Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn said Arizona communities would “collapse” without cheap prison labor, during testimony before the Joint Legislative Budget Committee Thursday...Sen. David Gowan asked Shinn about the nature of the work the prisoners do at the Florence West prison. In Arizona, all people in state prisons are forced to work 40 hours a week with exceptions for prisoners with health care conditions and other conflicting programming schedules. Some prisoners earn just 10 cents an hour for their work.“These are low-level worker inmates that work in the communities around the county itself, I would imagine?" Gowan asked.“Yes. The department does more than just incarcerate folks,” Shinn replied. “There are services that this department provides to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can't be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents.”..The state currently contracts with The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies, to run Florence West, a minimum security prison that can hold up to 750 people...Rep. John Kavanagh said to get companies interested in bidding for the contract, it was necessary to provide a profit motive.“You have to guarantee that they're going to have people there, and they're going to have a profit that they make, they're going to have income,” Kavanagh said. “No one's going to enter into a contract when you can't guarantee the income that they expect. That's kind of based on basic business.”..After more questioning from Butler, Shinn confirmed there were currently more than 5,000 empty beds in the Arizona prison system state-wide...When Butler asked “Why aren’t we closing more prisons?” her line of questioning was halted by committee leadership for being outside the scope of discussion...An Arizona Republic investigation found that Arizona lawmakers invested more in private prisons after record-high campaign contributions from the industry in recent years.
The embedded image is from the movie "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," via Film Forum.
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Growth industry [prison populations]
Slave labor is still slave labor. And capitalist theory would suggest that any market that requires slave labor to exist should go out of business.
ReplyDeleteAnd capitalist theory would suggest that any market that requires slave labor to exist should go out of business
DeleteCapitalist theory suggest no such thing. Capitalist theory says that if you can make a buck, that's good.
The stock exchange in was invented in Amsterdam to finance the VOC (Dutch East-India Company) trading across the world. That trade started with nutmeg. The WIC (Dutch West-India Company) was founded as a mixed commercial-government agency to handle slave trade across the Atlantic. And it turned pretty much into a government-backed piracy company.
Capitalism has no morality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market#History
The worst thing is that the people defending this system do not realize what monsters they are and that they are working in a system designed to criminalize people because other people do not want to pay taxes.
ReplyDeleteSo much for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness....
I read somewhere, several years ago, that 40% of the office furniture sold in America was made in prison workshops. I wonder how many of us are tangentially participatig in this modern form of exploitation without realizing it.
ReplyDelete'Greatest country in the world' .... they say, but I reckon not, even if you are white and well off.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if you never disobey any of the rules made for the common people it is the land of the free.
Lobbying as a form of government ? He with the biggest hand outs gets to make the rules ? Hardly 'for the people' is it.
And my little country is starting to ape the USA.
Might as well put me in jail now, I jay walk all the time.
As wealth inequality worsens in the US, what does society do with all the “losers.” One thing you can do is to absorb a fraction in an ever more bloated prison system and that’s what we’ve done.
ReplyDeleteIn my state (CA), there are more and more homeless people as a result of a housing crisis, which is really just another way of saying we more poorly distribute housing as the rich get richer and those at the other end of the spectrum are lucky to have a tarp and a sleeping bag.
In this same prison vein, there are many in my community enthusiastic about shoving more of the homeless into incarceration, of various sorts, and totally unwilling to consider how we got here; that is, especially since 1980, when we started down the road to Reaganomics hell.
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ReplyDeleteBut at the heart of the matter: "When Butler asked 'Why aren’t we closing more prisons?' her line of questioning was halted by committee leadership for being outside the scope of discussion..."
ReplyDelete