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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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What do you think about indentured servitude being called slavery?
I agree that's slavery.
There is slavery in the US prison system as well.
These prisoners are supposedly doing this specific job voluntarily, with pay. That is not indentured servitude.
Being voluntary doesn't contradict slavery. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery
Being paid $0.50 an hour, as opposed to $0.00 an hour, is trivial. If the slave-owners of old societies gave their slaves a penny a day, they would still be slaves for all intents and purposes.
While I personally haven't looked into this specific case, there is a very consistent and ongoing history of forced prison labor in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#Prison_labor
That is forced work on an imprisoned person upon threat of punishment, even if they can theoretically decline it. This is a form of slavery, even if they get paid a dollar an hour.
There is a history of this yes, but there is no signs that this is happening with this specific situation. I even said, if this case had that, it would be slavery.
The website for the program, while can't be fully trusted, explicitly states that this is not the case
Edit: And just to be clear - Yes, they might be forced to do something else if not this, but that's probably up to the prison specifically. That alternative would be slavery, but these people are freely volunteering. They were not enslaved into this as OPs editorialized title implies.
Thanks for bringing up that program site (link, for convenience)
Like you said, it's hard to know the internal situation in the prison, so it's reasonable to want to avoid labeling this specific case as slavery or not without further evidence. The title is ultimately subjective, rather than the objective titles a news community typically encourages (by 'subjective', I'm referring to the fact that different worldviews have different interpretations of slavery, even up to the point where many through history consider regular work to be wage slavery based on a holistic analysis of labor in society)