Author: Noah Berman / Source: did you know?
If you’ve never heard of the prison-industrial complex, you aren’t the only one. The term comes from the more famous 50s-era jargon “military-industrial complex”, and it refers to how the growth of the United States’ prison population has deep roots in corporate profit-making.
Since this isn’t as far out in the public eye as perhaps it should be, we thought we’d devote a little bit of metaphorical ink to exploring the ways people turn a profit off of imprisoning convicts and detainees – by contracting to contain and care for prisoners and utilizing their labor – and the roots of the practice.
The origins of modern convict labor go all the way back to the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which finally banned slavery. The exact words of the amendment are:
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.
Right smack in the middle there is a big loophole – if you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be forced into labor. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, this loophole was immediately put to use. Slave states passed laws that targeted recently-freed slaves, put them in jail (often without evidence of their supposed misdeeds), and leased their labor out to private companies and individuals. The practice was called ‘convict leasing’, and it allowed state governments to add huge sums to their coffers – in 1898, nearly 75% of Alabama’s state revenue came…
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