That’s called slave labour. Here you go again USA.
They’ve just re-instituted slavery.
It never went away, they just eliminated private ownership.
Prisons are privately owned, no?
Only a small minority. Private prisons are no doubt a problem, but the vast majority of prisons in the USA are publicly owned
They may be “public “ but they all funnel millions to the Epstein class and corrupt politicians through contracts on everything
History shows the pendulum swings both ways. The fast and more violently the swing to the right, well, political physics has some incredible lessons to teach.
How does 16k permanently house and feed someone? Is that yearly cost? Where?
The South loves slavery, more at 11. This is why the US should have punished the Confederacy as the treason it was instead of coddling them.
I just wish President Grant had punished the South more during Reconstruction but it wasn’t that popular at the time unfortunately and his corrupt administration certainly did not help.
Prison (hell #1) and homelessness (hell #2): the two whips of the capitalist state to lash us into wage labour slavery. “No underpaid job can be too bad to accept, or do you want to risk not be able paying your exorbitant rent, risk to become homeless? Sell your labour for the lowest price so some capitalist can make 2-3 times the profit of what you gain, which is bareley enough to pay another capitalist your rent.” This is what the capitalist state enforces by holding up these two hells. We don’t have a prison system by accident, homelessness is not a natural phenomenon. They exist by design. It’s not about the money that prisons cost in comparison to what housing a homeless person costs. The money for prisons is a fair price to pay for a capitaliat state given the MUCH larger sum of money that its capitalist class can extract of us by making us obedient and doing the even shittest job for the shittest pay to suck the most possible surplus out of our work. Become communist. Sabotage. Seize the means of production. Be a grain of sand in this machine.
In the country with some of the most gruesome history of slavery in human history, it feels pretty disingenuous to call waged labour slavery. This feels like the stock standard yankee settler aspirational landholder bunkum to me
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Joseph Stalin, 1936
You’re quoting Stalin (banger quote, btw) and you’ve not heard of the idea of wage slavery?
The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment
-Engels
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch05.htm
The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.
The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
-Engels, again
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
They do it so people like you think it’s okay
They don’t care because the breakdown is:
The tax-payer is out 66k in order to imprison the homeless That 66k goes to a prison, the prison makes money The imprisoned person is enslaved to prison labor, which the prison then leases out. The prison makes money.
The prison lobbies politicians to be “tough on crime” and pass laws that criminalize more and more things instead of helping people, that way the prison will make more and more money.
The people would be happier, healthier, and pay less in taxes if we just helped people, but we never will because helping people doesn’t make prisons money. Same thing for policing. Police, as an institution, did not begin as law enforcement. They began as slave catchers. Their attitude and overall goal has remained the same. The police exist to ticket and fine people wherever possible in order to generate revenue, and, when able, arrest and charge people with the goal of filling prisons with slave labor.
If you eliminate the part of the 13th amendment that says ‘except as punishment for convicted crime’ and make slave labor illegal period, and in fact, make it illegal for any entity anywhere to profit off of incarcerated persons, you will eliminate a metric shit ton of problems in the U.S.
The prisons sue the states when not enough prisoners come in. That’s the state of things.
What on earth could they possibly be suing for??
Not that I doubt you, mind, it just sounds incredulous!
The lawsuit centered around the Marana prison, a 1,400-bed facility operated by MTC. The contract between MTC and Arizona included a provision guaranteeing 97% occupancy.
Oh, so there’s a contract with the state that says that they’ll keep it at max occupancy. That’s fucked.
Here’s how I would get around it: We enact the legislation that says that prisons cannot profit off of any labor by incarcerated individuals, nor may their labor be leased, for any reason. Take that revenue away.
We hold to the occupancy contract, and they can have a prison full of people they have to care for but can’t profit from.
Then we let the contract end and refuse to sign another one.
Would that work?
I’d say make the prison responsible for rehabilitation and job training.
Yeah make it a form of cheap housing you can leave any time you want rather a punishment nexus. Sack the sadists and hire social and support workers.
Yeah that could be good. A prison’s success rate is determined by how few reoffenders it has.
Just confiscate their fucking property.
If they protest, arrest them and throw them in their own goddamn prisons.
In other words: use their own shitty laws against them. Only way to get those laws to change.
