US prisoners are being assigned dangerous jobs

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Recently, I read “US prisoners are being assigned dangerous jobs. But what happens if they are hurt or killed?“¹ by AP journalists Margie Mason and Robin McDowell (2024), and while I was already well aware that the privatized prison industry in this country was little more than a deplorable smokescreen to justify slavery via the 13th Amendment², this article disturbed me in a way I’m not sure I can properly articulate.

If you read one thing this week, let it be this article.

And then, please think about the implications regarding what ICE is doing and the fact that the only thing between you and becoming a literal slave is being convicted of a crime.

1. There is another article by the same authors that gives additional detail into the prison labor force: “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands”. ↩︎
2. It has always been easy to justify any and all manner of horrific atrocities against “unpersons” such as black people, houseless people, immigrants, refugees, transgender people, etc. but in particular, prisoners are vulnerable to this because they are being “punished” for a “crime”, so it’s easy to write them off as having deserved whatever happens to them. The peculiar institution of our prison system exploits this in order to use slave labor right here on US soil, more than a century after it was supposedly “abolished”. ↩︎