this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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There's just so much there. You dance around a ton of things and beg like three different questions. Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities? What happens if you refuse to work? It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?
What you typed is the bullshit prison labor corporations use to argue in bad faith and it doesn't stand up to the slightest examination. Slavery is bad. Period.
There was this one time I had to help a customer after I clocked out. You can read all about it in my memoir "Twelve minutes a slave".
A. You didn't have to.
B. What the fuck does that have to do with anything I said? Are you equating prison labor to volunteering a few minutes at your normal job?
Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the "enslaved" are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.
I assume you can't refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can't leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it's not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it's literally slavery. "It's not literally slavery" is not a defense of the system.
We're not arguing "well prisoners can't be sold to other prisons so that proves it's not slavery" because that one difference doesn't prove anything, just like one similarity doesn't prove anything.
...no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of "the system" maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn't because a parent was imprisoned. There's nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you're trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves' children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?
Are you really going to make the argument that forced labor with beating and torture as punishment for not working isn't slavery? Even the guy I responded to felt like they had to strawman chattel slavery in there.
And again you admit the system is racist. But the presence of white people means it can't be slavery somehow?
And because we made it legal it's not slavery somehow?
And we absolutely target the children of prisoners. Do you know what the police call it when a teenager hangs out with their ex felon dad? A gang association. Do you know what an employer calls surveillance and repeated searches? Unemployable.
There's a hundred little things like that, including the school to prison pipeline, the zip code lottery, over policing, and more.
Saying we don't target the exact same families for legal slavery requires ignoring the evidence of your eyes.