Latest / Stuff You Should Know / The Brutal History of Prison Labor

Transcript

The Brutal History of Prison Labor · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, we are partnering up with a Cooperative for
0:03
Speaker 1: Education once again to help raise money for their RISE
0:06
Speaker 1: Youth Development program which sends students to school in Guatemala
0:10
Speaker 1: and they break the cycle of poverty through education.
0:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, kids who otherwise would not have gotten an education
0:16
Speaker 2: get a world class one thanks to co ED, thanks
0:18
Speaker 2: to your donations and so far in our history with
0:21
Speaker 2: co ED, which dates back all the way to two
0:23
Speaker 2: thousand and nine, Stuff you Should Know listeners have given
0:26
Speaker 2: one point four million dollars in donations and helped one
0:29
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy two different RISE students who are sponsored
0:32
Speaker 2: directly by Stuff you Should Know fans. So we're asking
0:36
Speaker 2: you guys to do it again. And if you go
0:38
Speaker 2: to Cooperative for Education dot org and give today as
0:42
Speaker 2: little as twenty dollars to support a RISE student, you
0:45
Speaker 2: will be entered into a raffle to be picked to
0:49
Speaker 2: hang out with us virtually in January.
0:52
Speaker 1: That's right. Set up a recurring gift of twenty dollars
0:54
Speaker 1: a month by December nineteenth, and you can win that
0:57
Speaker 1: raffle and hang out with us in a zoom call.
1:00
Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun. We do it every year
1:01
Speaker 1: and it's a great organization to support.
1:03
Speaker 2: So go to Cooperative for Education dot org slash sysk
1:07
Speaker 2: and you'll get all the info you need. And thank you.
1:13
Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
1:22
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
1:25
Speaker 2: Chuck and it's just us. Jerry's on leave right now.
1:28
Speaker 2: She's having a little R and R living it up
1:31
Speaker 2: in the South Seas, falling in love, spending a lot
1:36
Speaker 2: of time on beach writing people's names in the sand
1:40
Speaker 2: for money. Wow, I assume that's what she's doing. Oh okay,
1:47
Speaker 2: she might also just be in New York.
1:48
Speaker 1: It's one of the two, right, unless she could ride
1:52
Speaker 1: on a beach there, Jones beach. I guess, so sure,
1:54
Speaker 1: Coney Island.
1:56
Speaker 2: I guess we should stop all the joking around the
1:58
Speaker 2: horse and around Chuck. This is a very serious episode,
2:01
Speaker 2: so let's just end that now.
2:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, what better to chat about over what's
2:07
Speaker 1: probably gonna end up being the holiday season when this
2:09
Speaker 1: is released than hard labor at prisons in that history?
2:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I mean, if you think about prison labor,
2:17
Speaker 2: it's bad enough as it is, but when you really
2:20
Speaker 2: start to get into the nuts and bolts of it,
2:22
Speaker 2: and all the loopholes that are abused, and all of
2:26
Speaker 2: the ways that prisoners are actually treated in exchange for
2:30
Speaker 2: the labor. It's even worse than you would think, it
2:33
Speaker 2: turns out.
2:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the good news, right.
2:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, And we'll get into the bad news for sure.
2:40
Speaker 2: But the thing that I was a little surprised about
2:43
Speaker 2: from the outside is that I would have thought that
2:45
Speaker 2: this was ancient, like the Sumerians doing stuff like this,
2:50
Speaker 2: And it turns out no Sumerians forward all the way
2:55
Speaker 2: into the Enlightenment period in Europe, just killed people. They
2:59
Speaker 2: hung you, or they cut your hand off, or put
3:01
Speaker 2: you in the stocks. Maybe the stocks were a non
3:04
Speaker 2: lethal form of punishment, and you would be ridiculed by
3:08
Speaker 2: your neighbors. And then a guy named Thomas Moore wrote
3:12
Speaker 2: a book called Utopia, and he said, there's a better
3:14
Speaker 2: way people, There's an alternative to just killing people or
3:17
Speaker 2: cutting off their hands. What if we just put them
3:21
Speaker 2: to work. There's all sorts of benefits and upsides to this.
3:25
Speaker 2: And they said, well, what are they? Thomas Moore, he said,
3:27
Speaker 2: let me tell you.
3:28
Speaker 1: I'm glad you asked, Yeah, he basically, I mean and
3:31
Speaker 1: we'll see this over and over again. The you know,
3:34
Speaker 1: the point has sort of always been one. It can
3:39
Speaker 1: or really threefold. One, it can deter people from committing
3:42
Speaker 1: crime if they see somebody manual laboring, yeah, for probably
3:46
Speaker 1: no money or very little money these days. Right. The
3:49
Speaker 1: second is it can you know, help rehabilitate that person
3:53
Speaker 1: and make them, you know, make them think about what
3:55
Speaker 1: they've done basically, Yeah. And then the most obvious one
4:00
Speaker 1: is we can get them to do stuff for us
4:03
Speaker 1: for nothing.
4:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like we can really use that labor. Especially if
4:06
Speaker 2: you put a bunch of people together and make them
4:09
Speaker 2: work for free, you can get a lot of stuff done.
4:12
Speaker 2: And that is a fairly new form of punishment. It
4:16
Speaker 2: wasn't like immediately adopted after Thomas Moore wrote Utopia. He
4:19
Speaker 2: wrote it in the sixteenth century. Even into the American
4:24
Speaker 2: Revolution and beyond, there was not like a lot of
4:29
Speaker 2: government enforced punishment using prison labor. They were still crazy
4:35
Speaker 2: for the stocks. But there were things regarding the colonies
4:40
Speaker 2: that did have to do with punishment that did result
4:43
Speaker 2: in your labor. And that would be if you got
4:44
Speaker 2: into trouble, saying in England you would be sentenced to
4:47
Speaker 2: transportation either Australia or the United States, maybe even Canada
4:52
Speaker 2: if you were lucky, and I think sixty thousand people
4:56
Speaker 2: before the American Revolution while America was British colonies or
5:00
Speaker 2: British colonies were sentenced to transportation and showed up there
5:04
Speaker 2: and said, Okay, what do you want me to do?
5:05
Speaker 2: I'm here to work.
5:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I doubt if they said that. They were
5:09
Speaker 1: probably more told that, but they were known as the
5:11
Speaker 1: King's passengers, and they you know, the colonies, you know,
5:15
Speaker 1: the people in the colonies, they weren't that wild about this.
5:18
Speaker 1: They were worried about, you know, sending convicted criminals there, obviously,
5:21
Speaker 1: but most of these criminals were you know, maybe not
5:25
Speaker 1: petty crimes, but pretty minor crimes, maybe theft, maybe vagrancy,
5:31
Speaker 1: you know, depending on what the laws were, and whatever
5:34
Speaker 1: weird English village you lived, you might have committed a
5:36
Speaker 1: crime against one of those. But they weren't sending over
5:39
Speaker 1: generally to the colonies. That is like the worst of
5:43
Speaker 1: the worst. Right, if you were a plantation owner or
5:46
Speaker 1: if you were an employer that maybe was near a prison,
5:50
Speaker 1: you were pretty psyched because that was very cheap, meaning
5:54
Speaker 1: usually free labor. Compared to what it cost to you know,
5:58
Speaker 1: trade in the slaved African market.
6:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we should say this early indentured servitude is
6:06
Speaker 2: what they called it if it was aimed at white
6:10
Speaker 2: people exclusively in the colonies and then later on the
6:13
Speaker 2: early United States, because if the government intervened in a
6:18
Speaker 2: plantation owner enslaved person's dynamic, then and they removed the
6:25
Speaker 2: enslaved person and put them in jail, the poor white
6:29
Speaker 2: plantation owner was the one suffering there, he lost the laborer.
6:32
Speaker 2: So it was left entirely to the plantation owners to
6:36
Speaker 2: basically keep their slaves punish their slaves essentially, And if
6:41
Speaker 2: you've ever have you ever seen twelve years of slave yet.
6:45
Speaker 1: That still shamefully cannot bring myself to see it.
6:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I get it. I totally understand your reticence.
6:50
Speaker 2: But it's the way that plantation owners punished slaves is
6:56
Speaker 2: depicted throughout in really brutal, honest fashion, and it's it
7:00
Speaker 2: really drives home like what it was like. But you
7:02
Speaker 2: were left up to the guy that owned you legally
7:07
Speaker 2: doling out punishment based on his whim. Essentially, the state
7:11
Speaker 2: would not intervene. It was just strictly up to white
7:13
Speaker 2: people or it was just strictly directed at white people
7:16
Speaker 2: at first.
7:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know what, that's the kind of movie
7:19
Speaker 1: that you got to watch that when it comes out
7:22
Speaker 1: and when it's in the zeitgeist, because that's never the
7:26
Speaker 1: movie when you're like, what do I want to watch tonight?
7:29
Speaker 1: Like Gloomy set several years later, it's just not going
7:31
Speaker 1: to happen, So I need to just you know, it's
7:35
Speaker 1: like a history lesson, So I need to watch it.
7:37
Speaker 1: And I've heard it's it's good, like in an upsetting way,
7:39
Speaker 1: but like a well made film.
7:40
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely. Everybody does an amazing job. And look
7:43
Speaker 2: at it like a classic novel that you just have
7:46
Speaker 2: to read before you die, because I think that'll be
7:48
Speaker 2: a dad approach to it.
7:50
Speaker 1: You know what, when I start Moby Dick finally, I'll
7:53
Speaker 1: watch Twelve Years of Slave and I'll just I'll just
7:56
Speaker 1: do both at the same time.
7:58
Speaker 2: I remember we talked about reading Mobi Dick and a
8:01
Speaker 2: couple of people wrote in and they're like, Josh, do
8:03
Speaker 2: not waste your time. It is not worth reading. And
8:06
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna go with their interpretation. Oh wow, I
8:09
Speaker 2: like Bartleby the Scrivener, but I'm not sure I could
8:11
Speaker 2: take hundreds and hundreds of pages of that writing.
8:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, you know, our mutual friend in front of
8:18
Speaker 1: the show, Joey cr is gonna be very upset to
8:20
Speaker 1: hear that.
8:20
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Joey.
8:23
Speaker 1: So as far as these laborers, ninety percent of the
8:26
Speaker 1: ones that were of those sixty thousand that were sent
8:28
Speaker 1: to the States, which is I'm surprised it was, you know,
8:31
Speaker 1: ninety percent, they ended up kind of in two places,
8:33
Speaker 1: Maryland Virginia, probably working in you know, industry like you know,
8:38
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution type stuff, or on the farm, so
8:41
Speaker 1: like tobacco farming obviously in Virginia. And it was terrible work.
8:45
Speaker 1: It was really brutal. You know, you're talking maybe seven
8:50
Speaker 1: to fourteen years as your sentence. After your sentence, maybe
8:54
Speaker 1: you go back to England. Maybe you have a shot
8:56
Speaker 1: at a free life in the New Colonies. But you know,
9:01
Speaker 1: just like getting out of prison these days, it's a
9:03
Speaker 1: it's not an easy transition to make.
9:05
Speaker 2: Right. The ones that went back to England were like,
9:08
Speaker 2: I really missed the tasteless cuisine of home.
9:10
Speaker 1: Right, so back then, maybe sure, it's come a long way.
9:15
Speaker 2: So one of the it has for sure. One of
9:17
Speaker 2: the other things that had to evolve for prison labor
9:21
Speaker 2: to become an actual thing in the United States was
9:23
Speaker 2: prisons themselves. Like at the same time when they were
9:26
Speaker 2: still crazy about the stocks and a dentured servitude, like
9:30
Speaker 2: you had jails, you didn't have prisons, and a jail
9:32
Speaker 2: was just basically where they kept you while you were
9:34
Speaker 2: awaiting trial or sentencing or something like that. And then
9:37
Speaker 2: sure you left the jail. The idea of going to
9:41
Speaker 2: a place to be held as a punishment in and
9:43
Speaker 2: of itself, that is prisons that came later on after
9:48
Speaker 2: the American Revolution. I think it was the Quakers that
9:51
Speaker 2: came up with the idea of the penitentiary, which is
9:53
Speaker 2: meant to give you quiet time to reflect on what
9:56
Speaker 2: terrible things you've done and hopefully find God and come
9:59
Speaker 2: out bit a better person. Of course, it's not how
10:02
Speaker 2: it worked out, but very quickly after penitentiaries became a thing,
10:07
Speaker 2: prison labor became a thing. In early short order, actually
10:11
Speaker 2: like decades maybe.
10:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I never thought about the root word penitent
10:15
Speaker 1: for penitentiaries. It was sort of one of those things
10:18
Speaker 1: where I was today years old, you know.
10:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, But I mean, like you, yeah, it's just so
10:22
Speaker 2: easy to look right past it. It's its own thing,
10:25
Speaker 2: yeah for sure.
10:26
Speaker 1: But yeah, redemptive suffering is what they called it. And
10:29
Speaker 1: that was a big part of being in prison and
10:32
Speaker 1: committing well, not committing to hardly like being committed too
10:35
Speaker 1: hard labor. Auburn Prison in New York was one of
10:39
Speaker 1: the sort of leading examples that set the way forward
10:43
Speaker 1: for what was to become the norm where private businesses
10:46
Speaker 1: would lease prison buildings along with the prisoners and say, hey,
10:52
Speaker 1: we're just gonna You've got this big building over here,
10:54
Speaker 1: You've got lots of free labor. I'm going to bring
10:55
Speaker 1: my machinery into here, and all of a sudden, the
10:58
Speaker 1: prison is part prison in part you know, industrial plant
11:01
Speaker 1: for whatever company worked out whatever deal. And that proved,
11:06
Speaker 1: you know, provided a real model moving forward. I think Auburn,
11:09
Speaker 1: they the prisoners of Auburn ended up building Sing Sing.
11:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they use them for that as well. And
11:18
Speaker 2: that I think Sing Sing opened in eighteen twenty eight.
11:21
Speaker 2: So this is going on, like if prisons became a
11:23
Speaker 2: thing around the time of the American Revolution, like this, this,
11:27
Speaker 2: like I said, my point, has proven this transition happened quickly. Yeah,
11:31
Speaker 2: so by the time the Civil War came around, like this,
11:34
Speaker 2: it's called the Northern model or the Auburn prison model,
11:37
Speaker 2: where you can rent a building, rent the inmates, and
11:40
Speaker 2: then set up shop there. That's what prison labor looked like,
11:43
Speaker 2: or else you were working for the prison, like say,
11:45
Speaker 2: building other prisons. That's what the North was doing. In
11:49
Speaker 2: the South, they were still quite hung up on the
11:53
Speaker 2: idea of chattel slavery and h owning a person and
11:57
Speaker 2: making them work until they died. Essentially that that was
12:02
Speaker 2: something that was really ingrained in the culture and was
12:04
Speaker 2: not an easy thing to give up despite having lost
12:07
Speaker 2: the Civil War and the thirteenth Amendment being passed. And
12:11
Speaker 2: I know you've seen thirteenth the Avia de Verne documentary.
12:15
Speaker 1: I have seen that.
12:16
Speaker 2: That's a great one too. That's one of those like
12:18
Speaker 2: life changing, perspective changing, eye opening type documentaries.
12:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and even if I hadn't seen it, I would
12:25
Speaker 1: I would lie to your face right now, okay, and
12:28
Speaker 1: all of our listeners, because there's no way you're gonna
12:30
Speaker 1: double shame me.
12:31
Speaker 2: Well, how about this if you but I did see it,
12:32
Speaker 2: If you, well, if you are lying right now and
12:35
Speaker 2: you go look for it. Do not be infused by
12:37
Speaker 2: the documentary Thirteenth that came out in twenty twenty five, Yeah,
12:41
Speaker 2: which was about the Yeah, it's about the high pressure
12:43
Speaker 2: student exams in India.