One tiny note, with markdown formatting, you gotta put two spaces after a line for a newline. But that’s only if you are absolutely absolutely sure, it’s best to use two newlines for a new paragraph. OR make a list by adding the minus sign to the start of each line.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
I recently visited family in Vietnam, the people there are reasonable secure, reasonable healthy and quiet educated… but nobody can convince me that this country is NOT very conservative and authoritarian…
religion
scared of death, scared of sin, scared of judgement
Nah… this is a too christian view…
Important to note this isn’t new or restricted to red parts of the country. Vagrancy laws, laws against loitering, etc are all ways of criminalizing the poor to ensure we are all loyal wage slaves, and to a lesser extent feeding the prison-industrial complex. Many Steinbeck novels touch on this so it was a prevalent cultural touchstone in the 30s
To be clear, those rules were all ways of criminalizing BLACKNESS in the immediate aftermath of emancipation because the freed people had nowhere to go and nowhere to sleep. And since racism is a system designed to get the working class to do the dirty work of the owning class, it makes sense that laws intended to enforce racism get used against all poor people in relatively short order.
a lot of systemic issues in the country have been around for a very long time. I always think of FDR’s secretary or labor, Francis Perkins advocating for universal healthcare and 80-90 years later it’s still an issue too few politicians take seriously.
The forced labour part is relatively new-ish. I think the average American has no idea about the slave labour involved in their daily lives.
Forced labor is not new. When the USA amended the constitution in the aftermath of the civil war they explicitly banned private ownership of slaves but made a specific carve out for prison slavery. Immediately after emancipation the states created laws that freed black folk couldn’t avoid and in 10 years the prison population went from 90% white to 90% black. And those black prisoners were leased to plantation owners to work their fields.
Convict leasing lasted almost 50 years, but not before other modalities of prison slave labor had developed and matured.
It is in no way a relatively new-ish thing
I meant as a political talking point its relatively new, but I also havent been around forever so it might be a recurring topic.
I will say that in the 90s and 00s, the teaching was that we don’t do slavery anymore. Very explicit that slavery is bad, but its in the past so no worries. This has led to a lot of people born in the 80s and 90s becoming aware of this reality much later into their adult lives.
My guess is most of them still think slavery is “solved” in America. Most people aren’t going to look at most of the brands in their grocery store and think, “slave labor helped bring me this product.”
This has led to a lot of white people born in the 80s and 90s becoming aware of this reality much later into their adult lives.
My guess is most of them still think slavery is “solved” in America.
I’m always glad when people come around, but it’s also important to acknowledge this fact so we can correct it.
13th amendment of the united states:
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.
Yeah, they sorta gloss over that part in school when we learn about this stuff.
How do they even tell if you’re homeless? It seems like a pretty fallible conviction to ruin someone’s life… Like what if your bus got delayed?
… have you not seen/been around homeless? It’s pretty clear, hygiene has taken a nose dive is probably the biggest indicator.
So you want cops to base things off of profiling?
Yeah, why don’t these guys just stop being poor and homeless?
/s
Just sell some stock and buy a house, duh. Oh, hey, I’ve just been offered a Cabinet position. Why would a Head-Up Display need a secretary though?
You mean the crime is punished with enslavement.
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Louisiana State Penitentiary, aka Angola, was a state owned and operated plantation with over 600 slaves before the Civil War. It never stopped operation, only changed how the slave labor was acquired.
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As the thirteenth amendment specifically allows.
All of America’s laws are based on what puritanical, religious losers want.
Yeah, like the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act, or the right to remain silent, or title 9. Those are all what the religious losers want.
They’re literally teaching the Bible in schools now
Tax subsidized slavery for anyone who can’t afford a home?
What a horrible state.
These numbers are going to need context.
$66,000 for how long? A year? Median across all sentences regardless of length?
If $16,000 houses AND feeds a homeless person permanently, how long exactly are we letting them live before euthanasia? There’s no “permanent” when it comes to feeding or even housing, both include ongoing costs. 16 grand is a couple of years’ food costs for me. More than 1, fewer than 10.
Note that I’m not arguing against housing the homeless obviously. Besides the obvious “what the fuck” factor of making homelessness a crime, incarceration by definition can’t be cheaper because it involves housing, feeding AND guarding them. I just would prefer there to be more context when numbers are thrown around like that.
Per year, per year. These are the yearly outlays for each.
Criminalize existing, to make slaves.
