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California enslaves 400 prisoners to fight wildfires.
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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Fire camp is a program that most prisoners actually want to get into. They get to learn useful skills, the accommodations are better, and the prisoners there don't want to get removed from the program so they're unlikely to be violent. I have a friend who spent 3 years in that program and he greatly preferred it to the prison he transferred from.
Getting paid 50 cents an hour to get put in a life-threatening situation because the state doesn't want to hire firefighters, and would rather pay its prison population a pittance.
Are you under the impression that these prisoners are the only people fighting the fires in California? That is not the case, if that's your impression.
Good people don't make excuses to abuse human beings.
You're a bad person.
You're bad at virtue signaling.
You realize that's not what you're replying to, right? That suggesting lots of people are fighting fires doesn't actually advocate for slavery; right?
Your quick condemnation was neat-o, though.
The post they're replying to is nitpicking. What difference does it make to this argument if only some of the firefighters are slaves? The point is that slave labor is being employed to avoid paying all the people fighting the fire a reasonable amount.