not opposed to hard manual labor in principle, but it’s hard for me to believe it’s the best use of those lives.

jacquesm2• 2 years ago

In some countries.

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

All sorts of things have been long accepted as an appropriate punishment for crimes, until people said "yeah, perhaps not".

Most developed democracies have banned forced prison labour; the US is a bit of an outlier here.

lesuorac• 2 years ago

Prisoners are deprived of rights... by due process...

Nice sound bite; but not really true.

It's certainly true a process is followed but that process is pretty shitty.

Plenty of people get released after the murder weapon is actually tried for fingerprints and low-and-behold it was somebody else! How does a person go through trial with even the murder weapon being tested? It's not required by the process.

Plenty of people have been convicted because "their bite marks match". Is there actually some peer-reviewed standard of bite marks where if I gave you somebody's bite and a bite mark you could match them together at 90% accuracy? No. How are non-reproducible methods used to incarcerate people? The process doesn't require accuracy.

For more, John Oliver: Forensic Analysis [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScmJvmzDcG0

juliangmp• 2 years ago

This is a paper thin excuse to deprive prisoners of their civil rights.

If only... they don't even need an excuse, the 13th amendment has a literal exception for "punishment for crime" :)

narrator• 2 years ago

These articles always cherrypick the most sympathetic cases. They never say, here's this triple murderer who never worked a day in his life, don't you feel sorry for him? They also don't mention that prisons aren't free to run.

tarxvf• 2 years ago

Is it not a problem that there exist sympathetic cases at all?

This is even before starting into the many innocent people in prison.

aredox4• 2 years ago

Prison work as extensively done here is unconstitutional. Period.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alabama-prisons-... https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2021/06/convict-leasing-s...

resolutebat• 2 years ago

The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery unless you're a convicted criminal.

"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."

bilbo0s• 2 years ago

Not to put too fine a point on it, but didn't you just cherry pick a case?

smt88• 2 years ago

An exceedingly rare case, in fact.

piva00• 2 years ago

And why should it? If one sympathetic case is found by these articles it means there are many others, why should we care about the triple murder example you just conjured out of thin air?

Prisons are not free, that's why it should be an incentive for a society to work towards not needing prisons, when the incentive is for prisons to be profitable (or at least cover their costs) you created a perverse incentive for the existence of prisons, for the punishment of crimes with prison time, etc.

aredox4• 2 years ago

"They also don't mention that prisons aren't free to run" - Yeah, there is no way the system would put more people in prison to make more money (especially people no one cares about, black and/or poor).

self_awareness• 2 years ago

I don't think "the system" needs to put innocent people in jail in order to make a living. There are plenty of criminals to choose from. Also it's obvious that only poor criminals go to jail, black or not black. Rich criminals are busy running the world (also rich black criminals).

wtcactus4• 2 years ago

Black and/or poor criminals. The key word here is "criminals".

aredox4• 2 years ago

Are white murderers naturally more sympathetic?

https://jp.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mississippi-pardons-id...

karmakurtisaani• 2 years ago

Prisoners - when illegal immigrants are not cheap enough.

0xEF2• 2 years ago

That they do this to unprotected populations is proof positive that if labor laws did not exist, employers would happily pay all us less and work us more.

danuker• 2 years ago

And yet, there still are illegal immigrants.

wtcactus4• 2 years ago

I don't have a problem against this if certain checks are in place, and I think it should be expanded.

Society shouldn't pay twice for a crime against their citizens. Criminals should be punished, but society should profit from them while imprisoned, not pay even more to have them do time in prison.

The only reasons I see for a prisoner not to work full time while incarcerated, are:

- They have some illness or impairment.

- They want to study (and get good grades) while in prison to change their criminal lives.

tetris11• 2 years ago

Hell, I have no problem with Capitalism if certain checks are in place, but we all know how perverse incentives have a way of occluding those checks over time.

coldtea• 2 years ago

Summed the mentality that gives the US the worst crime and recidivism rates in the western world perfectly!

