The American prison world is a truly vast and unknown civilization. Millions of people live behind bars in the United States, forced to comply with special unwritten laws and put up with discrimination that has not been seen in the wild for decades. Today, the nation’s prisons are ruled by white privilege, which infringes on black people’s rights and the uncontrolled exploitation of prisoners, which brings income to the corporations that paid for this cheap labor.
The prison system in the United States is a profit-making industry. Even though slavery was abolished many years ago, it still thrives in places of detention in the United States. Prisoners are a free, and therefore desirable, labor force for businesses, especially in times of crisis. In the article, Benns (2015) cites a prison in Angola as an example. Prisoners have no constitutional rights in this area; they can be forced to work as punishment for their crimes. The author also says that many prisons create programs that make it possible, for a certain fee, to rent prisoners as hired brigades (Benns, 2015). As an argument for the work of prisoners, the prison of Angola makes the argument that work is a way of rehabilitation for the prisoner. Prison managers claim that such actions foster self-respect and a sense of self-importance to society. Another idea is that criminals should work and earn money just as hard as people outside prison, even though special fees support American jails. Although prisoners receive money for their labor, most of them might never get them because of long sentences, ruthless exploitation, and poor detention conditions.
The article also focuses on the problem of racism within the United States judicial system. It is emphasized that in many prisons, there are people who were there through no fault of their own, and most of them will be African-Americans (Benns, 2015). Black people face not only the everyday manifestation of prejudice but also the biases embedded in prison institutions. The war on drugs also has a significant impact on the number of African-American prisoners in U.S. prisons.
The almost zero tolerance of society for people of another race leads to the fact that black people were forced to leave schools, were bullied, and deprived of education. Such treatment led to psychological trauma, turning to drugs and crime as the only available way to survive. It is for these reasons that many soon end up in prison. The War on Drugs is a global campaign, led by the country’s federal government, about drug prohibition, military aid, and military intervention in order to reduce the illegal drug trade in America (Gallagher et al., 2020). Racial prejudice and actions of the authorities in this war caused a significant number of black people jailed who were not involved in any way in the sale or creation of prohibited substances. The War on Drugs led to the disregard of human rights systems in an attempt to achieve specific goals.
Today, the United States is known all over the world as a state that protects the rights and interests of its citizens in every possible way. However, this does not always apply to prisoners, especially African American people. The prison industry is one of the fastest-growing industries in the country. In American prisons, the labor force of convicts is bought and used by companies to get richer since it is the most affordable one.
References
Benns, W. (2015). American Slavery, Reinvented.The Atlantic.
Gallagher, A., Raffle, E., & Maulana, Z. (2020). Failing to fulfil the responsibility to protect: the war on drugs as crimes against humanity in the Philippines. The Pacific Review, 33(2), 247-277.