>The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
Is there any documented evidence of this happening?
The for-profit prison industrial complex spends millions of dollars lobbying for lengthier prison sentences.
Every bed they fill is money the state pays them.
Prisons pay politicians to get beds filled for lengthier times, so they can make more money from the states that convict and send them prisoners. It's a disgusting immoral racket.
It does appear that was part of the development of Parchman, Angola and the like. However the cost of the prison-industrial complex dwarfs the economic value of a prisoner's labor.
There are other funds to be extracted of course, including exorbitant phone calls, "snack kits" and the like but that money goes to private corporations, not to the state (and to the kind of political donations that lead to the "three strikes" laws in California).
> Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products.
Tho it's not just private prisons, even federal prisons and state jails have massive rat-tails of private industries servicing them [0]
Nor are private companies the only ones outsourcing labor to prisons, the US military is also doing it [1]
At WalMart, yes. Also JC Penny, Victoria's Secret, K-Mart, and Starbucks have all used prison labor. There's also prison call centers, such as those used by American Airlines and Avis.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...
It is also apparently mentioned in Hillary Clinton's memoirs that they had unpaid prison labor at the governor's mansion to save money.
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