800,000 imprisoned people in the US produce $10 billion of value each year through their labor. $2 billion for private industry. The state of Alabama alone makes $450 million off the labor of incarcerated workers. We have a word for this. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

What happens if you're in prison and refuse to work?

Damn, using prison labor to build more prisons is so fucking bleak

The Thirteenth didn’t fully abolish slavery—only private slavery. The work of abolition and reconstruction was never finished, and these are the consequences.

Crime does pay. Just not the criminals.

Prison slavery is stll legal WTF

I wonder, if incarcerated individuals were paid the same wages as their "free" counterparts, how many would be likely to repeat-offend after release? Seems to me a cause of re-offending is lack of resources. If they were to have access to full wages saved upon their release, they'd have no reason.

During the height of the pandemic, prisoners washed hospital laundry, made masks, and dug mask graves. Now they are building more prisons. The free market at work, amirite?!?

Was just reading Rachel Slade's MAKING IT IN AMERICA, which has some sobering data in a related vein.

The US is literally a slave state. It's in the Constitution and everything, prisoners can still be enslaved. This bears repeating for those who don't know. If cannabis is decriminalized federally they'll come up with some other law to enslave mostly black men under on trumped-up charges.

It is however literally spelled out in the Constitution that slavery ... of imprisoned people ... is legal.