PostOnce2• 2 years ago

We've wrongfully imprisoned and executed plenty of innocent men.

Another case of freeing a man after 48 years wrongfully jailed just weeks ago https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67782907

It's not something we used to do, it's something we still do.

What checks take care of this?

nilsherzig2• 2 years ago

But if the prisons makes a profit for every inmate, they might no longer be interested in releasing / reintegrating them back into society, right?

And (correct me if I'm wrong) there already are some cases in which people got prison sentences to make somebody else a profit.

PostOnce2• 2 years ago

Indeed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

holoduke• 2 years ago

If you look at the American justice system you will probably agree that the entire system is one big fu. Thats because focus is on punishment and not in the reintegration back into society. Some northern European countries do focus on this. Result is a much better system. There are literally millions of studies that provides evidence. Let people work in poor working conditions wont really help making them better people. It only helps filling the pockets of business owners who don't give a damn about society.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

I believe that one should respect the prisoners work. And part of that respect means a decent pay. In fact, I think prison work should be held to the same as regular work, like minimum wage, employee protection, etc...

Work is good, that's the best thing you can do to criminals. It provides guidance, a meaning in life, and revenue. If we can get prisoners to work a honest job after they leave prison, we win. We have turned a criminal into a productive member of society. And I don't think that treating prisoners as slaves rather than as actual workers is the way to achieve that.

If you want society to make profit of convicts, that's what fines are for, not prison. You can have both, and prison work, like out-of-prison work can be used to pay that fine, and also damage to the victims. But for that, work has to be decently paid. At less than $1/hour, there is not much to repay the victims.

wtcactus4• 2 years ago

They cost a lot more that hey bring in. So, no, they should be expected to receive anything, up to the point where they pay all their incarceration expenses with that salary.

iglio• 2 years ago

Just 23¢ to $1.15 is the typical hourly pay [1], work is not always voluntary, and not up to the same employee protection/safety standards as true employment [2].

Labour (and profit) sourced from the incarcerated creates problematic incentives, so needs proper oversight and regulation.

[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor_about.js...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/2022...

MacsHeadroom2• 2 years ago

Thirteenth Amendment Section 1. "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."

"except as a punishment for crime"

marginalia_nu• 2 years ago

I think it's a bit of a strange interpretation to read that as a mandate that slavery as a punishment for a crime must exist within the united states. The spirit of the law seems more to be that its not part of what the amendment prohibits.

defrost2• 2 years ago

Any other gems of stupidity from 1865 we should abide by?

    A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union in June 2022 found about 800,000 prisoners out of the 1.2 million in state and federal prisons are forced to work, generating a conservative estimate of $11bn annually in goods and services while average wages range from 13 cents to 52 cents per hour.

    Five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas – force prisoners to work without pay.

    The report concluded that the labor conditions of US prisoners violate fundamental human rights to life and dignity.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...

Clearly not everybody is in line with holdovers from the cotton fields of central north america.

https://harvardpolitics.com/prison-labor-is-a-human-rights-a...

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

That doesn't make it mandatory, though.

ben_w7• 2 years ago

Are you calling for a constitutional amendment, or are you trying to say that it's fine because it's in your constitution?

The trouble with quotes given in isolation, nobody knows your motivation for giving it.

jongjong• 2 years ago

This kind of stuff is why I reject the notion that the west has truly abolished slavery. It has been abolished in name only. There is still wage slavery and sweat shops.

And also, there are implications in terms of market monopolization if only certain large corporations have access to the prison slave labor. It can create unfair, anti-competitive markets which harms people outside of the prison system.

boffinAudio2• 2 years ago

Indeed. The moral authority - indeed 'imperative' - that many use to justify the Wests' crimes around the world, simply dissolves in face of the fact that the USA is still very much a slaver state.

