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June 18, 2013
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 Locking Down an American WorkforcePosted on Apr 19, 2012
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (Page 4) Convict Leasing Rises Again “Now,” means our second Gilded Age and its aftermath. In these years, the system of leasing out convicts to private enterprise was reborn. This was a perverse triumph for the law of supply and demand in an era infatuated with the charms of the free market. On the supply side, the U.S. holds captive 25% of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people. It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president. As for the demand for labor, since the 1970s American industrial corporations have found it increasingly unprofitable to invest in domestic production. Instead, they have sought out the hundreds of millions of people abroad who are willing to, or can be pressed into, working for far less than American workers. As a consequence, those back home—disproportionately African-American workers—who found themselves living in economic exile, scrabbling to get by, began showing up in similarly disproportionate numbers in the country’s rapidly expanding prison archipelago. It didn’t take long for corporate America to come to view this as another potential foreign country, full of cheap and subservient labor—and better yet, close by. What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states. And here’s the ultimate irony: our ancestors found convict labor obnoxious in part because it seemed to prefigure a new and more universal form of enslavement. Could its rebirth foreshadow a future ever more unnervingly like those past nightmares? Advertisement What accounts for that peculiarly narrow view of recovery, however, is that the general costs of doing business are falling off a cliff as the economy eats itself alive. The recovery being celebrated owes thanks to local, state, and Federal austerity budgets, the starving of the social welfare system and public services, rampant anti-union campaigns in the public and private sector, the spread of sweatshop labor, the coercion of desperate unemployed or underemployed workers to accept lower wages, part-time work, and temporary work, as well as the relinquishing of healthcare benefits and a financially secure retirement—in short, to surrender the hope that is supposed to come with the American franchise. Such a recovery, resting on the stripping away of the hard won material and cultural achievements of the past century, suggests a new world in which the prison-labor archipelago could indeed become a vast gulag of the downwardly mobile. Steve Fraser is editor-at-large of New Labor Forum, co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books), and a TomDispatch regular. He is, most recently, the author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He teaches history at Columbia University. Joshua B. Freeman, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at Queens College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is affiliated with its Joseph S. Murphy Labor Institute. His forthcoming book, American Empire, will be the final volume of the Penguin History of the United States. [Further Reading: For those interested in learning more about the history of prison labor and the convict-leasing system, we highly recommend three books that were crucial to us in writing this essay: Rebecca M. McLennan’s The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941, Alex Lichtenstein’s Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, and Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.] This piece is an adaptation of an “In the Rearview Mirror” column that will be published in a forthcoming issue of the magazine New Labor Forum. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.
Copyright 2012 Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
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By heterochromatic, April 24, 2012 at 3:56 pm Link to this comment
Griffith—- sorry that you think that citing the 13th Amendment is indicative of a
disconnect from reality….....
Report thismight be some confusion on your part.
By heterochromatic, April 24, 2012 at 3:54 pm Link to this comment
I thought the agenda has always been pretty transparent….... America views the
Report thissale and usage of street drugs as a not a good thing, and believes that criminal
penalties for sales is a method of discouraging people from engaging in those
sales.
By Salome, April 24, 2012 at 1:46 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
So now the agenda for locking up so many people for drug crimes becomes transparent.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 24, 2012 at 11:16 am Link to this comment
I’m saying that felons are indeed human and that terrorists are human too.
criminals are human and some of them have forfeited their rights to be considered
a decent human deserving decent treatment. some have shown themselves to be
but barely human and some have not.
Report thisall they have in common is that they’ve lost their claim to freedom and a full
measure of rights and protections.
By vector56, April 24, 2012 at 9:09 am Link to this comment
So, you are saying those who commit crimes are still human and their humanity should be considered regardless of what they have done?
Might one even go so far as to extend these basic human rights to the “New N*ggers”, Terrorist?
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 24, 2012 at 7:54 am Link to this comment
involuntary slavery for those that aren’t human seems to be pretty well accepted in
the world, vec…..using the labor of animals was and is common and usually
accepted .
if you’re trying to get me to me accept that involuntary servitude for felons means
that I view felons as less than human, I’m not going along with that one.
crime is all too human ...and requiring labor of criminals is not due to viewing
Report thisthem as non-human.
By vector56, April 24, 2012 at 6:34 am Link to this comment
“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. “
Ok, I get it; but this tells me that as long as “slavery” is (was) legal and it is being done to those you see as less than human you would support it?
heterochromatic; you would have fit right into the Confederacy.
