From: mumia@webcom.com
Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 01:38:00
Subject: !*Profit In Prison

FORWARDED MESSAGE
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From: "Kenneth Ritchards" 

PROFIT IN PRISON

After emancipation, former slaves were returned to the plantation through an
arrangement that came to be known as "convict
leasing."

The prison industry became big business as free labor was found through the
expansion of offenses for which African Americans
could be incarcerated. Passage of the Mississippi "Pig Law", in which the
offense of grand larceny was expanded to include theft of
any property in excess of ten dollars or any livestock, virtually insured
enough growth in the prison population to feed the labor
appetite of American industries.

By the end of 1877, the Pig Law produced the desired result. The state penal
system swelled to over one thousand convicts, an
almost exclusively African American labor force worth considerably more than
one million dollars as slaves at the time of freedom.
The entire inmate population was "leased" to a private company for a period
of four years.

White plantation owners and emerging railroad tycoons made vast fortunes on
the backs of freedmen. Ingenious rules were created
to shield white prisoners, almost always convicted of heinous crimes, from
being worked to death. These rules mandated that those
convicts serving sentences of 10 or more years were to labor within the
prison walls or nearby enough to sleep in the prison at
night.

Conditions of disease and starvation that thrived in the prison camps were
actually worse than that suffered in slavery. Black
children were not spared from this inhumane treatment as large numbers of
them entered the penal system through enforcement of
the Pig Law.

Today's laws are creating a new prison industry. with the privatization of
Anerican prisons, companies are again being allowed to
manage a population of majority Black and Brown convicts. Prison labor
supports industries from furniture manufacturing to the
airlines. Prisoners are earning between fourteen and twenty-nine cents an
hour. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws are expanding
the prison population and the length of prison sentences. Vast fortunes are
once again being made on the backs of African
Americans in servitude.
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Source: http://www.blackworldweb.com/wdas/

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