Posted on 04/21/2014 8:34:06 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Melvin Ray
Inmates at an Alabama prison plan to stage a work stoppage this weekend and hope to spur an escalating strike wave, a leader of the effort told Salon in a Thursday phone call from his jail cell.
“We decided that the only weapon or strategy … that we have is our labor, because that’s the only reason that we’re here,” said Melvin Ray, an inmate at the St. Clair correctional facility and founder of the prison-based group Free Alabama Movement. “They’re incarcerating people for the free labor.” Spokespeople for Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and his Department of Corrections did not respond to midday inquiries Thursday. Jobs done by inmates include kitchen and laundry work, chemical and license plate production, and furniture-making. In 2011, Alabama’s Department of Agriculture reportedly discussed using inmates to replace immigrants for agricultural work; in 2012, the state Senate passed a bill to let private businesses employ prison labor.
Inmates at St. Clair and two other prisons, Holman and Elmore, previously refused to work for several days in January. A Department of Corrections spokesperson told the Associated Press at the time that those protests were peaceful, and told AL.com that some of the inmates’ demands were outside the authority of the department to address. The state told the AP that a handful of inmates refused work, and others were prevented from working by safety or weather issues. In contrast, Ray told Salon the January effort drew the participation of all of St. Clair’s roughly 1,300 inmates and nearly all of Holman’s roughly 1,100. He predicted this weekend’s work stoppage would spread further and grow larger than that one, but also accused prison officials of hampering F.A.M.’s organizing by wielding threats and sending him and other leaders to solitary confinement. “It’s a hellhole,”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
It’s nothing but Leftist propaganda.
What jury or judge is thinking “Gee we need more free labor in prisons, so even though this guy is innocent, we’ll send him to jail anyway?”
Absurd.
> He means that many businesses have made partnerships with the prison system to have inmates make goods for almost nothing.
Worked on a case several years ago where a guy owned a high end custom auto restoration business for the really high dollar vehicles. He would take them conpletely apart, strip the paint, then rebuild each one from the ground up and paint every single part. It was extremely detailed work. The finished autos were breathtaking. Somehow he made a deal with the warden at a state prison facility and they had inmates assisting him by working on some if the vehicles. If memory serves correct, they were removing the serial numbers on the vehicles. Bottom line, yeah this type of stuff really does happen and the inmates work on the “real cheap” but it would be better than sitting in a jail cell all day if you ask me.
We had these programs in the ca youth authority
They got paid the same as the company’s employees on the street.
30% went to the state as compensation for the cost of incarceration
40%went to state victims of violent crime fund or towards reparations if that inmate had court ordered reparations
30%went to the. Inmates account for canteen and the rest when they paroled
And are they not learning a skill they could apply in the real world once they get out? Sounds like a “Win-Win” to me.
Kind of hard translating making license plates as a viable skill on the outside.
What does the US Constitution say about slavery:
Amendment XIII » 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
Is slavery or involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime allowable under our Constitution?
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Does he have a pay phone in his cell or maybe a guard gave him a cell phone? Didn't realize 'they' were allowed phones in their cells, but if 'they' are getting cable TV and room service in their cells, it makes sense.
Nothing like being in jail, getting a job and forming a Union.
Sure was 'neighborly' of them to give the Facility a week to prepare for the shut down.
Maybe the Facility will bring in 'Scabs' to send a message to the "Union Inmates".
Salon is for the “Free Mumia” crowd.
While I have no problem with convicts being essentially slaves, as that is absolutely constitutional, he does have a point about the incentive to imprison as many people as they can due to the profit motive. It touches on the “school-to-prison pipelines” that get mentioned from time to time, particularly in light of the significant privatization of prisons over the last few decades. It’s a situation that’s ripe for abuse, and apparently some are doing so.
Well certainly. I support inmates learning working skills so that, those who get out, can start earning a real living and not have to fall back into crime to support themselves.
However, I also don’t want a justice system that is incentivised to convict people because businesses are willing to contribute to some politician’s, or DA’s campaign because they know that once elected they can start up a business in the prison and have people create profitable products or services for free.
One possible compromise is to allow businesses to intern inmates, who are due to eventually be released. The business can pay them the market rate, with the money going towards those the inmate has harmed or a state fund that would be used to pay victims for wrong done to them, until the inmate has paid fully for his crime.
I can’t speak to all prisoners. It’s possible that the inmate had the phone smuggled in and made the video and had the phone smuggled out.
I don’t think he was able to send his video over the internet, because many prisons suppress cell phone connections to prevent gangs from running things outside while incarcerated.
I just don’t see how it creates an incentive...sure on paper it’s possible, but it would take Third-World-like corruption for that to come to fruition, and we are nowhere close to that.
“Prisoners are not there to make profits for companies but to pay their debt to the public. Making them into free labor for business invites large scale corruption into the legal system that has enough already. They can be worked plenty hard without going down that road.”
