Chris Hedges: America’s Slave Empire
The kryptonite to fight the prison system, which is a $500 billion enterprise, is the work strike.
.. In the St. Clair prison there is also a chemical plant, a furniture company and a repair shop for state vehicles. Other Alabama prisons run printing companies and recycling plants, stamp license plates, make metal bed frames, operate sand pits and tend fish farms. Only a few hundred of Alabama’s 26,200 prisoners — the system is designed to hold only 13,130 people — are paid to work; they get 17 to 71 cents an hour. The rest are slaves.
.. An estimated 80 percent of prisoners entering the Alabama prison system are functionally illiterate.
.. “For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us,” Ray said. “Then the word ‘n-word’ became politically incorrect. So they began calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a n-word. It means they deserve what they get.”