Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Well there's absolutely a lot of real and actual slavery across the country, from domestic servants who are being held against their will, to sex slaves, and of course the numbers scale up with our population. So our population during the civil war was 31+ million, with close to 4 million of that being slaves, now we have 331+ million people, if you combine the instances of domestic and indentured servitude with sexual slavery, then add in those wrongfully in the prison system it scales to being much more than the sub 4 million in slavery during the civil war.
I know a lot of people would want to say "but the prison system is prisoners who committed crimes" but a lot of people are in prison because of failed justice, or on poverty based offenses, some of which compile with other petty offenses. Now also another caveat is that prison work isn't usually compulsory, it's normally voluntary, but one can argue that it's the prison that has the leverage over these people volunteering or not.
Overall these statistics aren't easy to calculate because modern day slavers want to hide and obfuscate their crimes, but it's there, it exists, and it exists in places you may not expect, like the next time you're sitting in a park in Manhattan consider the fact that one of the many domestic workers present may in fact be enslaved against their will, and this could be said in LA, Miami, Atlanta, anywhere in the US.
And even if someone is in the prison system for entirely correct reasons, forcing them to work is still slavery. I don't care if they're the most guilty awful person ever, if they need to be put in prison then put them in prison. That's the purpose of prison.
Trying to get economic benefit out of holding people in prison is not a slippery slope, it's a slippery cliff. The moment you try to justify it for anyone you're opening the door to a moral disaster.
But let's be objective with this, most of prison work is voluntary, and the desire to do something, anything, sometimes gets the best of us and due to that we'll do the volunteering, it's important to make that distinction, especially when I've been there and done that.
Now the obvious differences are prisons like Angola in Louisiana, which still has the same chaingang that they were depicted to have in movies decades behind us, there's no voluntary work there, those are prison work camps/concentration camps, and are tantamount to slavery, if not outright slavery, and are violent as hell, and these types of prisons can be found all across the American South, but especially along the Gulf Coast.
"You can work and spend your entire pittance on ramen noodles, or you can go stir-crazy in your cell and eat stewed cardboard" is a voluntary choice only in the most strictly pedantic sense.
That's being a bit Hyperbolic, and these aren't the types of prisons or jails where you're stuck in a cell all day, that's your misconception, the only people who are locked up like that are the ones that have proven themselves too dangerous to be around others, or at least that's how it's supposed to be when our prison system is working correctly, and the only prisons where that's consistently their prison existence is the SuperMax prisons, because again, those people are too dangerous to let roam without supervision.
Mostly it's just a chance to get out from behind the walls and the fences, sure they'd rather be free, but I'm sure we'd all rather they not do shut that gets them put in prison, and regardless of your feelings towards prisons people who commit crimes, real crimes, belong there, or some form of prison that emphasizes rehabilitation.
Opinions on whether it's "working correctly" is likely going to vary depending on whether you're running a factory that depends on prison labor. Right now I think those factory owners would agree that it's working correctly.