Because of the various issues, we have watched the rise of two “solutions” that have put us on the slippery slope to legalized slavery in the United States. The first “solution” was to make prisoners pay their own way while incarcerated. We first watched the rise of prison industries – products and services made by prisons with prisoner labor and sold to the public. The second was the use of private corrections companies in private prisons being paid by federal and state governments. The private prisons are also entitled to use prisoners as a workforce. In both of these solutions the earning of the prisoners are largely diverted to the prison. In fact, prisoners average a low wage of 14 cents and hour to a high wage of 63 cents an hour, and those wages have been dropping since 2001 (Sawyer, 2017), and may work up to 10 hours a day.

A massive problem with the combination of private incarceration and requiring prisoners to work (for pennies) is that the goal of for-profit companies is to grow and increase their profits. This means that they have every incentive to have more people incarcerated for longer periods of time. It also means that US prison labor workforce is paid less than virtually any workforce in the world. Further, these corporations are being paid (usually hundreds of dollars) per day for each prisoner, AND they are making money from the labor of prisoners as well. In other words, they are in a growth business that likely has the highest profit margin of any business in the country.

Not only have we have left justice far behind, we have instituted and grown a new plantation state where prisoners are denied even basic rights.