Not only that, but there are more than three times as many slaves TODAY as ever were in the transatlantic slave trade that is the only one the US knows exists.
It's really undermining the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade by comparing it to prison. We wouldn't compare it to indentured servitude, which is much closer to the penal system (monetary debt vs social debt, but both are contacts even if not purely voluntary). The federal government also doesn't have complete ownership over prisoners. Yes, prisoners are mistreated, but what they face isn't at the level of those from the slave trade and so you're effectively diminishing those atrocities.
For one, most people don't equate indentured servitude with slavery. We generally think of lifelong service when we say slavery, which isn't part of the penal system. The penal system also isn't generational and people aren't born into slavery. There's grounds to call it slavery, yes, but the context you're bringing it up in is in comparison to the African slave trade and you're diminishing the suffering those people went through by saying that what happened to them was just like what we do to prisoners today. What happened to them was much worse.
I may missing something but it seems plain enough in the thirteenth amendment? “ Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
To this point, if US prison labor isn't "slavery" or "involuntary servitude", then removing the words between "except" and "shall" would be noncontroversial.
Similarly, if there was political consensus that US companies shouldn't own or hire slaves overseas, then the bit starting with "within" would be easy to remove as well.
None of this has had any chance of happening since the thirteenth amendment was passed (not even during BLM). It's pretty clear that a big chunk of the US's leaders are pro-slavery.
Because worrs carry not only direct meanings, but subjective connotations, and most people consider slavery an unjust subjugation of another human being, and think it is immoral by definition, in any circumstances. On the other hand, even most of the people who aren't fans of US prison system still consider the general idea of prison to be just, as the general idea of prison labour as a way to repay society.
Idk how this works in the US in particular - but I suppose that - essentially - yes. Harsher conditions.
When one has a essentially complete control over another person's life, there are ways to make this life hell, even while staying within the legal bounds.
From my understanding, the main punishment for not working as prison labor is losing the small wages you do get (i.e, normally one of the punishments for misbehavior is prohibiting you from working).
Wow, lots of replies are trying to downplay the existence ongoing human suffering.
A few things to consider:
- A disproportionate number of prisoners are African American, and that subset are mostly in prison for crimes that whites simply don't go to prison for (e.g., pot, or coke vs. crack).
- US prisoners aren't given nutritionally adequate food for free. They have to buy that at inflated prices from the prison. Once they blow through any savings, their only option (other than malnutrition) is to work for wages that would be illegally low outside of prison.
- As during the transatlantic trade, it is straightforward to buy your way out of forced prison labor.
- A growing fraction of prisoners consider the current system to be eugenics as well as slavery. The prisons take the majority of men while they are at prime child rearing age. It's well known that any that do manage to have kids will probably be forced into a situation where they can't adequately care for those children (dad goes to prison for driving while black or whatever), making the next generation easy targets for the same scheme. (This is coming from current prisoners, not me.)
The other pushback against my comment boils down to "it's legal, so we don't use that word". Similar arguments were made in defense of the transatlantic trade. For instance, black Africans were generally the ones selling slaves, and often used real or imagined criminal records as an excuse. Any objective comparison of the two systems would find that the transatlantic slave trade was roughly as immoral California's three strike law is in practice. You could argue the slave trade was worse because the kids were automatically slaves. In the current system, they're only probably going to prison, but the prisons also aren't paying to raise them.
I suggest reading Things Fall Apart if you're unfamiliar with the African side of the slave trade.
That feels like a very misleading point. The world population is almost 8 billion, it was almost 1 billion in 1800 (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population), so we decreased slavery as a precentage of the world by a lot, yet the total number of slaves has increased. It's tragic that there is modern slavery, but it was horrible the us did it, it's horrible that people want to minimize and argue we weren't so bad for having it, that the founding father's of the us were mostly slave owners.
> That feels like a very misleading point. The world population is almost 8 billion, it was almost 1 billion in 1800 [...] we decreased slavery as a precentage of the world by a lot
I appreciate what you're saying, but my point is actually that the US view is that "slavery has been abolished for 150 years" makes for a very US-centric view of history. Which for a 250 year old country is laughably closed minded both backwards and forwards in time.
The context of what I said is the parent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124042), specifically related to the US-centricism of the retold statement of "slavery was started by the United States".
The story of the world is not that slavery was created for the process of building the US as a powerful nation, and then abolished and now only dealing with the fallout and reparations. But I've heard this understanding many times in the US, to the point where it seems like the mainstream understanding there.