12:45
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure that's upsetting too.
12:48
Speaker 2: I'm sure, But the thirteenth Amendment is kind of what
12:51
Speaker 2: we're talking about here, and that's not only abolished slavery.
12:55
Speaker 2: It abolished involuntary servitude of all kinds except one tiny provision,
13:01
Speaker 2: one little loophole that said that if you're a convicted prisoner,
13:05
Speaker 2: you can be punished with slave labor. That's okay. And
13:09
Speaker 2: not only was it okay, it's enshrined in the Constitution
13:13
Speaker 2: that slave labor is legal in prisons.
13:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, it's one of those things where
13:20
Speaker 1: it's hard to go back and imagine what the original
13:22
Speaker 1: framers intended, But I think most people agree that they
13:25
Speaker 1: didn't intend to just have you know, enslavement and another
13:29
Speaker 1: name basically, whereas that's basically what happened for a long
13:33
Speaker 1: long time, you know, through that, through the loophole, and
13:37
Speaker 1: you know, you mentioned loopholes in the beginning. There's been
13:38
Speaker 1: a lot of loopholes over the year, and anytime there's
13:40
Speaker 1: a loophole, somebody's gonna exploit it, like for greedy purposes.
13:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, free labor. I saw that. The reason that they
13:47
Speaker 2: included it in that amendment was because it was just
13:50
Speaker 2: such a no brainer that you would want the ability
13:54
Speaker 2: to to to perform hard labor rather than just being
13:58
Speaker 2: punished in other ways. That it was just an accepted
14:01
Speaker 2: thing that, Yeah, the loophole wasn't meant to be there.
14:04
Speaker 2: But in the South, almost immediately they put that to use.
14:09
Speaker 2: We did an episode on the Black Codes back in
14:11
Speaker 2: January of twenty twenty two. Yeah, another very eye opening topic,
14:15
Speaker 2: and those only lasted like a year or two. And
14:17
Speaker 2: it was basically they criminalized being a free black person
14:20
Speaker 2: in the South. Yeah, And so they could pick you
14:23
Speaker 2: up and they could arrest you with something. If you
14:25
Speaker 2: couldn't prove on the spot that, say, you had a job,
14:28
Speaker 2: you'd be arrested for vagrancy. You'd be taken to jail,
14:31
Speaker 2: and then you could be leased out as a slave
14:34
Speaker 2: to a local plantation owner doing the work you were
14:37
Speaker 2: doing before you were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Legally,
14:40
Speaker 2: because of that loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment.
14:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe to the same plantation where you were previously held, right, Yeah,
14:48
Speaker 1: a lot of times. That's a great episode. People should
14:51
Speaker 1: go back and listen to that creed that you know,
14:54
Speaker 1: the black codes went away with the Civil Rights Act
14:56
Speaker 1: of eighteen sixty six and the Fourteenth Amendment, which is
15:00
Speaker 1: ratified in eighteen sixty eight, made equal rights and protections.
15:04
Speaker 1: You know, you know the law everywhere basically, but you know,
15:07
Speaker 1: there were still ways to make things happen, especially in
15:11
Speaker 1: the South, and especially as it turns out shamefully, in Georgia.
15:15
Speaker 1: Georgia kind of led the way in eighteen sixty eight.
15:18
Speaker 1: That was a provisional governor named Thomas Ruger, and he
15:22
Speaker 1: leased like this is when the kind of the big
15:26
Speaker 1: sort of prisoner trade started, where they were leasing prisoners
15:30
Speaker 1: to different states, kind of back and forth like hey,
15:32
Speaker 1: you got to you've got a farm in your state
15:35
Speaker 1: that needs like a crop tended to, Well, let me
15:38
Speaker 1: lease you some prisoners from our state. And Georgia led
15:41
Speaker 1: the way early on with one hundred black prisoners being
15:45
Speaker 1: leased to William Fort of the Georgia and Alabama Railroad
15:49
Speaker 1: for twenty five hundred bucks, so twenty five twenty five
15:53
Speaker 1: dollars a prisoner. Right, But here's the thing, it's like, hey,
15:58
Speaker 1: you're paying us to lead these prisoners to you, So
16:01
Speaker 1: now not only are we getting money for that, but
16:04
Speaker 1: now they're your responsibility. But your responsibility didn't really mean anything.
16:09
Speaker 1: Like sixteen of those prisoners died in the first year.
16:11
Speaker 1: And as you'll see, a story that you know is
16:13
Speaker 1: going to be repeated over and over, that was you know,
16:16
Speaker 1: one of the biggest problems with all of this is
16:18
Speaker 1: like basic medical care was not provided, and decent food
16:23
Speaker 1: and certainly, like you know, somebody was sick, they would
16:28
Speaker 1: just let them die basically, right.
16:30
Speaker 2: And that still happens today, I mean not quite to
16:33
Speaker 2: that dramatic a degree, but when people die in custody
16:36
Speaker 2: in prison, there's not a lot the prison's held accountable for.
16:41
Speaker 2: So that's that's essentially a long standing thing in the
16:43
Speaker 2: United States. People like prisoners dying even though they haven't
16:47
Speaker 2: been sentenced to death. So I think you said that
16:50
Speaker 2: Georgia was making some pretty good money off of this.
16:53
Speaker 2: Starting in the eighteen sixties, I read this started to
16:57
Speaker 2: like other states were like, oh h that's a really
16:59
Speaker 2: good idea. By eighteen ninety eight, convict leasing made up
17:04
Speaker 2: seventy three percent of Alabama state revenue. Wow, yeah, which
17:10
Speaker 2: is really saying something.
17:11
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's a staggering stat right.
17:14
Speaker 2: And then when reconstruction and did the federal government just
17:17
Speaker 2: basically said, hey, we really just want to be on
17:19
Speaker 2: good terms with the Southern elite against so we're just
17:22
Speaker 2: going to leave you on your own and withdrew from
17:25
Speaker 2: the South. Black people were in really terrible positions, really
17:30
Speaker 2: vulnerable positions, and at that time, prison labor stepped up.
17:35
Speaker 2: Incarcerations stepped up, but prison labor also did it as well,
17:39
Speaker 2: and it was nothing compared to what you would the
17:42
Speaker 2: work you would be put to in the North. It
17:44
Speaker 2: was essentially slavery all over again. But again this time
17:50
Speaker 2: the Fed the Union wasn't going to come down and
17:53
Speaker 2: push anybody around at the end of a bayonet, because
17:55
Speaker 2: this was all agreed upon in the thirteenth Amendment.
17:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. Up North, if you were working prison labor, you
18:02
Speaker 1: might work an eight or nine hour day. In the
18:05
Speaker 1: South that was routinely twelve to sixteen hours or just
18:08
Speaker 1: however long they felt like you needed to work to
18:10
Speaker 1: get whatever job done. There's anecdotal evidence at least like
18:15
Speaker 1: during the cotton harvest, like before the cotton harvest, that
18:19
Speaker 1: the plantation owners would call up the sheriff and say, hey,
18:22
Speaker 1: why don't you make some more arrests. We need some guys.
18:25
Speaker 1: And you know, a lot of these pretextual arrests were
18:28
Speaker 1: happening where it was just like you know, they would
18:30
Speaker 1: just cook something up and arrest you and you have
18:33
Speaker 1: basically no rights and no representation. So it's just a
18:37
Speaker 1: way to stock the industry or the farm or the
18:40
Speaker 1: field with workers. Right.
18:43
Speaker 2: So that was like plantation owners local plantations. Like you said,
18:46
Speaker 2: you could have been a former slave who was arrested
18:49
Speaker 2: for something as stupid as mischief and put back to
18:52
Speaker 2: work on that same plantation essentially as a slave. They
18:55
Speaker 2: would also, like corporations got in on this as well,
18:57
Speaker 2: like you said the railroad. There was a company in
19:00
Speaker 2: Alabama called the Sloss Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in
19:05
Speaker 2: Jefferson County, Alabama. That's where their minds were. They had
19:09
Speaker 2: a ten percent death rate from the least convict labor
19:13
Speaker 2: that they got from the state. And there was a
19:16
Speaker 2: sugar company, the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugarland, Tennessee, which
19:20
Speaker 2: I guess is an appropriate place for.
