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This was probably the plan all along

DCblogger's picture
Submitted by DCblogger on Mon, 10/24/2011 - 1:07pm
Departments: 
Department of When Foil is not Foily
Thread: 
Fascism Rising

http://twitter.com/sabokitty/status/128498294245699584

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Submitted by MontanaMaven on

Arizona and Florida too will incarcerate undocumented workers who will then pick the vegetables that they can't get Americans to pick because it is incredibly difficult to do. It is back breaking but also takes a lot of skill with a knife according to the latest Counterpunch article.

Submitted by Alcuin on

The URL to the Counterpunch article seems to be missing. I went to Counterpunch, but didn't see an article about prison labor ...

Submitted by Lex on

I don't think it was the plan all along, but it's at least a happy outcome. Probationers didn't work; they all quit at lunch.

It very much is skilled work, or at least takes a well-developed skill set to do effectively and efficiently. And since it's piece work, pay is directly proportional to skill.

Clonal Antibody's picture
Submitted by Clonal Antibody on

A critical examination of Kevin Carson’s Mutualism

Capital, or Slavery by Another Name

Moreover, laws against vagabonds are still on the books in the United States today. According to one writer, it was not unusual for these laws to be used against Black men even into the 1950s in Birmingham. Police would sweep up all men who appeared to be without jobs. Once convicted, they would be hired out the mining companies. Carl V. Harris writes of this practice in his 1972 book, “Reforms in Government Control of Negroes in Birmingham, Alabama, 1890-1990?

“When the newspapers announce that the ever alert Sheriff and his trusted deputies rounded up some twenty or thirty negroes in the woods, wounded two or three and landed the balance in the county jail for crap shooting, does anybody believe that the peace of the county is being conserved, or does every man know that the syndicate is trying to reimburse itself for its campaign expenditures?” Thus did Walker Perry, chief attorney for the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, denounce in 1912 the oppressive fee system, under which the Sheriff’s “syndicate” in Birmingham and Jefferson County, Alabama, allegedly earned $50,000 per year in fees by energetically arresting Negroes on petty gambling charges. Perry, as chairman of a reform crusade to abolish the fee system in Jefferson County, was one of many reform movement leaders who between 1890 and 1920 sought to remedy defects in the local government’s methods of controlling Negroes.

Most Birmingham whites believed that their local government should exercise vigilant control over the Negroes who composed approximately 40 percent of the population of their city. In 1889 the editor of the Birmingham Age-Herald declared: ‘The negro is a good laborer when his labor can be controlled and directed, but he is a very undesirable citizen.” In 1906 the editor of the Birmingham News said: ‘Anyone visiting a Southern city or town must be impressed at witnessing the large number of loafing negroes… They can all get work, but they don’t want to work. The result is that they sooner or later get into mischief or commit crimes.” The editor believed that such Negroes were “not only a menace to the public safety” but also “to some extent a financial burden upon the taxpayers.”

The Constitution actually allows this practice in the very amendment that outlawed slavery:

Thirteenth Amendment – Slavery And Involuntary Servitude

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.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

For decades this amendment was used to justify state action that in essence, reproduced all the vilest practices of slavery. How soon will it be before these laws are applied to the 99er population?

Submitted by Alcuin on

Not sure what this has to do with the post. Seems like this comment should be a stand alone post - might get more responses that way. I thought someone might comment to the effect that the private prison industry has an interest in promoting these harsh immigration laws. Then they can use their slaves (uh,prisoners) to add to their bottom line. The State pays them to "take care" of their charges, but now they have another profit center. Capitalists are so very creative, aren't they??

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Submitted by Clonal Antibody on

of using prison labor, whether the prisons be private or public, to do work for private business. The problems are the laws that allow this to be done.

These laws also allow private business to circumvent minimum wage laws.

As regards private prisons, a 1997 Ken Silverstein article, in the Shyster magazine, on private prisons can be found reprinted here

Private prison companies have been predictably enthusiastic about the booming market for convict labor. Between 1980 and 1994, the value of goods produced by prisoners rose from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Prisoners now make articles such as clothes, car parts, computer components, shoes, golf balls, soap, furniture and mattresses, in addition to staffing jailhouse telemarketing data entry and print shop operations. Some states have even begun assigning prisoners to institutions after matching up their job skills with a prison's labor needs.

Prisoners at state-run institutions generally receive the minimum wage, though in some states, such as Colorado, wages fall to as low at $2 per hour (workers receive only about 20 per cent of that amount, with the rest going to pay room and board, victims compensation programs and other fees). As an added bonus, companies that employ prison labor have no need to offer benefits, vacation days or sick time to employees and many states offer such firms tax breaks and other advantages as well.

Lured by such enticements, many big firms have moved eagerly into the prison-industrial complex. Trans World Airlines pays prison workers $5 per hour to book reservations by phone, less than a third of the rate it previously paid to its own employees. The EAU succeeded in shutting down a program at an Ohio prison where the Waste corporation was paying prisoners $2.05 per hour to assemble parts for Honda cars.

For businesses, the deal is even sweeter at private prisons where pay rates can be as low as 17 cents per hour for a six hour maximum day, which translates into a monthly pay check of about $20. The maximum pay scale at a CCA prison in Tennessee is 50 cents an hour for what are classified as "highly skilled positions." Given such rates itâs not surprising that a prisoner there complained about the relative generosity of publicly-run programs, saying, "At federal prisons you can take home $1.25 per hour and work eight hours a day, sometimes even double shifts. A two, three or four hundred dollars a month check isn't unusual in the feds."

So substituting prison labor for now no longer available illegal migrant workers is not surprising.

I knew someone who had a business that was using California prison labor to enter GIS information, under the guise of "training" prison workers on computers -- the computers and the workers "paid" for by the state. He had two operations - one using prison labor to enter the data, and on the other cheap Rumanian programmers to do the GIS programming. He then sold his GIS services to state and local agencies.

Submitted by Alcuin on

I was struck, when I read your comment, of how similar this scam is to agricultural labor camps and company towns. The company owns the houses, rents them at a rate that impoverishes the renter, and issues script that is only redeemable at the company store. Why do we have to go through this again? Do people have functioning brains? Jeez ....

Submitted by Alcuin on

I had no idea, until I read this article, that private prisons were outlawed in 1928:

"Since 1984, when pri­va­ti­za­tion of pris­ons was made legal again, after hav­ing been stamped out in 1928 due to gross abuses against pris­on­ers in the name of profit, the for-profit prison in­dus­try has moved quickly to ex­pand into as many states as pos­si­ble be­fore enough re­sis­tance could be amassed to stop them."

This an eye-opening article for those of us uneducated about the prison industrial complex.