Re: Slaves and their instruments - was/ poor underpaid CEOs
On Dec 15, 2006, at 12:59 AM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
So, I’m curious if there’s any research to back this up Doug –
the stuff about prison labor.This is from a 1999 interview with Christian Parenti. A much
fuller version of this argument is in his book “Lockdown America”
I should have said that I first came up with the “you can’t beat free
labor” formulation after talking with Christian when I was first
getting to know him - it was probably around 1999. I said I was
skeptical of the line about how prison privatization and the use of
inmate labor were driving the incarceration boom - that it was all
about profit and not social control, an extremely vulgar Marxist
interpretation popular with some anti-prison activists. Christian
agreed, recounted all the evidence he’d found of the failure of
prison labor to make a buck (as I recall he said it’s often
subsidized in fact). So I said, you can’t beat free labor, right?,
and he agreed. It was an early bonding moment.
Doug