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When slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, the focus on free labor shifted from human ownership, to forced prison labor. This practice has been exploited for a very long time and the companies that prosper from it, the list of which includes American corporate giants like Wal Mart, McDonald's, Victoria's Secret and a long list of others, are generating huge revenues by people who are reportedly paid 2 cents to $1.15 per hour.

According to the USUncut.com article, "These 7 Household Names Make a Killing Off of the Prison-Industrial Complex", the list of companies benefiting from this questionable type of workforce is a real eye opener. The article reveals how prisoners work an average of 8 hours a day, yet they are paid roughly six times less than the federal minimum wage. Prison labor is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing. "Instead of sending labor over to China or Bangladesh, manufacturers have chosen to forcibly employ up to 2.4 million incarcerated people in the United States. Chances are high that if a product you’re holding says it is 'American Made,' it was made in an American prison."

It is also noteworthy that items that say "Made in China" are sometimes manufactured in Chinese prisons. According to the NPR article, "Made In China — But Was It Made In A Prison?", there are few limits to the use of prison labor in Communist China, "Prisoners in China's re-education-through-labor camps make everything from electronics to shoes, which find their way into U.S. homes."

Practice Similar to Slavery

This is an issue that potentially affects every American family, but squarely impacts the African-American community, where on any given day, more Black males are serving prison time than attending college. The practice hearkens back to the brutal days of slavery in America's deep South, in countless ways.

An article published by The Atlantic this year, "American Slavery, Reinvented," examines the Louisiana State Penitentiary called Angola, which was converted from a southern plantation into a prison, where modern day Black men labor in the sun while guards patrol from horseback just as they did a century and a half ago. The article explains that the prisoners who do not perform the labor as expected, will be severely punished, "...once cleared by the prison doctor, (the prisoners) can be forced to work under threat of punishment as severe as solitary confinement. Legally, this labor may be totally uncompensated; more typically inmates are paid meagerly—as little as two cents per hour—for their full-time work in the fields, manufacturing warehouses, or kitchens. How is this legal? Didn’t the Thirteenth Amendment abolish all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude in this country?"

The Thirteenth Amendment, signed into law 01 February 1865, states that, "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." Interestingly, the law ending slavery was a hot button subject for the legislators of the mid-1860's. The 13th amendment was passed before the Southern US states had been restored to the Union. It is generally agreed that it should have easily passed the Congress. The amendment passed the Senate in April 1864, but the House, void of the votes of the Southern startes, did not pass it. This dillema required President Abraham Lincoln to take a more active role in seeing the legislation through. It became part of the Republican party platform in the next Presidential election. The 13th Amendment ultimately passed through Congress in early 1865, with a vote of 119–56.



No Secret to Americans

Prison labor does not exist in total obscurity. The 1976 movie, "Nightmare in Badham County" tells the story of two UCLA co-eds who are arrested under false pretenses by a sheriff who rapes one of the young women, and has the local judge send them to the "Badham County Farm" where female inmates are forced to labor under totally segregated conditions, while undergoing constant punishment, all of which would under federal law would be considered both cruel and unusual. The women are subjected to atrocities as they are denied even their basic right to make a phone call. The movie leaves a dark feeling about how life changed very little in the years following slavery.

A TruthDig article by Chris Hedges offers a telling perspective on the severity of the problem. In "America’s Slave Empire" Hedges tells the story of three prisoners in Alabama, Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council, who led work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014. The result of their actions was solitary confinement with no end in sight. The state of Alabama stripped their right to television and reading material. Living day in and day out in temperatures that often exceed ninety degrees, they live almost every moment of their lives in tiny cells designed specifically for isolation.

Their lives may be hellish, but these three men, "become symbols of a growing resistance movement inside American prisons. The prisoners’ work stoppages and refusal to cooperate with authorities in Alabama are modeled on actions that shook the Georgia prison system in December 2010." The three say they had run out of other options, nothing else was helping to reduce the forced labor of 2.3 million prisoners in the US.

"By refusing to work—a tactic that would force prison authorities to hire compensated labor or to induce the prisoners to return to their jobs by paying a fair wage—the neoslavery that defines the prison system can be broken. Prisoners are currently organizing in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Washington."

One of the founding members of the Free Alabama Movement, told Hedges, “We have to shut down the prisons,” the inmate known as Kinetik said from the Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama's Escambia County. He says that in Alabama, where almost no inmate is paid, "Without us the prisons, which are slave empires, cannot function."