The rest of the world sees this, Americans don't. That needs to change, for the positive.

wolverine87615• 2 years ago

I agree that it's not truly abolished, but I strongly disagree with the implication, as I read it, that nothing has changed. Look at labor conditions 100 and 200 years ago; it's night and day.

Much more to do. We can't rest here.

assimpleaspossi• 2 years ago

If they weren't doing this work, what would they be doing? I would think they would rather get out of their confined areas and do something physical.

The pay they receive is typically minuscule so I don't know the advantage there. I'm not sure why they are paid at all. Perhaps some other benefit should be given such as more free time or better inside job.

These people are in these types of jails because they did awful things to normal, decent people. They cannot always be believed when they complain about beatings. I have no way of knowing if that's always true or true at all. If it were true, why would the prison allow them to speak to reporters?

This doesn't all make sense to me to have sympathy for dangerous criminals.

pinkmuffinere2• 2 years ago

I frequently wonder if there is an opportunity to start a company/nonprofit by using prison labor in a more ethical way, providing better conditions, reasonable pay, personal development —- the things these companies are claiming but then failing to do.

Why aren’t there such programs? Has this been tried? It seems these companies aren’t presently trying to improve the conditions, but maybe at first they were?

jacquesm2• 2 years ago

Of course there is no such opportunity. The entrenched parties aren't going to give up their nearly free labor force without a serious fight.

james_david• 2 years ago

I once worked for a firm that developed a small, worker owned business that was owned and managed by incarcerated folks. The business was vertically integrated with the jail and produced food served in the cafeteria. It was unique and very much relied on the song willingness of the correctional staff, but such a thing is possible.

SauciestGNU• 2 years ago

I'm sorry and I suspect you mean well, but there is no ethical way to utilize coerced/slave labor. If we want to be concerned with rehabilitation we should look at what some successful prisons have done with educational programs. The trick to reducing crime is to help people find a way to live better through legal means than they would through crime.

Georgelemental8• 2 years ago

Punishing crime is also necessary. El Salvador provides the model here: they locked up all their criminals, and are now using prison labor to build hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, and other public works projects to benefit all honest citizens. The result: crime rate has fallen off a cliff, and the economy is booming.

https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1751748220156268626

mschuster912• 2 years ago

Pay the prisoners fairly, deduct a portion for the cost of incarceration, and keep a large chunk saved away so that the prisoner, once released, has enough money to start a new life without needing to fall back to crime just to survive. Easy as that.

ndsipa_pomu2• 2 years ago

It doesn't seem fair to charge prisoners for the cost of their incarceration - it strikes me as a system open to abuse. Prisoners should be able to not work and not accrue debt for that choice (it may not be a choice for medical issues etc) and then it would be unfair to only charge those that do work.

speeder• 2 years ago

Trust me. In some countries either you charge prisoners... Or you don't make prisoners (meaning kill criminals even for small crimes. Or let them roam free and have the population kill them instead).

ben_w7• 2 years ago

deduct a portion for the cost of incarceration

How much is a portion? Cost per prisoner varies a lot, but a quick google suggests the US average cost per prisoner is about 50%-100% of gross national average salary depending on who I ask. (And the cost per prisoner in the UK is about double national average gross salary).

anon-sre-srm• 2 years ago

- For-profit prisons

- Very high carceral rate

- Slave labor

- Executions, which civilized people don't do

- Undocumented migrants exploited purposefully in agriculture and manufacturing, creating a workforce unlikely to ever complain to anyone

- Even more extreme and unbelievable are the undocumented migrant children who are trafficked and exploited well past any sense of child labor regulations. Some sponsors are working them like a 19th c. London street gang because there is no meaningful oversight or regulation.

pastacacioepepe• 2 years ago

Tell me again how the country with the highest incarcerated population in the world and prisoner slavery is a beacon of freedom. Forgot to mention, the prison system is built to be profitable for corporations.

