1 post tagged America

“You’re not allowed to bring into America anything that’s been made by forced labor or prisons. But in America, you can almost say…that they’ve reinvented the slave trade. They [prisoners in U.S. prisons] produce, for example, 100% of all military helmets, ammunition, belts, bullet proof vests, id tags etc., 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances, 21% of home furniture…which allows the United States to compete with workers in Mexico because of course the workers can’t refuse to work for $0.25 an hour…” - from the video.

I’m not so sure whether prisoners don’t have the right to refuse working but needless to say it’s not as if they have a lot of choices in prison. I did some digging and found out the corporation that does this: Unicor. I tried to find out more about the statistics mentioned and discovered that Unicor at some point did produce all military helmets, but they’ve stopped doing so in 2010 after there was a recall of 44,000 defective helmets (source here). I wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining statistics are more or less accurate even though outdated.

Unicor is still around and has a vast number of services that employ prison labor at probably very low hourly rates (see for example this report to congress, albeit also a bit outdated given the last update was in 2007, where you can see it written that “Inmates earn from $0.23 per hour up to a maximum of $1.15 per hour, depending on their proficiency and educational level, among other things” p.6). Unicor even has call-centers where you can enjoy “all the benefits of domestic outsourcing” with “off-shore pricing”. At some point a female prisoner who’s interviewed says:

This has been a wonderful experience for me it has opened up a lot of doors.

                                                                                            (italics added)

A mixture of Freudian and Orwellian irony at its best. You can find the sinister video here.

Needless to say, there is something morally repugnant about this whole enterprise not to mention the fact that America incarcerates a historically unprecedented amount of its own population based on laws inspired more by baseball than reason. Perhaps it is time for Americans, but not just Americans, to remember the words of Hubert H. Humphrey, 38th Vice President of the United States:

“…the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped. “

- and if I may add, the imprisoned.