(Blog) Mean America: Punishing Poverty – The Prison Industrial Complex
“While most claim that work is not mandatory the truth is that refusal gets you extra scrutiny and, surprise, more punishment for minor infractions. Almost all of the jobs pay well below the minimum wage with some as low as 74 cents a day. This labor goes to subsidize the bottom line of some of the largest companies in America as well as hundreds of smaller enterprises. Just how this meshes with all of the ‘free market’ talk we hear from the corporate lobby is puzzling. A theoretically free market would need to compete for the labor and pay’“market rates.’ In this system a worker is contribution value to the corporate bottom line for every hour they are underpaid.”