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Turquoise ring Studio 54, 1977 Meryl Meisler

Storm clouds are gray

25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots

Central Park, NY (1994)

Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:

-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.

-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”

-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?

-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.

-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.

-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.

-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.

-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.

-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.

-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.

-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.

Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html