Week 10: Prison Labor
While doing research on the prison system in the United States I came across a website with an article posted recently in March of 2008. The Center for Research on Globalization has an article published on their website about the debate on whether or not the prison industry in the United States is considered “big business or a new form of slavery”.
The prison system is made up of millions of prisoners, and out of that the majority or African Americans or Hispanics. From what we learned in class, most prisoners in jail are there for non-violent crimes, and out of those, many are first time offenders. With the amount of prisoners being put into jail every year increasing and jails getting more and more overcrowded. These prisoners in some jails are being forced to work for larger companies for way less then minimum wage. Because of these rates, being forced to work as a prisoner could be considered a form of slavery to many people, and because they are being paid so little. Jails cost so much to keep operating, things that people buy that the prisoners make, help bring an income into the prison system. Prisons themselves take billions of dollars each year to run and maintain, and with the high number or prisoners being sentenced for all kinds of crimes this rate just keeps on going up.
In order to help this situation new laws need to be passed that helps to bring the rate of prisoners down, helping to reduce the amount of money that is spent by our tax dollars each year. A way of changing that, is to change minimum sentences for crimes that are nonviolent. This will help bring down the amount of prisoners, and also bring down cost, which will make it not mandatory to make them work for less then a dollar a day.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289
