In recent years there has been a growing movement to prevent forced labor in prisons for little or no pay. But in Louisiana — a state that has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country — the debate is unsettled.
BATON ROUGE — Breakfast at Louisiana’s state Capitol includes fresh coffee, cookies and egg sandwiches — made and served in part by incarcerated people working for no pay.
“The drafting of our language didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to,” said state Rep. Edmond Jordan, a Democrat who sponsored the bill to change Louisiana’s constitution before later urging people to vote against the ballot measure that would have ratified it. As many as 800,000 incarcerated people work in prisons across the country, providing more than $9 billion a year in services to those facilities and creating around $2 billion in goods and commodities, according to a study from the University of Chicago’s Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union. The average prison wage is 52 cents an hour, while seven states are not required to pay prisoners for work.
Archille’s colleague and fellow inmate Brodarius Washington, 26, also part of the Trusty program, said working in the cafe at the Capitol is “good because we’re dealing with people. But we don’t get paid and they work us a lot.” They described being forced to work and not having a choice in their job.over their shoulders at the cafe’s manager, expressing fear of repercussions. “They should at least pay us and not try to punish us for talking to people like yourself,” Archille said.
her son was on “lockdown” in the prison while under investigation for speaking to a journalist, which included isolation and loss of certain privileges. In Louisiana, there were more than 27,000 people imprisoned at the end of October 2022, according to the state’s. A 2022 report into captive labor from the University of Chicago and the ACLU found incarcerated people in Louisiana’s prisons earn 2 cents to 40 cents an hour. Costs inside the prisons can be high by comparison, with a visit to the prison doctor costing $3, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“I was a 16-year-old kid who went straight from the classroom to the cotton field,” said Terrance Winn, 49, who gave testimony to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for its 2022 U.S. review about his time at Angola from 1982 to 2020. Describing guards on horseback who oversee the field, he added, “You actually experience and feel what slavery was like for our ancestors.
Given that some felony convictions in the state come with sentences including imprisonment “at hard labor,” Seabaugh explained, people must work while incarcerated. “If you’re going to say a sentence with hard labor is tantamount to indentured servitude, and you outlaw indentured servitude, then you have potentially just invalidated” them, Seabaugh said.
But Decarcerate Louisiana, an organization of formerly incarcerated people who proposed the constitutional amendment to Jordan, urged people to vote “Yes,” saying the bill would have improved the situation for people in prison.the founder of Decarcerate Louisiana. “We didn’t understand what we were voting for.”
South Africa Latest News, South Africa Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Inside Andrew Tate’s $700K Romanian warehouse he turned into a hideoutTate and his brother Tristan were arrested Thursday night for alleged sex trafficking.
Read more »
Inside the Wagner Group: The criminals and contractors fighting Putin's warRussian human rights activist Vladimir Osechkin told Newsweek that as many as 30,000 prisoners have been recruited and deployed to Ukraine.
Read more »
New York man hailed as hero after breaking into school to shelter people from blizzardA man in New York is being hailed a hero after breaking into a school to shelter nearly a dozen people from the massive blizzard.
Read more »
Inside Barbara Walters’ tough final year at ‘The View’The trailblazing journalist, who died Friday at age 93, retired from her five-decade career in 2014 after suffering a series of health setbacks.
Read more »