Beneath the blazing summer sun on a former slave plantation, Lamont Gross and fellow prisoners stooped in long rows, picking vegetables by hand under the watchful eyes of armed guards on horseback. He said breaks were short and infrequent, with nothing to protect workers from the heat.
“I saw guys collapse,” Gross said of his days on the so-called farm line at Louisiana’s state penitentiary, where men work for pennies an hour or nothing at all and face punishment if they refuse. “There were dudes that got heat stroke. There were dudes with underlying conditions, older or had some sort of disability, but they had to go out there, too.”
As daily temperatures hit record highs across much of the South, a federal judge took an unusual step, challenging the treatment of mostly Black incarcerated workers in the fields.
America’s largest maximum-security prison, known as Angola, sits on 18,000 acres. It was once a patchwork of cotton fields where, historians note, even enslaved pregnant women and young children worked from dawn to dusk during the busiest and hottest harvesting months. Prisoners have toiled on the same farm lines since after emancipation often without shade, adequate work breaks or even sunscreen.
I dispute the AP’s use of the word ‘former.’
formercurrent slave plantationthe state warned that shutting down the farm line once the heat index hits 88 degrees Fahrenheit (31.1 degrees Celsius), as requested by plaintiffs in their emergency filing, would “open the floodgates” to cease work “in any institution across the South.”
Maybe - and just hear me out - maybe that’s not a bad thing if your work is all slave labor. ¯\(ツ)/¯
“That’s just Yankee-thinkin.”
And this is why the for-profit american justice system isn’t about rehabilitation.
A supply of slave labour requires recidivism.
America is barbaric.
Is this a for-profit prison if it’s state owned? Are they actually making profit? Is this just so they can cosplay as slave holders?
I believe even state owned prisons can “lease” out their prisoners for labour in order to bring extra money into their budgetary coffers. Though I could be wrong.
You are correct. Prison labor is often used for things like government production (military uniforms, office supplies, state license plates) and private industry (call centers, telephone 411 services).
Is there a list of companies that use prisoners for call center work so I can never use their products and services?
I couldn’t find a comprehensive list*, but here’s some articles about it that include specific examples, listed by source website as the titles of articles on this subject tend to veer very verbose, verily:
*scratch that, managed to find a database of all 4000+ of them after a bit more searching.
There’s no rule saying the state can’t make a profit…
“Oh we no longer have slaves, we call them prisoners now and everyone is just okay with it.”
And it’s just “coincidence” that they’re almost all black.
Totally. I mean, they do arrest other people who are not African American right?
I mean just look at how the image preview for the article looks…
we always say how cruel North Korea is, meanwhile in America:
you can downvote me but we still have the largest prison population in the world, must be nice to live in ignorance
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Oh so NK is doing it? It’s okay then.
The system is designed for an endless loop of this.
At least indentured servants had the idea of earning their freedom. This is below cruel.
My uncle saw it firsthand. He saw the chain gangs clearing out vines in the south while the prisoners got lit up by hornets (and couldn’t move since everyone was chained together). My uncle asked the fat, white prison guard if they were going to get bug killer for the prisoners. The guard laughed and said they will, in three days. He deliberately was making an example out of them.
They were the worst of the worst- comprised entirely of murderers, pedophiles, and rapists…but even then (late 70s-80s), it seemed cruel and unusual. I think the heat has made people cruel to each other down there. Monsters, even.
