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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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What is your definition of slavery that would mean there is more slavery now than before the civil war?
Well there's absolutely a lot of real and actual slavery across the country, from domestic servants who are being held against their will, to sex slaves, and of course the numbers scale up with our population. So our population during the civil war was 31+ million, with close to 4 million of that being slaves, now we have 331+ million people, if you combine the instances of domestic and indentured servitude with sexual slavery, then add in those wrongfully in the prison system it scales to being much more than the sub 4 million in slavery during the civil war.
I know a lot of people would want to say "but the prison system is prisoners who committed crimes" but a lot of people are in prison because of failed justice, or on poverty based offenses, some of which compile with other petty offenses. Now also another caveat is that prison work isn't usually compulsory, it's normally voluntary, but one can argue that it's the prison that has the leverage over these people volunteering or not.
Overall these statistics aren't easy to calculate because modern day slavers want to hide and obfuscate their crimes, but it's there, it exists, and it exists in places you may not expect, like the next time you're sitting in a park in Manhattan consider the fact that one of the many domestic workers present may in fact be enslaved against their will, and this could be said in LA, Miami, Atlanta, anywhere in the US.
And even if someone is in the prison system for entirely correct reasons, forcing them to work is still slavery. I don't care if they're the most guilty awful person ever, if they need to be put in prison then put them in prison. That's the purpose of prison.
Trying to get economic benefit out of holding people in prison is not a slippery slope, it's a slippery cliff. The moment you try to justify it for anyone you're opening the door to a moral disaster.
But let's be objective with this, most of prison work is voluntary, and the desire to do something, anything, sometimes gets the best of us and due to that we'll do the volunteering, it's important to make that distinction, especially when I've been there and done that.
Now the obvious differences are prisons like Angola in Louisiana, which still has the same chaingang that they were depicted to have in movies decades behind us, there's no voluntary work there, those are prison work camps/concentration camps, and are tantamount to slavery, if not outright slavery, and are violent as hell, and these types of prisons can be found all across the American South, but especially along the Gulf Coast.
"You can work and spend your entire pittance on ramen noodles, or you can go stir-crazy in your cell and eat stewed cardboard" is a voluntary choice only in the most strictly pedantic sense.
That's being a bit Hyperbolic, and these aren't the types of prisons or jails where you're stuck in a cell all day, that's your misconception, the only people who are locked up like that are the ones that have proven themselves too dangerous to be around others, or at least that's how it's supposed to be when our prison system is working correctly, and the only prisons where that's consistently their prison existence is the SuperMax prisons, because again, those people are too dangerous to let roam without supervision.
Mostly it's just a chance to get out from behind the walls and the fences, sure they'd rather be free, but I'm sure we'd all rather they not do shut that gets them put in prison, and regardless of your feelings towards prisons people who commit crimes, real crimes, belong there, or some form of prison that emphasizes rehabilitation.
Opinions on whether it's "working correctly" is likely going to vary depending on whether you're running a factory that depends on prison labor. Right now I think those factory owners would agree that it's working correctly.
And you are certain there is no reprisal against anyone that refuses?
Most guards could not give a shit less, they're there to do their jobs and go home, so if you're not going to volunteer some other person will, or they'll just take whomever did volunteer. Sure you might run into some dickhead guard that demands it but that guard is just a symptom of our broken system and is most likely operating in a manner that would get them in trouble if the right people are notified.
But as I said to another person who replied to me that then you have prisons like Angola, which are basically just concentration camps, they staff the place with brutal guards purposely to keep the place viciously violent, and every single one of the prisons like Angola should be shut down with the staff prosected.
So it really depends on the prison, but the majority are of the more mellow variety, although overpopulation makes the more mellow prisons drastically less mellow.
The Private Prisons have contracts to fulfill, your optimistic belief that folks all volunteer is laughable.
I have no idea who's downvoting your comments or why, you're providing a perspective most of us nerds don't have.
If you aren't accounting for the change in population and you're just comparing the estimated number of slaves, then you are definitely correct. However, I think its probably better to measure what percentage of the population is made up of slaves.
I agree, but that's also what I'm trying to say is that the natural scale of the population increase will still scale out to be a higher slavery total than back then, but that's total numbers, the percentages would be vastly different, like during the civil war era slaves were about 9.6% of the population of the US, but because of slavery not being tracked so closely now we couldn't get an accurate total for slavery in the modern era, and there would be nitpicking about what counts as slavery and what does not.
Always loved this logic.
There's more people enslaved today than there ever has been in the history of the world
No no, let's not think about it that way -
The percentage of people that are slaves is roughly the same or decreasing 🥰🥰🥰
Obviously there are going to be more total enslaved people now, it scales with the population. The problem with looking at it that way is that it doesn't actually tell you if the situation is improving. All it tells you is that there are way more people now. That's why you look at a percentage. That will tell you how bad the problem was, how much better its gotten, and how much better it needs to get.
I'm not trying to argue that everything is ok because a smaller percentage of people are enslaved now. A percentage is simply the more useful method of measuring how common slavery is and comparing it to different times.
As well as the domestic slavery that DigitalTraveler42 mentions, we've off-shored a lot of slavery.
Companies serving US markets set up their pricing in a way that encourages producers to use slaves or they buy from the lowest price and either don't ask questions or ask questions after the order is filled. Coffee, chocolate, tea, textiles and garment production all involve slave labour at the tacit request of large companies that are often based in the US.
The cost benefits of slavery are factored into a lot of our food and clothes. That's an important part of our economy that we can't separate out just because we've set up supply chains with deniability in mind.