For profit prisons are an abomination, but they are a natural extension of capitalism without conscience. The following article from truthout.org briefly describes America’s move from the direct form of slavery so named, to the modified form of slavery we call “for profit prisons.”
“Thanks to (Ronald) Reagan elevating profit to a religion, between 1980 and 2009, the state and federal prison population in the U.S. increased by over 700 percent.
Since the for-profit prison industry started aggressively buying Congressmen 15 years ago, the number of people thrown into for-profit prisons has exploded.
And Americans sitting in jail make a very exploitable, very profitable, slave-like labor force.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the minimum wage for a prisoner who works in the UNICOR program, the federal government’s prison industries program, is 23 cents an hour. The maximum UNICOR wage is $1.15 an hour.
…And some states, like Georgia and Texas, are completely upfront about their slave-labor camps. They pay absolutely nothing to prisoners.”