Report thisBy Marian Griffith, April 24, 2012 at 1:36 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
@Heterochromatic
—(Re: Not paying prisoners for their forced labour would make them slaves) vec—- yes, it would be….and that’s not a problem.—-
And the fact that you can not see a problem here points out a complete disconnect between you and morality.
Since I have no right to tell you to leave, I do the next best thing and tell you I really do not want to know you or your opinions any more, seeing that to me they have no redeeming qualities.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 23, 2012 at 5:56 pm Link to this comment
vec—- yes, it would be….and that’s not a problem. being a convicted felon puts
people in a position where they’ve pissed way most of their rights.
Report thisgive a glance to the 13th Amendment for a refresher about that.
By vector56, April 23, 2012 at 5:43 pm Link to this comment
“there’s little
reason to pay imprisoned felons for required labor and thw proceeds of their labor
should be applied to the cost of the penal justice system, not to for-profit
enterprises. “
heterochromatic;
I agree that Prison should remain Public, but not paying them for their labor would be “slavery”.
Report thisBy Jeff N., April 20, 2012 at 1:19 pm Link to this comment
Bunch of troglodytes.
Report thisBy heterochromatic, April 20, 2012 at 1:03 pm Link to this comment
prisons should not be operated as other than public institutions and there’s little
Report thisreason to pay imprisoned felons for required labor and thw proceeds of their labor
should be applied to the cost of the penal justice system, not to for-profit
enterprises.
By prisnersdilema, April 20, 2012 at 9:31 am Link to this comment
Chimerika, has long ago become, a Hobbesian society where the lives of the 99%, fulfill
at least 2 thirds of Thomas Hobbs description of life as nasty, brutish and short.
Though lives may be longer, it is doubtful they are enjoyable on a diet of soda, cheap
beer, prescription medications sold illegally by drug dealers, and pornograpic violent
entertainment. That in itself is part of the torment, you must endure by living in
Chimerica.
You cannot live in freedom, when those that control your government believe in slavery.
Report thisBy tussah, April 20, 2012 at 9:27 am Link to this comment
WOW, indeed, gerard…comprehensive education I never received.
There is never any rest from the exploitative nature of some rapacious humans.
Report thisBy Jim Yell, April 20, 2012 at 6:53 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
As stories start leaking into the press about corporations conspiring with Judges to sentence people to incarceration solely to keep up the bottom line of private prisons, the question should be “why are for profit prison even allowed?” In a country with our history of Slave Labor we should be very sensitive to allowing such unfair use of authority and besides once again the privatization mantra turns out to be a fraud. It was in healthcare which has created a system where even fairly affluent people can not afford to pay medical costs and for the vast majority of American Workers health care is a bad joke.
Well maybe these jackasses will over play their hand and we will finally go back to “America” instead of head long into opression.
Report thisBy SoTexGuy, April 20, 2012 at 4:48 am Link to this comment
A free thinking friend of mine predicted the boom in the inmate populations and private prisons about 30 years ago.. Nuts, I told him! He’s a very wealthy man now! who hasn’t had to work for the last dozen years.
He also predicted that the next stage, after there are too many convicts to contain at any price that society can afford, will be the wealthy and the corporations buying people’s sentences.. In this way they gain the convict’s service for all or some portion of their sentence.. like old time debt slaves, or just slaves.
Him having been so entirely right in the first instance makes me think he may well be right about the next phase.
Report thisBy rtb61, April 19, 2012 at 9:48 pm Link to this comment
So how long will it be until you will be able to long term lease them for their term of imprisonment ie buy them for five or ten years.
Report thisBe able to directly enforce physical punishment, engage in legal bondage and sadism.
Will women and children also be up for sale.
USA slavery it’s build into them, they always return to it and they can never ever be trusted.
This is the way they treat their own and you already know they treat foreigners far worse best keep them as far away as possible.
By gerard, April 19, 2012 at 8:50 pm Link to this comment
Wow! A very comprehensive, tough, clear-headed article. I wonder how many people experienced my same lack of education. So help me God, the only aspect of this horrific problem that I ever heard of in any coherent way—in any classroom—was southern slavery associated with the Civil War and the isolation, neglect and betrayal of indigenous tribes. I heard some family discussions of steal and coal mine strikes, abuses, lock-outs, and such, too occasionally “taught”—sort of—but never the whole picture as this article shows.
Report thisOne encouraging thing, though: Some reforms that required hundreds and thousands of concerted efforts did improve the overall situations here and there, somewhat, and for a time—which proves that strong efforts over time, by people who are consecrated to a cause can effect good results.
Thank you so much for this article. It points in the direction where we ourselves must go—and soon.