19:22
Speaker 1: It to be where else.
19:24
Speaker 2: A lot of people died when Texas leased them every
19:27
Speaker 2: single state prisoner it had in eighteen seventy eight to
19:31
Speaker 2: help in the sugar fields. People were dying of things
19:35
Speaker 2: like malaria. Like you said, they weren't They weren't given
19:38
Speaker 2: any kind of medical care at all. They were fed
19:40
Speaker 2: just the minimum amount to keep them alive and have
19:44
Speaker 2: energy enough to work. And this is just par for
19:47
Speaker 2: the course in the South.
19:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I was bagging on Georgia because that's
19:52
Speaker 1: our home state or my home home state. But Louisiana
19:57
Speaker 1: has kind of from the beginning been one of certainly
20:00
Speaker 1: one of the worst defenders. In the eighteen seventies and eighties,
20:03
Speaker 1: they built the New Orleans specific railway with prison labor.
20:08
Speaker 1: About one hundred and forty people died, and when you
20:10
Speaker 1: look at some of the incarceration rates and especially incarceration
20:15
Speaker 1: rates for black males in the United States today, Louisiana
20:18
Speaker 1: leads the way and also with some of the worst
20:21
Speaker 1: you know, working conditions for forced labor.
20:24
Speaker 2: That's another thing too that you mentioned, like they built
20:26
Speaker 2: the railroad or say they mined something that was turned
20:30
Speaker 2: into a product that people use. They don't think about.
20:33
Speaker 2: I'm sure they didn't think like, oh, this railroad is
20:35
Speaker 2: really nice. The prisoners who built it really did a
20:38
Speaker 2: good job. That actually still carries on today. Like a
20:41
Speaker 2: lot of people don't realize that the stuff they're buying
20:45
Speaker 2: from a big box retailer was made somewhere down the
20:48
Speaker 2: line by a convict who was essentially leased out to
20:52
Speaker 2: that company to make those products. It still goes on today.
20:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, the chicken on your plate in your
20:59
Speaker 1: house might have come from a chicken farm that had
21:04
Speaker 1: and you know, these are people that are sort of
21:06
Speaker 1: the work release programs we're going to talk about later,
21:09
Speaker 1: where they leave the prison to go work for like
21:11
Speaker 1: a private industry, and a lot of times it might
21:13
Speaker 1: be like a chicken farm, or they may work at
21:15
Speaker 1: a D and B call center or something like that. So, yeah,
21:18
Speaker 1: the person you talked to on the phone might be
21:21
Speaker 1: you know, incarcerated.
21:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is quite surprising, But Chuck, don't call it
21:25
Speaker 2: convict releasing, even though essentially it's so much the same
21:29
Speaker 2: thing that basically just the people's clothes changed. That's what's
21:33
Speaker 2: going on today. Still Supposedly, in the nineteen thirties, thanks
21:38
Speaker 2: to the New Deal, America became enlightened enough that we
21:41
Speaker 2: moved on past convict fleecing. We didn't do that kind
21:44
Speaker 2: of stuff anymore, not at least a private industry. Prison
21:49
Speaker 2: labor working for the prison were working for the state.
21:52
Speaker 1: That was still aokay, yeah, I mean that was you know,
21:56
Speaker 1: sort of fifty years before that is when wage workers
22:01
Speaker 1: started complaining, Like prisoners obviously were complaining. Families might be complaining,
22:05
Speaker 1: but they're not going to get very far. But once
22:06
Speaker 1: wage workers got unions involved, they're like, hey, these you know,
22:11
Speaker 1: we want these jobs. We want to you know, make
22:14
Speaker 1: a little bit of money ourselves. And that's when it
22:18
Speaker 1: finally started to change a little bit. And I think
22:20
Speaker 1: eventually that led to that New Deal era law prohibiting
22:23
Speaker 1: interstate trade and prison made products. But in nineteen thirty four,
22:29
Speaker 1: the Federal Prison Industries was created. It's now known as Unicor,
22:33
Speaker 1: and that is, you know, still a big program at
22:35
Speaker 1: employees people that are incarcerated in our federal system, not
22:39
Speaker 1: state prisons again, and obviously not private prisons are federal.
22:43
Speaker 1: Are any federal prisons private? Or is that just state.
22:46
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know the answer that question.
22:49
Speaker 1: I know we never did one on the private prison industry,
22:51
Speaker 1: did we.
22:52
Speaker 2: No, and we really should.
22:53
Speaker 1: It's on the list.
22:54
Speaker 2: They do this too, and they like the idea of
22:57
Speaker 2: them leasing out convicts for before profit prison is just
23:01
Speaker 2: mind boggling.
23:02
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. But yeah, and with Unicorn, they're making
23:06
Speaker 1: things for the federal government like a lot of times,
23:08
Speaker 1: you know, military fatigues or furniture stuff like that.
23:12
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, And if you are a government agency,
23:15
Speaker 2: you have to go to Unicorp first to see if
23:17
Speaker 2: they have what you want, then you order for them then.
23:20
Speaker 2: And so even still today, like companies complain like these
23:24
Speaker 2: guys it's unfair competition. You know, they have like unpaid
23:28
Speaker 2: labor making these products so they can sell it for whatever.
23:32
Speaker 2: And the Feds are basically like, we can't hear you.
23:35
Speaker 1: Should we take a break?
23:36
Speaker 2: I think so?
23:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, since the Feds can't hear us, right,
23:39
Speaker 1: we might as well.
23:40
Speaker 2: We might as well.
23:41
Speaker 1: All right, we'll be right back with more on prison labor.
24:12
Speaker 2: Okay, So when we left off, like convict leasing was
24:17
Speaker 2: dead in the North thanks to labor unions. The South
24:22
Speaker 2: has long been considered kind of anti worker, so labor
24:25
Speaker 2: unions never really got a foothold here, so it took
24:27
Speaker 2: a little longer for convict leasing to go away. But
24:31
Speaker 2: again that doesn't mean that there was no such thing
24:34
Speaker 2: as prison labor. They just kind of directed them to
24:36
Speaker 2: state owned stuff. A really good example of this is
24:39
Speaker 2: a Parchment farm in Mississippi, part of Parchment State Penitentiary.
24:45
Speaker 2: It's a twenty thousand acre farm where in the early
24:49
Speaker 2: nineteen teens, with a ninety percent black prison population, prisoners
24:55
Speaker 2: were put to work on this farm. And one of
24:58
Speaker 2: the reasons that got so famous very quickly, in addition
25:03
Speaker 2: to just the scope of what was going on, was
25:06
Speaker 2: they used a trustee system they spelled it trustee is
25:09
Speaker 2: in tr us t Y where some of the worst,
25:12
Speaker 2: most violent convicted felons that were prisoners there were given
25:17
Speaker 2: rifles and said, you guys, make sure this other eighty
25:20
Speaker 2: percent of your fellow prisoners do the work the way
25:22
Speaker 2: we want them to.
25:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really interesting system, it really is.
25:28
Speaker 2: It seems risky, you know.
25:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wanted to look more. I'm going to look
25:32
Speaker 1: more into that just for my own edification, but because
25:34
Speaker 1: I'm curious that that dynamic is I don't know, it
25:38
Speaker 1: seems like a would create a really dodgy dynamic.
25:40
Speaker 2: It would, But it also reminded me of what is
25:44
Speaker 2: the Quentin Tarantino Antebellum Slavery movie. So, yeah, Jenko, remember
25:50
Speaker 2: he posed as a black slaver.
25:52
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
25:53
Speaker 2: That's kind of how I took it to kind of be.
25:56
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, I think you're probably right. Chain gangs is
26:01
Speaker 1: something that you know, you've seen in like movies and stuff.
