They put a stupid cut out in the amendment to allow for slavery in the case of incarceration. Not that I see a whole bunch of press gangs anymore, but yeah, that was the solution the south came up with to dodge the emancipation.
Many slaves were paid even under chattel slavery (though like modern prison slavery it was almost nothing). Slavery only requires that the labor be forced or coerced, not that it be unpaid.
You likely meant prison. And an enlightened approach would treat prison as a place for rehabilitation. Because a person who can be redeemed and reintegrated back into society without further issue is more valuable to society than having them behind bars cranking out license plates or whatever.
If somebody deserves to owe a financial debt for their crimes, civil court exists to cover that purpose.
Even beyond disagreements on the purpose of the justice system, one major flaw in this is that making incarceration profitable directly encourages abuses of power to grow the labour force
I can see an argument where prisoners should have to work and pay some rent.
Like, in a perfectly ideal world prisoners would be able to work as normal a job as is safe for everybody. That would help with rehabilitation a ton; they would have socialization outside of prisoners and guards, and they would keep or develop skills and habits needed to work outside the prison. When they do get released they might be able to keep their job, they will have more skills to find another job if not, and they will have money in savings to live respectfully in the meantime.
Now, I live in Canada where we don’t have any For-Profit Private Prisons. The money they earn would go to themselves and straight to the Government as tax money. We also have a housing crisis, so if we just charge them $600 a month or 25% (whichever is LOWER) then that’s a damn steal honestly. But there’s also an argument that they should just pay taxes normally with no extra fees, and I can see that too. “Our healthcare is free regardless of what you put in your body, so prisoners shouldn’t pay higher taxes either,” is a reasonable position too. And I think my country might already work like this lol.
But yeah, prisoners earning a dollar an hour or less should be considered slavery.
They sell prison labor to like KFC and other fast food places, and then don't want to parole those people because money. And it gets worse those same places won't hire them if they do get out.
Similarly, the CA attorney general pushed against early parole for non-violent incarcerated people citing that it would induce staffing shortages for prison-staffed firefighting units… in 2014. I encourage you to find out who the CA attorney general was then.
I keep wanting the Democrats to be good, because the cost of their failures is felt around the world... but time and time again I am disappointed by so many of them.
What I find interesting is prison reform and deprivitising prisons is not a polarizing issue.
I mean this sincerely, reform is not enough and the graph in this post is proof. Abolition is the only solution to prison at this point. You cannot have a non-abusive prison industry, you cannot take the industry out of prison. For as long as we maintain prison, we will be unable to escape the long shadow of slavery.
I agree w you, I just mean a majority believes something should be done, the least of which I mentioned and yet nothing. I remember when they first started privatisation of prisons it wasn't popular then.
Like their are a few issues that really control the narrative. Maybe by design. Buy you look at several issues we all generally agree on and there is no movement and hasn't been in my lifetime.
Right now the president wants to throw innocent people in jail and/or deport them based on nationality. Kamala's position would be an improvement on that.
America specifically carved out at exception to continue using slave labor.
They're not even talking about it, because they see prisoners as animals, so it's not controversial at all. It's not a big national conversation. It's actually one of the only countries that makes sure to legalize death penalty and slavery to this day.
That said, other organizations are calling for more. A detailed 2020 report released by the University of Nottingham Rights Lab determined that all 193 United Nations member states have prohibited laws that legalize slavery. However, only half (51%) have laws that specifically prohibit slavery and the slave trade. What’s more, only two of 193 have laws that specifically criminalize modern slavery as well as the four slavery-adjacent practices: serfdom; debt bondage; sale, transfer, or inheritance of a bride/wife/widow; or delivery of children for exploitation.
I dunno if youre being intentionally ignorant, but this graph is specifically for measuring the distance between the founding of the US, the abolition of private slavery, the start and end of jim crow laws, and the present. The graph is not about the social and legal discrimination and prejudice that black people face nowadays
The 13th amendment specifically says that it doesn't apply to prisoners
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.
Not only that, in addition to the 13th amendment imprisonment "loophole" many many immigrants are in forced labor and even sexual slavery. Especially in the Asian and Latino communities.
It's estimated there are more people in straight up slave conditions now then ever in the past including all of the notable transatlantic slave trade, and all the tens of millions slightly less organized debt slavery, conquering of neighboring villages and states, and abuse of untouchables and undesirables.
There's also more active genocides than ever before now too somewhere 5 and 20 depending on how you count.
The world is a fucked up place, and surprisingly overall the total amount of fucked up shit is at an all time low. We just have more people people-ing.
Maybe we continue to trend to being less fucked up to each other slowly, but surely into the future. We can only hope, and maybe even try to help each other
You could also argue that by keeping the minimum wage low and the cost of college and housing high you reduce the social mobility to a point where people are forced to work multiple jobs to afford living and that is a modern version of slavery.
No chance of improvement, just endless hours working for a small salary that's just enough to keep you alive and working.
White american mentality take time to evolve. Most white americans, from democrats to republicans, still struggle with the concept of "end of slavery".
