I read this article =>http://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system<= “US Prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”, and while the title could use a little work, I felt it needed to be shared.
I wouldn’t complain about the idea of prisoners giving something back, if I was sure that they were in prison for the crimes they committed or that they were serving fair sentences.
But with the recent upheavals in the prison system and the decades of corrupt officials taking advantage of those too poor to put up a decent legal defense, I’m not as skeptical about prisoners being kept as slaves as I might have been a few years ago. You know, back when I was young and naive and wanted to believe that human decency might actually be a real thing.
For years I’ve been of the belief that politicians were purposely writing laws to ensure the less-advantaged were branded as criminals as an easy means of subjugating citizens’ rights. You know, “You have a prison record, so now you can’t vote me out of office as I rape your community and lock your children up alongside you.”
But keeping prisoners behind bars as a means of cheap labor toiling for soulless corporations that line officials’ pockets? Yeah. I can see it.
Violent offenders need to be kept behind bars, especially those for which counseling and one-on-one therapies and medication do not work to curb their darker impulses. No one wants a child murdering rapist on the loose, and most people wouldn’t welcome a child murdering rapist to sit at their table and share a meal. That’s a common sense safety concern.
But if someone was arrested with an ounce of weed that they bought for personal use or to sell to support their poor family, does it really make sense to lock them in prison where it costs the community money to house them? Or would counseling and community service give more back? At the very least, their family doesn’t lose a valuable resource and their children aren’t left wondering why Mommy or Daddy went away.
Yet if the community is paying money to house “criminals”, and the prison is selling their labor for a profit… isn’t that just slavery with extra steps?
Because it’s easy to bitch about the forced labor camps of North Korea and China and all those OTHER not-as-good-as-our countries, but it might be worth it to give our own labor camps another look. Especially when it’s so easy for someone to have their rights taken away and no one is giving the paperwork a second glance.
Slavery is wrong.
Slavery is evil.
Slavery needs to be abolished.
And if that means paying someone more than $0.14 – 0.20 an hour and ensuring that they’re treated like human beings and not animals… That’s something we all need to be concerned about.
Because to happily buy food or wear clothes that proudly bear a “Made in the USA” tag, I need to know that I’m not profiting off the misery of other people. And to say that prisoners don’t deserve rights, that their sometimes minor or stupid crimes means that they deserve to be treated as less than human, that’s wrong.
It’s disgusting that companies are profiting off the misery of human beings. And whether the sweatshops or the fields are located in other countries or our own, it doesn’t matter.
Slavery is wrong.
