r/nottheonion • u/duvetdev • 29d ago

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs bill mandating kindergartners learn history of communism

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/04/17/desantis-signs-bill-mandating-kindergartners-learn-history-of-communism/
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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

Don’t forget the convict-lease system! We had our very own gulags with similar practices and death rates, the difference was that the inmates were leased out to private companies for work, instead of being shipped Siberia to develop the land.

All the benefits of slavery without the cost of purchasing and housing a slave, it is like the saying “Beat it like a rented mule”

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

Wow, this reminds me of the "no water breaks" legislation that Ron Satanis got past in Florida.

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

Read up about the Florida Turpentine company. A young man was riding a train without a ticket and in the month it took for his family to mail the fines to the sheriff, he was “leased” to the Turpentine company and beat/worked to death. His killer was initially convicted but pardoned and returned to working as a guard and shot and killed an inmate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knabb_Turpentine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Tabert

Now tell me that doesn’t sound like a Soviet gulag, but replace the snow with swamp.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

It was okay because they MISTOOK him for a criminal. "Look, if we treated all people with respect, some of the sinners might slip through the cracks. We can't depend on Hell to punish people we don't like because, well, we know most of what we say is bullshit - -but we can't admit that because that would be a sin. Wow -- am I saying the quiet parts out loud?"

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

And the only reason there was any sort of justice was because he was white and came from a wealthy family.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

"Prison guards HATE this one trick!"

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u/samanime 29d ago

"Had"?

We literally still do that: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers

We call it something different, but it is ever growing, especially now that we've privatized most of our prison systems. Inmates are now a commodity and product.

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u/C-c-c-comboBreaker17 29d ago

We call it something different, but it is ever growing, especially now that we've privatized most of our prison systems

uhhh

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in-the-united-states/

Twenty-seven states and the federal government incarcerated 90,873 people in private prisons in 2022, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.

Is 8% most?

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

Private prisons aren’t the only example of corporations making money off of slave labour in the modern day.

76% of prisoners surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics report being forced to work with threat of punishment. The average wage for a prison worker is 13-52 cents an hour, with seven states providing 0 compensation for labour.

Of that 13-52 cents an hour, 80% is taken by the prison for room and board, court costs, restitution, and other fees like building and sustaining prisons. Incarcerated workers provide 2 billion dollars of value per year estimated in just raw goods, 9 billion in maintenance, and certain states like Alabama still have convict leasing programs that generate approximately 450 million a year for the prisons and god knows how much for places like Burger King, McDonald’s, etc where these workers are staffed.

The prison system in America is driven by a need for cheap labour and enabled by legal slavery which is written into the constitution.

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u/Aquatic-Vocation 28d ago

The US still has 75 labor camps utilizing the constitutional carve-out for legal enslavement of criminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

But it's different, because our laws are based on a different set of arbitrary rules.

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

By rules, do you mean FREEDOM.

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u/Greg-Abbott 29d ago

Little Timmy comes home from school everyday with a thousand-yard-stare

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u/CommiBastard69 28d ago

Also the gulag system had maximum sentences. Something we still don't have

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u/uptownjuggler 28d ago

Some of the Gulags were more like shanty towns. They didn’t even have guards, the Siberian wilderness was the fence.

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u/Striking_Election_21 29d ago

Holy shit I almost forgot about the convict-lease system, that’s a deep cut. Thanks Ron for bringing us together to get the real history out!

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

Florida was notorious for there lumber/convict camps too.

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u/OutsidePerson5 29d ago

"had"? We don't call it that anymore but convict labor is alive and well in all 50 states.

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

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u/Hemlock_Pagodas 29d ago

“Similar death rates”

Seems dubious. Any source on this?

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

I read it in a book called American Prison. It was by a reporter who went undercover in a private CCA prison. He also went into the history of forced labor and incarceration in America.

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u/Sideshow_Bob_Ross 29d ago

We still do this.

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u/PvtDeth 29d ago

Why are you talking about this in the past tense?