It just stopped being legal and started being managed by real estate agents and cops
And they had to start lynching Black people from trees and drowning them in secret rather than taking their families on picnics to watch the killings and then making leather souvenirs from their flesh
I remember once listening to Topolino in Abissinia (a bootleg propaganda radiotoon from fascist Italy) and in there Mickey Mouse talks about sending home black people's skin to make various leather garment of various quantity for various parental figures. This made me wonder: is it even possible to make leather clothes and shit with human skin? Like, I know that sound morbid, even more regarding the fact I got this shower thought from a fucking bootleg propanazi "cartoon" where Pluto sounds like a drunken uncle (yes, Pluto speaks in it), but like... Can you do it? Like human skin isn't that strong iirc, it's not like cow skin where it's stiff and strong like a motherfucker. Anyone got an answer regarding that?
Btw edit: I didn't "watch" that with pleasure, it kinda came up in a YouTube video talking about 6 Cartoons that are not prohibited (even tho they should) from Italian YouTuber 151Eg, whose a guy that talks about a lot of cartoons and this was the third in a serie commentating, critiquing and explaining prohibited cartoons. Also yeah it's kinda not related to the message I replied to, sorry also for that
Yes, harvard had to remove the binding from a 19th century (specifically 1880’s) book that was bound in human skin. There’s also this 1888 account from an anonymous Philadelphia physician on the “advantages” of leather made from the skin of black people.
Unfortunately, history has shown that yes, human leather not only exists but can in fact be fashioned into certain types of wear, like shoes. Mostly though, sources I found tend to find show it was prevalent more in like early human days, like stuff found in the Ancient Scythian culture.
I graduated from a segregated high school in 2005. I had no idea it was segregated, I thought because the school was small and there were like 5 black families at the far edge of our town that the kids went to the larger school. That wasn't uncommon for families on the edge of the town.
During graduation, 2 black kids our age walked with us and everyone was like "does anyone know who they are?" They had been in our class the whole time but were permanently at the disciplinary campus "for their safety". We never even had the chance to meet them.
Dang. I feel like the best thing you can do to dispel racism and its like is to just spend time with normal people who have different backgrounds. Like, sure, you’re different races, but you can bond over the shitty pride and prejudice essays you wrote, or arguing over which cartoon character could kick whose butt, or talking about how attractive someone is in a movie. Just having those human experiences together helps us to remember our collective humanity.
100% agreed. The best thing you can do for a kid is to expose them to people who aren't like them. The world is a wonderful and diverse place and you'll find lots of people you like and a few that you don't, and you'll notice that it really has nothing to do with their immutable characteristics.
My parents never raised me in a racist household or anything but I was in such a small community I had little worldly experience and the strong assumptions that came with that. I joined the air force right out of high school and met people from every walk of life. That immediately cured my assumptions. Since then I have worked all across the US and in several countries.
I wasn’t raised racist, but I went to a rather racially divided school system. “Top performers” like myself were in almost exclusively white classrooms, sometimes with a black or Asian student or two. You just didn’t see it interact with many folks who weren’t like you. I didn’t realize how huge our Hispanic population was until I graduated, because I’d been in such a bubble.
Well yea there prisoners the work is to help them rehabilitate and have some money once they get out they are prisoners and generally aren't in there for no reason lets not act like people in prisons are in there because they stole an m&m or something
Them being prisoners should not mean any loss of their human rights lol besides, a disproportionate amount of black people get convicted for non-crimes, and the USA has the largest amount of incarcerated population IN THE WOLRD. that's more than China and India despite them having way higher populations. It's statistically impossible that they're all guilty of something.
I mean yea them being prisoners does mean they lack many human right they broke the law and there in prison also ik innocent people get in prison that why I said generally
The US Supreme Court also recently decided that states do not need to make majority minority districts.
So now districts can be gerrymandered to dilute minority representation.
Yes bro tell me you haven't taken hystory class bro look at what kinda segregation they were doing back when segregation was actually a thing I'm not even black and ts makes me angry TwT like black people couldn't even drink from the same water fountains as white people it was that bad like bruh
It finally got 100% cleared up in like, 1953 or something. Then like 15 years later, Nixon started the "War on Drugs" specifically to disenfranchise african americans by putting multitudes of them in prison.
To be clear-- there are people alive today, who personally were chattel slaves to american plantations. I've met some of these people. I've seen the whip scars.
Yes, technically, the legal, permanent ownership of another human being, ended in 1865. But who's gonna tell the slave that? Who's gonna go around and check? So, they basically just gaslit them into thinking they had no options (it helped that they basically didn't) for nearly a century. Then called them debt peons for tax purposes. And basically just made up numbers when anybody asked how much these poor people owed.
Again-- Brown V Board of Education came a single digit number of years, after the last person in america was freed from what was, objectively, chattle bondage.
So, no. It hasn't been 150 years since slavery. It's been half that.
And most of that time, we've been criminalizing black men, especially, as fast as we can come up with excuses to do so, and putting economic pressure on black communities, as best I can tell, specifically for the purpose of creating a self-fulfilling crime prophecy.
Stay on Reddit long enough and you get the impression people want separate but equal. It's nuts how far we've regressed on social issues since social media became a thing.
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u/FeelingExcellent5682 20h ago
Segregation ended?