No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.

Most jobs are inside facilities, where the state’s inmates — who are disproportionately Black — can be sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for free doing everything from mopping floors to laundry. But more than 10,000 inmates have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from major car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart, the AP determined.

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-3b2c7e414c681ba545dc1d0ad30bfaf5

  • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    You must not be American - the thirteenth amendment codifies slavery and involuntary servitude into the constitution.

    • can@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      I’m not, but I am familiar with that but I didn’t know it went this far. It’s so blatent.

      edit: fellow canadian

      • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        Ya, I’m hyperbolizing a little bit… But not really. The 13th amendment is what outlawed black slavery in the United States… But also explicitly allows slavery in the United States:

        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.