26:05
Speaker 1: Like I was watching over other where Thal Again the
26:08
Speaker 1: other night, and there was you know, chain gang scenes
26:12
Speaker 1: in that. And that was another type of sort of
26:15
Speaker 1: very public penal labor because they were put in place
26:18
Speaker 1: to build roads in the South in the nineteen twenties.
26:22
Speaker 1: You know, hard laboring all day again in the South,
26:24
Speaker 1: out in the hot sun on that black top, tend
26:27
Speaker 1: to fifteen hours a day. But they were chained together.
26:30
Speaker 1: That's why they were called chain gangs. They were chained
26:32
Speaker 1: to their ankle, They stayed chained when they walked to
26:35
Speaker 1: the job, they stayed chained as they slept in their
26:37
Speaker 1: bunks that were close to one another. And again the
26:41
Speaker 1: conditions were abysmal, terrible food. They were beaten, they were tortured.
26:47
Speaker 1: I think there was this one investigation this was in
26:49
Speaker 1: a chain gang, but this was Tucker Farm in Arkansas,
26:52
Speaker 1: where they found that the staff stripped prisoners naked at
26:56
Speaker 1: the prison hospital and put electric you know, shocks to
26:59
Speaker 1: the testicles in penis. Women prisoners were also subjected to
27:05
Speaker 1: work in the fields. Not as much as men. They were,
27:08
Speaker 1: you know, the main labor force, but you know women
27:10
Speaker 1: were put to work as well.
27:13
Speaker 2: Have you ever read beloved Tony Morrison novel, I feel
27:18
Speaker 2: like I have to see Yes, you should read that too.
27:20
Speaker 2: If you have, no, I haven't read that. It's very good,
27:22
Speaker 2: but there's a it's it's mind bogglingly good actually, but
27:25
Speaker 2: it's there's a few scenes about a chain gang and
27:30
Speaker 2: just what it would have been like. One of the
27:33
Speaker 2: main characters spent time on a chain gang, and I mean,
27:37
Speaker 2: this is the way you said. It was brutal work.
27:39
Speaker 2: And they were building roads. Like a good example of
27:42
Speaker 2: what chain gangs did. If you were building a road,
27:45
Speaker 2: you were using like human labor to build roads. This
27:47
Speaker 2: was before they had machinery, right, like road building machinery,
27:51
Speaker 2: it just didn't exist, so you used human beings. To
27:53
Speaker 2: do this stuff. If you ran into say in Georgia,
27:56
Speaker 2: and you were building a state road, if you ran
27:58
Speaker 2: into a chunk of stone mountain that was popping up
28:02
Speaker 2: out of the ground where you wanted your road to go, well,
28:05
Speaker 2: you would just set a bunch of convicts to work
28:07
Speaker 2: on it with sledgehammers, and eventually they're gonna wear it
28:10
Speaker 2: down to nothing if you give them long enough and
28:11
Speaker 2: work them hard enough. That's what people did on chain gangs.
28:15
Speaker 2: That's just what life was like. And again, you were
28:18
Speaker 2: working outside, so you weren't protected in any way, shape
28:20
Speaker 2: or form. You were fed meagerly, like you were working
28:23
Speaker 2: as hard as anyone's ever worked in their life, with
28:28
Speaker 2: like the minimum amount of nutrition, the minimum amount of rest.
28:32
Speaker 2: And if you put all that together, especially if you
28:35
Speaker 2: think about it accumulating, it's a brutal, brutal form of
28:40
Speaker 2: prison labor.
28:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean, and it was a racist framework.
28:44
Speaker 1: I know, we're talking a lot about the racism involved.
28:47
Speaker 1: There were white labor camps and stuff like that of
28:50
Speaker 1: course too. You know, sometimes they look like Paul Newman even. Yeah,
28:56
Speaker 1: but it was very much a racist framework wherein the
29:00
Speaker 1: threat of violence, the threat of torture they felt was
29:04
Speaker 1: like a necessary component to you know, quote unquote keeping
29:07
Speaker 1: guys in line.
29:08
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of the other things, too, is there was
29:10
Speaker 2: a certain amount of usefulness to letting these chain gangs
29:15
Speaker 2: get these horrible reputations, because the reach of these things
29:19
Speaker 2: reached out beyond the inside of prisons into the outside world.
29:24
Speaker 2: Because if you were black and you were looking for
29:27
Speaker 2: a job, and you could be arrested for not having
29:30
Speaker 2: a job and put onto a chain gang, and you
29:33
Speaker 2: knew it, you would accept all sorts of terrible working
29:36
Speaker 2: conditions in low pay because at least that was better
29:39
Speaker 2: than being put on a chain gang, which if you
29:41
Speaker 2: didn't accept this job and got caught without a job,
29:44
Speaker 2: you would end up on a chain gang anyway. That's
29:47
Speaker 2: that was another really kind of insidious effect that they had.
29:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, it's not like this kind of
29:53
Speaker 1: thing was being you know, there were no expos's being
29:56
Speaker 1: written in newspapers about chain gangs. You might drive by one,
30:00
Speaker 1: and that's how you knew they existed. But little by
30:02
Speaker 1: little what went on with these chain gangs started to
30:05
Speaker 1: kind of leak out, especially all over the South. There
30:10
Speaker 1: are a couple of famous examples In nineteen thirty two,
30:13
Speaker 1: there was a white Northern veteran who is a convict,
30:16
Speaker 1: obviously named Robert Burns. He published a book called I
30:19
Speaker 1: Am a Fugitive from a Georgia chain Gang exclamation point
30:23
Speaker 1: That's why I read it that way. That kind of
30:26
Speaker 1: got the word out a little bit. There was a
30:27
Speaker 1: movie adaptation.
30:28
Speaker 2: Have you seen that?
30:30
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it, have you?
30:31
Speaker 2: Yeah?
30:32
Speaker 1: Really?
30:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really yeah. For some reason, I don't know
30:35
Speaker 2: where you me found out about it, but she's one
30:37
Speaker 2: of her well liked movies. I want to say it's
30:40
Speaker 2: one of her favorite. But she showed it to me
30:42
Speaker 2: and it is.
30:42
Speaker 1: What year was that the movie?
30:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're asking when I saw it? Nineteen thirty two,
30:49
Speaker 2: I believe, or nineteen thirty five, something like that.
30:53
Speaker 1: I don't watch a lot of movies from that era.
30:56
Speaker 2: But Chuck, you should this one. It has eight point
30:58
Speaker 2: two on IMDb and that's a pretty high rating. It's
31:01
Speaker 2: really good. It's a good movie. Well.
31:04
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty seven, some more news leaked out when
31:07
Speaker 1: a black civil rights activist name Bayard Rustin. And I
31:10
Speaker 1: know we've talked about Baird Rusting before. He was on
31:14
Speaker 1: a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for
31:17
Speaker 1: civil disobedience, and a series of articles that he wrote
31:22
Speaker 1: came out in The New York Post.
31:23
Speaker 2: Did you read those? Huh?
31:25
Speaker 1: I read some of I read, like, you know, snippets
31:27
Speaker 1: from it, just to sort of get an idea.
31:29
Speaker 2: Oh, I was just kidding.
31:30
Speaker 1: I don't know. I looked into some of it, but
31:32
Speaker 1: I didn't like sit around and read him.
31:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, No, I was trying to get you. Yeah,
31:36
Speaker 2: I gotcha.
31:37
Speaker 1: But the fifties and sixties, like because of the New
31:41
Speaker 1: York Post and because of that movie that Umi Loves
31:44
Speaker 1: came out, fifties and sixties is kind of when chain
31:48
Speaker 1: gangs basically went away. Although you know, if you lived
31:52
Speaker 1: in Maricopa County, Arizona in the nineties, you know they
31:54
Speaker 1: tried pretty hard. What was that guy's name, the sheriff there,
31:58
Speaker 1: Joe Arpaio. Yeah, I'm not sure he pronounced it, but
32:02
Speaker 1: he made big news a lot, and he was one
32:06
Speaker 1: of the guys trying to push for the reinstatement of
32:08
Speaker 1: the chain gangs.
