"Incarceration in prison or a local jail sets poor people up for exploitation in a forced labor system. New Deal laws once prohibited the use of prison labor except for state institutions. Businesses won the right to use prison labor in 1979. They won an exception from minimum wage laws for prison workers in 1995. This led to the employment of hundreds of thousands of inmates of federal and state prisons for mere pennies per hour. Many are forced to work in unsafe conditions without protective equipment, because workplace health and safety laws do not apply to prison workers."
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Sources
Elizabeth S. Anderson. Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. (2023). p. 271.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
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Incarceration in the United States
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