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Saturday, January 21st, 2023

‘You’re a slave’: Inside Louisiana’s forced prison labor and a failed overhaul attempt

Author:     Cara McGoogan
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     January 1, 2023 | 7:00 a.m. EST
 Link: ‘You’re a slave’: Inside Louisiana’s forced prison labor and a failed overhaul attempt
Stephan:  

Louisiana, on the basis of its factual social outcome data, I think, has to be seen as an anti-democratic racist failed state. If it were not part of the United States, on the basis of that factual data, it would be considered a third-world country. And it provides a very specific example of racist prison slavery that pervades the American gulag.

Inmates Jonathan Archille, left, and Brodarius Washington, work for no pay at the cafe in the state Capitol building in Baton Rouge on Nov 4, 2022. Credit: Emily Kask / The Washington Post

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA — Breakfast at Louisiana’s state Capitol includes fresh coffee, cookies and egg sandwiches — made and served in part by incarcerated people working for no pay.

“They force us to work,” said Jonathan Archille, 29, who is among more than a dozen current and formerly incarcerated people in Louisiana who told The Washington Post they have felt like enslaved people in the state’s prison system.

Archille said prison staff had even used that term against him. “You’re a slave — that’s what they tell us,” he said. A spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections, Ken Pastorick, said it “does not tolerate” such language and is looking into the allegation.

In the 2022 midterm elections, voters in four states approved changes to their constitutions to remove language enabling involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime — part of a […]

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