32:10
Speaker 2: Did not happen though, because again America lost its taste
32:13
Speaker 2: for chain gangs in the first half of the twentieth century,
32:17
Speaker 2: and the idea of bringing them back was not something
32:19
Speaker 2: that you would want to do. Even beyond that, not
32:22
Speaker 2: bringing back the chain gangs. Prison labor got to be
32:26
Speaker 2: more and more or I should say less and less brutal.
32:31
Speaker 2: How about that, because the other way I could have
32:33
Speaker 2: put it is more and more or less brutal, and
32:35
Speaker 2: that just doesn't make sense.
32:38
Speaker 1: Well, we took a late break, so it wasn't too
32:41
Speaker 1: long ago, but I feel like we should go ahead
32:43
Speaker 1: and get our second one under our belt. Okay, all right,
32:45
Speaker 1: we'll be right back and talk about the modern era
32:48
Speaker 1: of mass incarceration. All Right, we've covered mass incarceration quite
33:21
Speaker 1: a bit, certainly in our Prisons episode. But here's a
33:25
Speaker 1: stat for you. Over a thirty six year period from
33:32
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy to two thousand and eight, the population of
33:34
Speaker 1: the United States rose by about fifty percent and the
33:39
Speaker 1: population of incarcerated prisoners rose by seven hundred percent. So
33:45
Speaker 1: we entered the mass incarceration era big time over about
33:51
Speaker 1: a thirty six year period, thanks to well, thanks to
33:54
Speaker 1: a lot, but namely thanks to Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
33:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, Nixon's war on drugs, Reagan tough on crime thing
34:01
Speaker 2: Clinton trying to wrestle the tough on crime. I guess
34:06
Speaker 2: Moniker away from the GOP, and I guess it was
34:10
Speaker 2: part of the Democrats platform every year until two thousand
34:14
Speaker 2: and eight and when it was quietly removed and not coincidentally,
34:19
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight is the year that the peak
34:21
Speaker 2: incarceration happened.
34:23
Speaker 1: Like you said, yeah, now we're about that went from
34:26
Speaker 1: one point six to two thousand and eight to about
34:27
Speaker 1: one point three million incarcerated individuals in the United States.
34:30
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, because America has become softer and.
34:32
Speaker 1: Gentler, About six hundred of every one hundred thousand people
34:37
Speaker 1: in the US are incarcerated. That is a higher rate
34:40
Speaker 1: than any other country in the world except Cuba, Rwanda,
34:43
Speaker 1: and El Salvador and Louisiana once again leads the way
34:47
Speaker 1: at a one thousand per one hundred thousand, and the
34:51
Speaker 1: rate of for Black Americans is nine hundred per one
34:55
Speaker 1: hundred thousand.
34:56
Speaker 2: Can I talk about Al Salvador first second, because I
34:58
Speaker 2: looked into their incredibly high incarceration rates.
35:02
Speaker 1: Sure do they do prison labor?
35:05
Speaker 2: I didn't check that out, but I got this other
35:07
Speaker 2: stuff about it? How about that?
35:09
Speaker 1: Sure?
35:09
Speaker 2: So they have essentially established an authoritarian crackdown on gangs,
35:16
Speaker 2: and in twenty fifteen, their murder rate was one hundred
35:21
Speaker 2: and three people per hundred thousand population, which means every
35:24
Speaker 2: year more than one percent of their population was murdered.
35:29
Speaker 2: So they cracked down on gangs and just started throwing
35:32
Speaker 2: everybody in jail, and between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty two,
35:37
Speaker 2: their murder rate went from one hundred and three per
35:39
Speaker 2: hundred thousand to seven point eight per one hundred thousand,
35:43
Speaker 2: which you're like, okay, that's actually I mean, authoritarian crackdowns
35:47
Speaker 2: on gangs and prisons is not very tasteful, but at
35:51
Speaker 2: least they got results. Here in the United States, we
35:54
Speaker 2: don't have the same excuse for that level of rise
35:58
Speaker 2: in incarceration. Our hamas rate in nineteen fifty five was
36:02
Speaker 2: four point five. In twenty twenty four it was like five.
36:08
Speaker 2: It's remained relatively flat, give or take a few points
36:12
Speaker 2: like here or there, over the years. So there's no
36:14
Speaker 2: reason why our prison population should have increased seven hundred percent.
36:19
Speaker 2: It just there's no reason for it. Yeah, unless you
36:24
Speaker 2: expand crimes, especially non violent crimes like drug possession and
36:29
Speaker 2: really throw the book at people, which is what happened
36:31
Speaker 2: during that time.
36:32
Speaker 1: Right exactly. As far as prison labor goes, most of
36:36
Speaker 1: the people in state and federal prison these days do
36:39
Speaker 1: some kind of prison labor. I think out of the
36:42
Speaker 1: one point three million ish, it's about eight hundred thousand
36:45
Speaker 1: as of a few years ago. The ones who don't
36:48
Speaker 1: are probably either too old or have some sort of
36:51
Speaker 1: disability or health problem that won't allow them to. About
36:55
Speaker 1: eighty percent of those workers are working for the prison,
36:58
Speaker 1: so you know, when you were in the cafeteria, you
37:01
Speaker 1: work in the laundry or something like that. That's about
37:03
Speaker 1: eighty percent of it, and most of the rest are
37:06
Speaker 1: kind of what we were talking about earlier, government run operations.
37:11
Speaker 1: Maybe you do laundry for a public hospital, maybe work
37:14
Speaker 1: in that DMB call center. About two percent of total
37:18
Speaker 1: prison workers in the federal prison system work for unicorse still,
37:24
Speaker 1: And I was curious about the whole license plate thing,
37:26
Speaker 1: you know that, oh yeah, sort of trope, But most
37:30
Speaker 1: of that doesn't happen at prisons anymore because it's just
37:33
Speaker 1: cheaper to have, you know, robot machinery do that kind
37:35
Speaker 1: of thing. But it's still a thing in some states.
37:39
Speaker 1: And I know, Utah is one of them. It's called
37:41
Speaker 1: the UCI operation, and they call themselves plate busters and
37:46
Speaker 1: they make them all, even the specialty like ski Utah
37:49
Speaker 1: plates and the Olympic plates and stuff like that. They're
37:52
Speaker 1: making them all.
37:53
Speaker 2: Still, I saw that there's like a long standing kind
37:57
Speaker 2: of jokey observation that prisoners in New Hampshire make their
38:01
Speaker 2: license plate and on the license plate it says live
38:04
Speaker 2: free or die, right, And that's actually true and they
38:07
Speaker 2: still do today at the state prison and conquered the
38:10
Speaker 2: prisoners in New Hampshire make those license plates.
38:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine making those and making ski Utah plates
38:16
Speaker 1: or I don't know, adds a little salt to them
38:19
Speaker 1: to the situation.
38:20
Speaker 2: You know, for sure. I like that.
38:22
Speaker 1: That's saying a little salt to the situation. Well, I
38:26
Speaker 1: didn't want to say wound. That's no. One likes that word.
38:30
Speaker 2: No, it's not a very pleasant word. Uh.
38:32
Speaker 1: Some of these prisoners do dangerous work too, though. You
38:34
Speaker 1: know it's not all just like sort of hourly easy stuff.
38:38
Speaker 2: No. No, I mean like again, you're you're engaged in
38:42
Speaker 2: forced unpaid labor. So you go where they tell you
38:45
Speaker 2: to go. I know in California, you might end up
38:48
Speaker 2: fighting wildfires, and this is one of the highest paying jobs,
38:51
Speaker 2: as we'll see. If you get two to five dollars
38:53
Speaker 2: a day plus one dollar an hour when you're actively
38:56
Speaker 2: fighting wildfires in California, that's something they can make you
39:00
Speaker 2: do if you're a prisoner.
39:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, saving the saving the houses at the wealthy. Yeah,
39:08
Speaker 1: but not always wealthy to be fair.
39:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, but there are a lot of wealthy people
39:12
Speaker 2: in California to be sure.
39:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, not only firefighting, disaster recovery sometimes lead paint removal.
39:20
Speaker 1: I think there's around five percent of the incarcerated workforce,
39:24
Speaker 1: which is about forty thousand people work for private industry still, right,
39:29
Speaker 1: and that a lot of times is like the work
39:30
Speaker 1: camp that I was talking about. So they they may
39:32
Speaker 1: work at a food fast food restaurant, or may be
39:36
Speaker 1: like a work on the custodial staff at a well
39:39
Speaker 1: known hotel chain.
39:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of these bigger businesses have policies
39:43
Speaker 2: where they don't use least convict labor like rice, but
39:48
Speaker 2: they also sometimes can't do a thing about it, like
39:51
Speaker 2: if their supplier part of the supply chain is that,
39:54
Speaker 2: like companies don't know who's painting the patio furniture that
39:58
Speaker 2: they're selling like they just I don't know, and that
40:00
Speaker 2: the company painting the furniture might be using least convict labor,
40:05
Speaker 2: or they their franchisees can use least convict labor, and
40:09
Speaker 2: the corporate office can't do anything about it because they
40:12
Speaker 2: don't own those stores. So it still does happen. Even
40:15
Speaker 2: though large corporations in the US tend to have policies
40:19
Speaker 2: against that, and in fact have policies that they put
40:23
Speaker 2: in place two higher felons, like preferential hiring of felons.
40:28
Speaker 2: Still it washes out to where there's plenty of least
40:31
Speaker 2: convict labor today in private businesses. Yeah.
40:34
Speaker 1: And you know, we've talked about money a little bit
40:36
Speaker 1: here and there, like you know, no pay, and you know,
40:40
Speaker 1: sometimes there is pay, sometimes there isn't. There's no federal
40:44
Speaker 1: law that says that someone has to be paid for
40:46
Speaker 1: work if they're a prisoner. Right on the state level.
40:50
Speaker 1: It depends on the state, but you know, a lot
40:52
Speaker 1: of them pay nothing at all. I think the average
40:56
Speaker 1: pay for a prisoner in the US is fifty two
40:58
Speaker 1: cents an hour, and that was like three years ago.
41:00
Speaker 1: So I doubt if it's gone up that much, who knows,
41:02
Speaker 1: maybe it's gone down. Almost always under a dollar an hour.
41:07
Speaker 1: You may get like minimum wage if you work one
41:11
Speaker 1: of the really hazardous jobs in a pretty forward thinking state.
41:15
Speaker 1: But then the prison can turn around and say, yeah,
41:18
Speaker 1: but we're gonna take most of that paycheck to cover
41:21
Speaker 1: like room and board, or maybe to provide restitution to
41:24
Speaker 1: your victims if it was a financial thing exactly.
41:27
Speaker 2: So, like even if you're off making federal minimum wage
41:30
Speaker 2: at KFC, as you know as a prisoner, as part
41:34
Speaker 2: of your prison labor, you're ending up with pennies on
41:39
Speaker 2: the dollar per hour after they deduct all that stuff
41:44
Speaker 2: from you. So that's why that average for all prison
41:47
Speaker 2: workers was fifty two cents an hour because they deduct
41:49
Speaker 2: so many things. That's why it's essentially convict leasing. That
41:53
Speaker 2: person goes out works, they get paid, and the prison says,
41:56
Speaker 2: we're taking this x amount of your pay our own use.
42:01
Speaker 1: That has to go into the private prison like financial
42:06
Speaker 1: success rate.
42:07
Speaker 2: Right precisely that private prisons are able to do that,
42:11
Speaker 2: they probably deduct way more. But the other problem with
42:14
Speaker 2: it too is that they're at the same time getting
42:17
Speaker 2: tax breaks for leasing out their contracts to use in
42:20
Speaker 2: the outside world. So they're getting like fees and tax breaks.
42:25
Speaker 2: It's quite a racket from what I can tell.
42:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, while the basic needs a lot of times that
42:30
Speaker 1: these prisoners aren't even being met. Still some pretty bad
42:34
Speaker 1: conditions as far as medical treatment goes and food. I
42:38
Speaker 1: think Olivia helped us with this. She did a great job.
42:41
Speaker 1: But she found one woman named Carla Simmons who is
42:43
Speaker 1: an incarcerated in a woman's prison, and she wrote last year,
42:48
Speaker 1: and this is right here in Georgia, that prisoners aren't paid.
42:52
Speaker 1: And she said the food is so bad that they
42:55
Speaker 1: people try to get work assignments where they can dig
42:58
Speaker 1: through the trash to eat the guards meals like the
43:00
Speaker 1: portions that they threw away, good God in twenty twenty four.
43:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of the other things too is that I
43:09
Speaker 2: mean people point to this and say, like, Okay, yes,
43:12
Speaker 2: we agree that prison labor is in and of itself
43:14
Speaker 2: a good thing. Like Thomas Moore was right, like there
43:19
Speaker 2: is redemption in labor. So we're not saying do away
43:22
Speaker 2: with it, but it needs a lot of reforms. These
43:25
Speaker 2: are the people who are like, well, reform minded about
43:28
Speaker 2: the whole thing. There's Basically, no one saying we should
43:30
Speaker 2: do away with prison labor, but they say it should
43:33
Speaker 2: be the kind of labor that's going to help them
43:36
Speaker 2: get jobs on the outside, where they learn valuable skills.
43:40
Speaker 2: They should be paid fairly federal minimum wage at least
43:43
Speaker 2: for the labor that they're doing, and they should also
43:46
Speaker 2: get protections that any worker gets in the United States.
43:50
Speaker 2: This to me is mind blowing. We have workers protections
43:53
Speaker 2: out the yin Yang. Here in the US, we have OSHA,
43:57
Speaker 2: we have the Fair Labor Standards Act. All of these
43:59
Speaker 2: are meant to protect workers physically from injury and also
44:03
Speaker 2: protect them from being screwed over by their employers. And
44:06
Speaker 2: court after court after court has ruled that prison laborers
44:11
Speaker 2: do not count for these protections. They're not classified as
44:15
Speaker 2: employees because, as I saw it put, the prison owns
44:19
Speaker 2: the prisoner's labor. The laborer doesn't own their own labor,
44:23
Speaker 2: So how can an employee be in that situation? They can't.
44:26
Speaker 2: Therefore they don't get any of these protections.
44:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, there was a lawsuit brought in Alabama
44:32
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four that was dismissed because they basically
44:34
Speaker 1: were like, oh, this isn't forced labor. These are mandatory chores.
44:41
Speaker 1: So it's just like depends on what you want to
44:43
Speaker 1: call it. I guess. In twenty twenty one, there's an
44:47
Speaker 1: international anti slavery nonprofit called walk Free in Australia who
44:51
Speaker 1: produces what's called the Global Slavery Index. And the United
44:54
Speaker 1: States is one of seventeen countries that use stadium posed
45:00
Speaker 1: force labor, along with China and Russia and some other places.
45:04
Speaker 1: And the United States is one of only six UN
45:07
Speaker 1: member states that hasn't ratified the Forced Labor Convention of
45:10
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty, which we considered. The Senate considered that nineteen
45:14
Speaker 1: ninety one, like hey, maybe we should sign on to
45:16
Speaker 1: this thing, and they said no, it really really conflicts
45:20
Speaker 1: with subcontracting these prisoners out to private companies. So like,
45:25
Speaker 1: let's not foul that.
45:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll just we'll walk past that one.
45:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.
45:30
Speaker 2: And like I think you mentioned Europe in the UN,
45:33
Speaker 2: there's in Europe essentially the way that they treat prison labors.
45:38
Speaker 2: What I was saying that in the US prison labor
45:42
Speaker 2: reformed people are calling for and you mentioned Alabama in
45:46
Speaker 2: that lawsuit about mandatory chores not prison labor. The reason
45:52
Speaker 2: that lawsuit even came up is because Alabama, surprisingly is
45:55
Speaker 2: one of seven states that in the last few years
45:58
Speaker 2: has passed in their state constitution a ban on prison labor.
