AOC on during Laken Riley Act debate: "When a private prison camp opens in your town and they say, 'we didn't know this

[Celerity]

was going to happen,' know that they did and they voted for it."

Link to tweet

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

1. "Just following orders."

Also too, Arbeit macht frei.

[haele]

2. When the Private Prison becomes the equivalent of a Day Labor provider...

And most basic light manufacturing, construction, agricultural, processing, basic caretaking, and janitorial jobs are done by "trustee" prison labor for 1/8 the the labor cost, don't be surprised that the local police will start arresting locals to "backfill" local business interest's need for cheap labor. Including those that become bankrupt or homeless. Prison services instead of social services.

Private prisons make Company Towns possible.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

5. Private and state prisons already serve that function.

[Cirsium]

10. That is already the case

Prison labor is already happening.

U.S. prison labor programs violate fundamental human rights

Incarcerated workers generate billions of dollars worth of goods and services annually but are paid pennies per hour without proper training or opportunity to build skills for careers after release, according to a comprehensive nationwide report released by the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The United States has a long, problematic history of using incarcerated workers as a source of cheap labor and to subsidize the costs of our bloated prison system,” said Jennifer Turner, principal human rights researcher with the ACLU’s Human Rights Program. “Incarcerated workers are stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse. They are paid pennies for their work even as they produce billions of dollars for states and the federal government. It’s past time we treat incarcerated workers with dignity. If states and the federal government can afford to incarcerate 1.2 million people, they can afford to pay them fairly for their work.”

The exploitation of incarcerated workers is rooted in the “exception clause” to the 13th Amendment, which bars slavery except for people who have been convicted of crimes. In many states—and in the United States Constitution—exception clauses allow for workers in prisons to be exploited, underpaid, and excluded from workplace safety protection laws. Worse, the exception clause in the 13th Amendment disproportionately encouraged the criminalization and re-enslavement of Black people during the Jim Crow era, and we still feel the impacts of this systemic racism to this day in the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown community members.

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-violate-fundamental-human-rights-new-report-finds

Texas’ plantation prisons: Inside a 200-year history of forced labor shrouded in secrecy

In 1910, members of the Penitentiary Investigating Committee, during the governorship of Thomas Mitchell Campbell, traveled by wagon and train to more than 20 railroad camps, industrial production units, and farms to interview convict laborers, a probe prompted by exposés in the San Antonio Express-News. After the committee released its report in August 1910, the Legislature effectively ended 39 years of convict leasing—a system in which the state hired out incarcerated people as virtual slaves to private contractors.

Instead, the state prison system would put incarcerated people to work on its own farms. Over the next decade, Texas amassed 139,000 acres for prison farms. More than 50,000 acres were purchased from ex-slaveholders who had become convict-leasing profiteers. The state would develop new prison units on these lands to run its own agricultural operations with captive labor. Most of these plantation prisons sprawled across what was known as the “Sugar Bowl District,” the same southeastern counties, including Fort Bend and Brazoria, where most enslaved Texans had been exploited before emancipation.

Today, 24 Texas prison units still have agribusiness operations. Nine are located on former plantations. Incarcerated workers harvest many of the same crops that slaves and later convict laborers did from 1871 to 1910. Like the previous owners, the Texas prison system still compels captive people to work its fields without pay. Guards on horseback monitor those who labor under the sun in fields of cotton and other crops. Texas prisons were finally fully racially desegregated in 1991, but Black Texans still account for one-third of the incarcerated—nearly triple their portion of the general population. Texas is one of only seven U.S. states that pay incarcerated workers nothing. Meanwhile, those incarcerated must pay for many essential items in the commissary. Their unpaid work is mandatory, a practice sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

This prison system of forced work is something of a black box. With free-world labor regulations inapplicable, it’s easy for the state to conceal work-related injuries and even deaths, leaving concerned citizens and journalists to cobble together information from inmate letters, lawsuits, and scant medical documentation. Shockingly, the Texas Legislature required far greater disclosure of work conditions, injuries, deaths, and punishments on prison farms during convict leasing and in the three decades after it was abolished than it does today. To uncover this, the Texas Observer spent months comparing thousands of pages of archived reports and testimonies from the late 1800s to the 1940s to contemporary court filings, state documents, and interviews with incarcerated workers.

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-plantation-prisons-history-forced-labor-tdcj-farms-convict-leasing/

[misanthrope]

15. They can fill those jobs with the unemployed

who lose their jobs to the AI we are racing to develop on the public dime.

[kerry-is-my-prez]

3. They want to take over private land and parks. They tried it in Florida.

Everyone went nuts in the state: Democrats, Independents, and Republicans so De Insanetis stopped it. He had signs out at 13 different parks but took them all down.

[Solly Mack]

4. They don't care.

A lot of Americans won't care.

Torture taught us that.

[mitch96]

6. That's what the people living around the concentration camps said when they were liberated in WW2.

"We did not know" .. .The smell from all the dead was overpowering in the towns..
m

[Initech]

7. This whole disgusting exercise was a loyalty test brought to you by Fox News.

Insane how many people on our side fell for the bullshit.

[UTUSN]

8. K&R for, there was a time here when I condescendingly liked Bernie and her while

thinking they were farther on than I am. Am farther on with them now.

[avebury]

9. I wish that she had ended it saying something along the lines of -

This is the type of behavior that happened in Nazi Germany. Someday there might be a 21st Century version of the Nuremburg Trail only next time the US might not be on the right side of history.

[wnylib]

11. A thousand salutes and thanks to AOC for speaking so frankly

and forcefully.

I would love to hear her saying exactly the same things in network TV interviews for the rest of the nation to hear.

We need much more of this in very public places for ALL people to hear.

[bdamomma]

14. Sorry to

say this, but these are the leaders we need right now, both in the House and Senate. I think those Senior Senators, need to consider retirement, you know who are. Both Democrats and GOP (or whatever the choose to be called now).

New blood is needed, the GQP are not interested in the people's agenda or their rights.

[wnylib]

16. I think that you are right.

[Blue Full Moon]

12. Money to be made.

[Renew Deal]

13. She did well

[PufPuf23]

17. AOC deserves consistent respect at DU and from the Democratic Party.

AOC tells the truth.

AOC heads a path to an egalitarian nation.

[La Coliniere]

18. AOC is the real deal.

She is unafraid to speak truth to power. I’ve always respected her and truly believe she has more integrity and fortitude than most of her colleagues. She needs to become one of leaders of our Party in this time of peril and the sooner the better. I’m fucking sick of hearing that she’s too divisive or strident. She’s a powerhouse and we need her strength of character and plain speaking honesty now more than ever.

[Frank D. Lincoln]

19. bookmarked. nt