Alabama profits off prisoners who work at McDonald’s but deems them too dangerous for parole

9 comments

1. “Too dangerous for freedom, but perfect for the fry station”—McJustice is served hot and with a side of irony. Modern slavery is too profitable.

2. Bits from the article:

   > No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.
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   > Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks.
   >
   > Most jobs are inside facilities, where the state’s inmates — who are disproportionately Black — can be sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for free doing everything from mopping floors to laundry. But more than 10,000 inmates have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from major car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart, the AP determined.
   >
   > . . .
   >
   > Few prisoner advocates believe outside jobs should be abolished. In Alabama, for instance, those shifts can offer a reprieve from the excessive violence inside the state’s institutions. Last year, and in the first six months of 2024, an Alabama inmate died behind bars nearly every day, a rate five times the national average.
   >
   > But advocates say incarcerated workers should be paid fair wages, given the choice to work without threat of punishment, and granted the same workplace rights and protections guaranteed to other Americans.
   >
   > . . .
   >
   > Alabama collected more than $13 million in work release fees in fiscal year 2024. But the prisoner lawsuit filed in federal court late last year with backing from the powerful AFL-CIO federation of unions, estimates the corrections department actually rakes in about $450 million in benefits from prison labor annually. That takes into consideration money saved by not having to hire civilians to maintain the sprawling prison system or work for government agencies.

3. Don’t forget, you compete with them in the job market.

   Even if you don’t work in a McDonald’s it still effects you. Because shit runs down hill.

   So somebody loses their job to a 0.30 cent/hr prisoner, they’re forced to go find another job and they move up to proper restaurant work.

   That displaces someone else, who maybe goes into office work.

   That displaces someone else, who goes back to college and finishes their degree.

   Now they’re toe to toe with you.

4. Alabama is a welfare state and profits off all of us.

5. Too profitable to parole

6. This is messed up Alabama.

7. Life Hack…don’t commit crime!

8. Like in the good old days.

9. It’s a work release program. How is this news?

   More to the point, everytime they ask, these prisoners like these programs. It beats the hell out of sitting in a cell all day.

   These are prisoners. Remember that.
   It isn’t like these guys don’t deserve to be incarcerated

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