Your reasoning is abominable. The cost of housing inmates, especially life-without-parole violent murderers like the example in this story, is excessive and cannot be recouped by prisoner labor. The economics of convict labor are abysmal, so much so that throughout written history it has been used sparsely and only for generally non-violent and tractable offenders, or for suicidal tasks for which there was no free-market equivalent labor source.
If convict labor were a net economic advantage, it wouldn’t have taken long for past tyrants and totalitarian oligarchies to criminalize birth and enslave the whole population in prisons - the only reason we haven’t seen that before isn’t because murdering dictators are squeamish or overly sympathetic to criminals, it’s simply because you can’t throw too many people in gulags and prisons before the costs involved drag your entire nation into poverty.
Our version of convict labor is even more inefficient than historical models in that we are not allowed to brutalize or kill in order to keep the population of prisoners in line or keep costs down, nor are goods and services derived from convict labor allowed to compete with private goods and services in the wider economy. The only lawful purchasers of prison-manufactured goods are other government agencies.
Further, your mythical “debt to society” is fuzzy-brained nonsense. Criminals are in prison to punish them, to deter other criminals, and to reduce crime in the community by incapacitating and segregating criminals away from society that would otherwise re-offend. In ages past we accomplished all of those tasks via execution.
The only thing convict labor can do is slightly lower the cost of segregating threats like this animal away from the community. There is no profit involved. There’s a reason long prison sentences were unheard of until the modern era: the costs involved are so prohibitive that when you are faced with a career criminal it’s simply far more efficient for society just to put them down like rabid animals. Only the phenomenal wealth and abundance of industrialized societies can support a large prison population - everyone else has to resort to rope and firing squads to get rid of trouble-makers.
Our society is no longer willing to hang horse thieves, nor even execute murderers as a general rule, so the only solution to excessive criminal predation is expensive incapacitation. Convict labor, even mythical solutions like convict slavery, cannot make this a costless, let alone profitable endeavor - all it can do is lower the price-tag of keeping wastes-of-flesh like this story’s example off the streets when you and society as a whole are too squeamish to execute them.
Private companies only make a “profit” from housing convicts because it costs them a little less to do so than the government due to free-market efficiencies, so the government can split the difference with a private company and both come out slightly ahead. This mystical profit is still a net loss to society, the tax payer, etc., it’s just a less significant loss than letting an amazingly inept and inefficient government bureaucracy do the same task.
The guards get a paycheck, the wardens get a paycheck, and society pays. It’s just when the guards and wardens are private contractors society pays a little less; just as society pays a little less when inmates are put to work. There’s nothing in that equation that will ever, EVER, support a profitable prison-slave-trade, nor is there anything there that could allow a runaway prison-industrial-complex to start enslaving average Americans. All it can ever do is make it a little cheaper to tolerate the continued existence of people that your ancestors would have executed.
Agreed totally. It’s really amazing how many people believe that absurdity.
That’s an excellent set-up and something I could support for all inmates. Serious crimes would warrant a higher financial penalty to pay off.
I think it would also give the inmate time to think about he’s done, having to do something to compensate those he has harmed.
We had twa reservation call center at Ventura school. They were rated higher by the company than their two national call centers and had fewer complaints and card theft.
One guy paroled with $26,000
We had six programs around the state, but corrections took over the cya and it’s not worth a crap now. Imo
If I’m a furniture manufacturer and, if I’m paying a woodworker $27/hour, plus the employment taxes, it might cost me $75 in labour to have somebody make a table.
However, if I only have to pay an inmate $9 to make that same table, that $66 that I could reap in extra profit from each table that I sell that was made by an inmate. If, due to a sweet deal with the state government, I get 20 inmates per state prison, and possibly 5 prisons in that state, that’s 100 inmates per state. Potentially, that could be $6600 per day that I would reap in extra profit. Multiply that by 250 days per year, that’s $1.5 million dollars that I could potentially reap from inmate labour.
You don’t think that is an incentive to get as many people incarcerated as possible?
Most Freepers know nothing of prison so who can blame their hang em all bravado
Kinda like when Freepers crow about war too...most Freepers are ignorant of war...we have some real combat vets...God love em
Usually Prison industry is UNICOR....they pay a little...which helps indigent prisoners....a lot in some cases
And in principle its best prisoners work....no question....better for everyone
But in really serious 24 hour fighting and killing prisons its not worth the risk...then work becomes a privilege....no I’m not kidding....beats lockdown
Other pitfalls are corrupt staff selling prison labor to fatten pockets
And UNICOR competing in bids with non prison labor private companies for everything from parachutes to desk to uniforms etc
UNICOR has huge advantage paying 50 cents an hour
Actually I like the old prison farms but again...security issues galore
Its complicated
Bastille days are long....
To be honest...if you aren’t white and young and pretty
Holman and Atmore aren’t that bad....
Or so I hear
So you, a lowly furniture manufacturer, is going to have to power to influence whether or not a person is found guilty in a court of law, or even to determine their sentence?
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