It’s not a “loophole” it’s explicit within the text of the amendment
“Loophole” lmfao like it’s a fucking accident, like it wasn’t purposefully structured to reclaim and expand a source of free labor
We never outlawed slavery in America. We simply transferred ownership of slaves from individual landowners to the government and large corporations.
Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:
-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.
–Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”
-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?
-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include:
IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument,
Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies,
3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre
Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.
-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.
-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.
-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.
-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.
-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.
-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.
-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.
Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.
I think it’s also important to realize and acknowledge that this is a bi-partisan issue.
It’s not a problem that can be solved simply by ousting republicans from congress in the next set of midterm elections.
Colorado voted blue last November. Hillary’s 2016 campaign took over 130k in campaign contributions from private prisons and their lobbyists.
It’s not just Louisiana using prison slaves to do housekeeping/janitorial/etc. labor for government officials. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, the Arkansas legislature “employed” house slaves at the governor’s mansion (and still does). No surprise that the US prison population rose by 673,000 inmates during Bill Clinton’s two terms (235,000 more than Reagan’s) [source].
Democrats and republicans are both complicit in upholding this system.
Thoughtfulfangirling 