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Back On The Chain Gang: The New Prison Labor Paradigm

1478 Words6 Pages

Free Labor From Behind Bars
Picture yourself laying on a thin foam mattress at the end of a long demanding day. You lay tired and restless all at once behind a set of cold steel bars. You’re referred to as inmate on a daily basis, slowly losing sight of your identity, who you are, and who you want to be all because for you time stands still behind the concrete walls and heavily fenced perimeter you call home. Though there is a sense of normality, you go to work every day just like the people who are not referred to as inmates and who live on the other side of the fence. You do not get paid much but the job keeps you busy and sane. Are you upset that you are being used for cheap labor? Did you deserve to have all of your rights stripped after you were incarcerated? Or are you just happy time passes faster and you have a sense of purpose because of a prison work program?
Abby Stein, author of Back on the Chain Gang: The New/Old Prison Labor Paradigm, obtained her Ph.D. in …show more content…

She focuses on the downside to prison work programs starting with her thesis when she used the words, “the naïve embrace of corporate solutions” (Stein 2). Further in the article she provided Elk, M. and Sloan, B. (2011) “The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor “The Nation, August 1, 2011. (Stein 4) During this point of the article she discussed how public workers could be replaced with prison workers. Stein reveals her feelings in this paragraph when she states “And surprise! Now ALEC can help you out with that pesky prison overcrowding problem too:” (Stein 5) I feel she became a bit sarcastic about the subject which also tells me she could have a slight bias. Throughout the “Discussion” point of her article she thoroughly discussed how an unnecessary amount of people are incarcerated, how prisoners are not trained for legitimate work and are likely to reenter the prison system, and lastly how she personally is not “apt to believe it quite yet”(Stein

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