How prison labor works in Arizona
www.workers.org
The following article was excerpted from an Arizona Republic and KJZZ News July 22 investigative exposé revealing “what happens when a state exploits some of its poorest people for their labor.” Full story at tinyurl.com/2p8ffmnn. After 15 months of gathering and analyzing more than 11,000 docu

Many prisoners say they enjoy the jobs, if only because it gets them out into the free world and gives them something to do. The biggest problem: They are often paid less than $1 an hour. And despite the misconception that everything in their lives is paid for, prison life is really quite expensive. Prices for goods are about the same as in the outside world. From pens and paper to envelopes and stamps, it could take a full week for some prisoners to buy what they need to send a single letter to a family member by mail.

  • @KommandoGZD
    15•2 years ago

    Many prisoners say they enjoy the jobs, if only because it gets them out into the free world and gives them something to do

    Yes, because incarceration has been made such a horrible experience over the past decades with torture techniques like solitary becoming standard MO that inmates prefer slave labour over it.

    • @bleepingblorp
      6•2 years ago

      Prison guards purposefully fuel race based violence between inmates in order to keep them divided. Prisoners aren’t allowed to talk to each other for extended periods even in the lower security periods. Guards are well armed, well fed, have medical care, etc. meanwhile prisoners are denied even healthy food and necessary medical care. There are nigh countless occasions where prisoners are denied life saving medicine for life conditions like diabetes and die for it. There are at least equal number of occasions where prisoners are beaten to near death, then denied medical care so they actually die. Prisoners also need to pay or go into debt to cover many of the expenses of incarceration while earning basically nothing, so even when they get out, they are burdened with debt from their sentence, on top of the new debt that’ll be incurred from having to pay for a parole officer, court hearings, and/or bail.

      So the lack of ability to organize, daily violence on their bodies, daily denial of resources needed to thrive, mental illness from incarceration related traumas, lack of resources post-incarceration, among others. There are efforts by groups which have splintered from the Black Panther Party, but I can’t speak to how successful or not they are since I am not nor never was a prisoner.