46:05
Speaker 2: You're not allowed to You can't force prisoners to work.
46:08
Speaker 2: They can. You can use prison labor, but you have
46:11
Speaker 2: to pay them, and you can't coerce them with punishments.
46:14
Speaker 2: Some of the punishments that prisoners face if they refuse
46:17
Speaker 2: to work, they might be transferred to a higher security prison,
46:21
Speaker 2: which is not what you want to happen to you.
46:23
Speaker 2: Their family visits may get cut. There's all sorts of
46:26
Speaker 2: punishments that can be meted out legally except in these
46:30
Speaker 2: states under their constitution. But like you said, that lawsuit
46:33
Speaker 2: where they were like, these aren't This isn't involuntary servitude.
46:36
Speaker 2: It's mandatory chores. Yeah, they don't have any teeth right now.
46:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tennessee was in there too, sort of surprising. In Nebraska,
46:47
Speaker 1: here's finally some numbers for you. And I love it
46:50
Speaker 1: when they kind of put numbers like this, which is like, hey,
46:52
Speaker 1: if you actually spent this in the long run, it
46:55
Speaker 1: would be better for everybody. I love those stats, and
46:58
Speaker 1: this is one of those incarcerated workers saves prison. Saves
47:04
Speaker 1: prison is about fifteen billion dollars a year and produces
47:07
Speaker 1: another two billion dollars in goods and services. And so
47:11
Speaker 1: the Edgeworth Economics Group did a study a cost benefit
47:15
Speaker 1: analysis last year and found that, hey, if they actually
47:19
Speaker 1: use that money to pay incarcerated workers like an okay wage,
47:23
Speaker 1: like maybe even just minimum wage, it would reduce a
47:26
Speaker 1: burden on families to send money, which they don't have
47:28
Speaker 1: a lot of money to begin with. Maybe they could
47:31
Speaker 1: pay child support from prison and improve their earnings like
47:36
Speaker 1: once they get out. And so they did the math
47:38
Speaker 1: and they found out in the end, every dollar spent
47:42
Speaker 1: on prisoners' wages would add up to a society wide
47:45
Speaker 1: return of two dollars and forty cents to three dollars
47:49
Speaker 1: and sixteen cents.
47:50
Speaker 2: Man, that's pretty pretty good, ROI just for paying prisoners.
47:55
Speaker 2: I know. I can't think of any better way to
47:59
Speaker 2: end this one, can you?
48:01
Speaker 1: I got nothing else?
48:02
Speaker 2: I thought I heard you drop from Mike.
48:04
Speaker 1: Even No, No, it's still up.
48:06
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, since Chuck said is Mike's still good to go,
48:09
Speaker 2: I guess it's time for listener mail.
48:13
Speaker 1: It's hard to drop the Mike in a studio because
48:14
Speaker 1: you got to unscrew it. I've got like a windscreen.
48:18
Speaker 1: Two things have to get unplugged, and by that time
48:21
Speaker 1: everyone's left the room.
48:22
Speaker 2: You know they gave you a Wins screen. I didn't
48:24
Speaker 2: get a Wins screen.
48:25
Speaker 1: I bought my own.
48:26
Speaker 2: I brought this from home.
48:28
Speaker 1: So who is this from? This is from Kimberly. Hey, guys,
48:32
Speaker 1: thanks for keeping me company on long work trips, during chores,
48:35
Speaker 1: and throughout my day to day life. I feel like
48:37
Speaker 1: I'm listening to old friends. Like a lot of people
48:39
Speaker 1: have said before, I appreciate how my worldview is challenged
48:42
Speaker 1: and enlightened when I listened to the show. My weekly
48:44
Speaker 1: trivia team also appreciates how I can answer some of
48:46
Speaker 1: the most random questions thanks to the random facts, and
48:51
Speaker 1: Kimberly sent in a great recommendation how crowds work. I'd
48:56
Speaker 1: love to know more about how humans move through crowds.
48:58
Speaker 1: How do we manage to avoid bumping into each each
49:00
Speaker 1: other at airport, stadiums and other crowded places. How do
49:03
Speaker 1: we avoid crowd crushes? I feel like we touched on
49:05
Speaker 1: that now we have.
49:06
Speaker 2: On our Black Friday episode. In a couple I guess
49:09
Speaker 2: we talked about crowd crushes.
49:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think maybe just crowds would be a pretty
49:14
Speaker 1: good idea.
49:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, really we could work in standing in line. Where
49:17
Speaker 2: that came from.
49:19
Speaker 1: Is that is that? Do people do that? I don't
49:21
Speaker 1: stand in lines.
49:23
Speaker 2: A lot of people do surprisingly and wait for their turn,
49:27
Speaker 2: I think is what they call it their turn.
49:30
Speaker 1: I'm a line jumper, you know. People love those guys.
49:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, All the key is to just not pay
49:36
Speaker 2: attention to anyone behind you, pretend like they're not there.
49:39
Speaker 1: I had a guy at the airport recently, and you know,
49:42
Speaker 1: boarding an airplane in the United States is just one
49:44
Speaker 1: of the worst things that can happen, especially after I've
49:46
Speaker 1: seen how they do it in Australia, which is to
49:48
Speaker 1: say sybil and friendly. And this guy was standing behind us,
49:52
Speaker 1: Me and Emily and Ruby like in the line really
49:56
Speaker 1: to get like to get on not the crowd that
49:58
Speaker 1: huh goes before they now, and he just like all
50:01
Speaker 1: of a sudden just walked right around us and jumped
50:03
Speaker 1: in front or tried to and I like sort of
50:06
Speaker 1: just bodied up a little bit. Yeah, and you want
50:10
Speaker 1: to see and in sense human is I don't know
50:13
Speaker 1: if it's all ten year olds, but my daughter when
50:15
Speaker 1: someone tries to jump a line, she was furious. Did
50:20
Speaker 1: you see that guy try to break in line? It
50:23
Speaker 1: was like the almost no worse offense at that age.
50:26
Speaker 2: Was he in your side? Did he hear say that?
50:29
Speaker 1: Wow? I don't think so, but I repeated it loudly,
50:31
Speaker 1: so Emily could hear. Did you hear what Ruby just said?
50:33
Speaker 1: She's calling out this guy behind us?
50:36
Speaker 2: Man, why would you do that?
50:38
Speaker 1: I don't know, It's just I don't know.
50:41
Speaker 2: I don't know, Josh. I mean, I get the drive
50:45
Speaker 2: to get on board as fast as possible, to get
50:47
Speaker 2: some overhead space, so they don't check your carry on
50:50
Speaker 2: bag because it's all you have, and you don't want
50:52
Speaker 2: to stand around waiting for it because you got to
50:54
Speaker 2: get out of the airport as soon as possible. But
50:56
Speaker 2: you still don't walk around people that you're in my mind.
51:00
Speaker 1: I know, And we were in that sort of you know,
51:04
Speaker 1: whether they do zones now, I think we were zone
51:06
Speaker 1: one or two, so it wasn't like we were at
51:07
Speaker 1: the back of the plane and it was going to
51:09
Speaker 1: be dog eat dog for that space.
51:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. Maybe he just could not wait to get some pretzels.
51:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, the mustard anyways, Sorry rant over?
51:18
Speaker 2: Was that the end of Kimberly's email too? Yeah, great idea, Kimberly.
51:23
Speaker 2: I think we will do one on crowds eventually and
51:25
Speaker 2: we will try like heck to remember to credit you
51:27
Speaker 2: with the idea because it was one hundred percent yours.
51:31
Speaker 1: That's right.
51:31
Speaker 2: If you want to be like Kimberly and give us
51:33
Speaker 2: a great idea, we love that kind of thing, you
51:35
Speaker 2: can send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
51:44
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
51:47
Speaker 1: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
51:50
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
52:00
Speaker 2: M