New rules from the Federal Communications Commission are putting the brakes on the prison telecom industry’s exploitative practices.
States are looking for new ways to execute people, and now they’re implicating South Carolinians. Whether it be a firing squad, the electric chair, or suffocation by nitrogen gas, South Carolina has its hand in calling for each. In our name, they are forsaking one of God’s most sacred principles, “Thou shalt not kill." For the sake of our souls, we must stop them.
No image draws a more obvious connection between chattel slavery and mass incarceration in the United States than that of Black men toiling in fields under the watch of armed overseers on horseback at Angola, an antebellum plantation turned plantation prison. From Angola in Louisiana to the Cummins Unit in Arkansas, this scene plays out on prison farms across the country daily.
Many of us borrow our understanding of prison labor from pop culture. Think Shawshank Redemption, men tarring roofs paid in cigarettes and beers. But, as we recently learned, the truth is very different.
There is a common misconception that private corporations are the primary beneficiaries of forced prison labor due to viral exposés of corporate exploitation by brands like Burger King. However, while private corporations may be the most vile beneficiaries of prison labor given their for-profit interests, federal, state, and local governments are the primary beneficiaries.
When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, they included a crucial exception clause that allows for slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. This clause has resulted in the forced labor of millions of people in our prisons and jails since, and the first beneficiaries of this labor were private corporations.
