PRISON LABOR ABOLITION

When discussing and fighting for collective liberation, it is clear that we must fight for those who have directly had their liberty taken away from them: incarcerated people. Not only is the entire system of prisons and mass incarceration an overtly racist system, but it is the vehicle through which slavery continues. The official wording on the 13th amendment allows for slavery to be used as a form of punishment. This results in prisoners often being forced to do work at abysmal pay or taking advantage of the fact that they’re inside so much to get them to “voluntarily” take these horrible paying jobs. Oftentimes these jobs include animal agriculture work, making incarcerated people subjugate and oppress non-human animals.

• https://sentientmedia.org/prison-labor-meat/

• https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander