Hard Labor

"Judge said 'Twenty years of hard labor. To the chain gang you gotta go.'" - from an old folk song

I don't think they have chain gangs anymore but, now that I think of it, I have seen in movies where a convicted criminal was sentenced to so many years of "hard labor". Last I heard, the military courts were still doing that, so maybe it's a federal thing like Old Dog said. When I was in the army, they used to send prisoners from the local stockade out on work details. I was assigned to guard those guys a couple of times and, in this case, it certainly wasn't hard labor, and the prisoners were happy to do it because it got them out of the stockade for a few hours. Of course, our local stockade held mostly minor offenders and people in pre-trial confinement, more like the Cheboygan County Jail than a federal prison. I always thought that only "trustees" who weren't considered a flight risk were allowed to do stuff like that, which is where I got the idea that they were all volunteers. I think it's reasonable to expect a certain amount of inside work from prisoners, but I don't know about sending them to outside jobs with private corporations. I suppose it would be all right as long as they weren't abused because it would teach them employment skills that they could use after serving their sentences. Then again, they shouldn't be putting other people out of work in the process.

I don't think that the 13th Amendment was deliberately formulated to promote prison labor. I think they already were using prison labor and the 13th Amendment allowed that to continue. By the way, it was the 13th Amendment that legally ended slavery in the U.S. The Emancipation Proclamation was just a wartime propaganda piece. It only "freed" the slaves in the states that had seceded, not the ones who lived in the few slave holding states that did not secede. Since the seceded states were in a state of rebellion at the time, they certainly did not free all their slaves just because Lincoln told them to. If they were going to do that, they wouldn't have seceded in the first place.

The author of Old Dog's link seems to imply that the past and current use of prison labor specifically targets Black people. Is he saying that White prisoners are not required to work? I find that hard to believe. I have heard that Blacks account for a disproportionate number of the prison population, so maybe that's what he was referring to. That may be because Blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes, or that they are caught more often than White criminals, or that most White criminals can afford better lawyers, but I doubt that the whole criminal justice system is geared towards perpetuating Black slavery. It might have been in the old chain gang days, but certainly not now.

I think that anybody can be conscripted to fight a wildfire. The reason I say this is that I knew a guy at the paper mill who was helping fight a wildfire in his neighborhood when he told them he had to leave now and go to work his shift at the mill. They told him that he wasn't going anywhere, and that they would explain it to his boss at the mill later. It was kind of like being called to jury duty, but not as random because they needed somebody right now and he was already there.

I believe that Moses was the first one to tell the Israelites not to eat pork and some other stuff. The Muslims recognize Moses as a prophet, so that's probably where they got the idea. Moses may have been partially motivated by health concerns, but he also wanted to set his people apart from the Canaanites they were planning to conquer so they wouldn't assimilate each other.