Truly a miracle of capitalism and Western democracy.

mchannon7• 2 years ago

I got “paid” $0.18/hr. in a federal complex in Colorado to make bologna sandwiches and other slop for other inmates on lockdown.

They took out over $1/hr. (the difference expropriated from remittances I received from family) to put toward “restitution”.

Slaves break even. This was closer to being held for ransom.

I feel a deep sense of shame to reside in a country where the majority of the populace is fine with it. Some with a shit-eating grin.

p3rls• 2 years ago

Why would you even show up for 0.18 cents? Could you have collectively gone on strike with the other prisoners? Would that have been held against you for sentencing? I thought federal prison was the "nice" one. I'd imagine you could just write in a notebook and sell it as a blog/book after prison and do better but everything I know about that environment was learned from Tim Robbins in Shawshank.

moralestapia• 2 years ago

It's forced labor, they don't have a choice.

mchannon7• 2 years ago

I’ll dispense with the 18 cents vs. 0.18 cents lecture.

Work stoppages can and have occurred, but the CO’s had sufficient expertise, staffing, and paid overtime to prevent anything newsworthy from happening. Generally unfair treatment or conditions were the cause of stoppages, none of which occurred during my tenure.

Collective punishments for evidence of smuggled contraband (which was ubiquitous) were more common.

Numerous jails I did time in transit (appx. 7 over 100 days) had worse conditions than the FPC I did the majority of my time in.

The problem with Shawshank as applied to the modern day is that the newsman Andy sent the warden’s financials to no longer exists to receive it. There is no independent investigative media in the U.S. anymore and the likely outcome of the movie, set today, would have been the warden continuing to commit his atrocities, unencumbered by public scrutiny.

I think a screenplay and movie will be the vehicle I tell this story with. Print isn’t exactly dead but movies are a more effective vehicle for change in this day and age.

Georgelemental8• 2 years ago

What were you locked up for?

mchannon7• 2 years ago

This is not a facetious response.

I honestly don't know. The jury foreman didn't know either, so he asked the judge to clarify, which she didn't. (I have copies of the notes they exchanged).

The jury didn't want to come back the following Monday, so they voted guilty on all counts, even though they didn't know what the counts were.

The judge later declared that I had pled guilty, then revised her order that I was found guilty by jury of X on a series of dates she pulled out of thin air. Then in her next order it was not X but rather Y. I don't think it's a stretch to say she didn't know either. One explanation is that the prosecutor kept changing her mind as to what the charges were, in three separate overlapping indictments, and played a trick where she'd supersede an indictment but argue the charges from the illegal one she superseded.

This case stinks to high heaven. Just the way America likes it.

And check out dirtyprosecutor.org for proof she forged the federal magistrate judge's signatures on the search warrant.

Finding a reporter interested in this matter is 100x harder than finding someone to help you open the cage to buy laundry detergent at Walmart. First they hide, then they literally run away screaming from me rather than do their job.

dkn775• 2 years ago

I used to work for a state agency and there was a truck that delivered office supplies called "$STATE Correctional Enterprises", all the office furniture was made by prisoners. I didnt have a problem with that to be honest because the cost savings were benefiting the taxpayer in theory. I have also looked at many prisons on google maps and you will see tons of blue collar businesses (Cintas, Pitt Ohio etc.) within the perimeter road of the complex.

Georgelemental8• 2 years ago

I've been impressed recently by El Salvador's "Plan Cero Ocio" ("Zero Leisure Plan") to allow prisoners to work to compensate for some of the damage they have done to society. Notably, unlike the US system from OP, the labor does not go to for-profit companies, but to public works projects like hospitals, roads, and schools that benefit all of society.

Another good read on carceral labor: https://archive.is/20230812162826/https://www.theamericancon...

wolverine87615• 2 years ago

Why is it called "Zero Leisure Plan". It sounds like the trope that people in prison have it good.

Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to popular food brands

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