Chelsea, I saw this article and I just thought this is something that we have to talk about. And obviously it's not going to be good news, but has that ever stopped us? Not you. And I think only sometimes is the answer. And that is not one of those times. So Chelsea, we know the Civil War in the US, it outlawed slavery, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, we did that. The 13th Amendment. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There is actually a loophole in the 13th Amendment, which is... I'm sorry, there's a loophole?
Yes. Okay. And I know we were just talking about free men, but this is not one of those loopholes. It is, except as punishment for a crime, slavery is abolished. Right. I did know that, like prisoners, right? Yeah. And this article comes from the Associated Press, AP News. It was posted on January 29th, 2024, so incredibly recent. And it was written by Robin McDowell and Margie Mason. Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands. What?
A hidden path to America's dinner table begins here at an unlikely source, a former southern slave plantation that is now the country's largest maximum security prison. Unmarked trucks are packed with prison-raised cattle, roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for pennies an hour, or sometimes nothing at all.
After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by the Associated Press, another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chain for giants like McDonald's, Walmart, and Cargill. Why is this not surprising? Intrafit invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world's largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by US prisoners nationwide.
According to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that ties hundreds of millions of dollars within agricultural products to goods sold on the open market. They are among America's most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement.
They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job. The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chain of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens. From frosted flake cereal and ballpark hot dogs to gold, metal, flour, Coca-Cola, and rice land rice.
They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger's, Target, Aldi, and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including two countries, that have had products blocked from entering the US for using forced or prison labor.
Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor, but it's completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor and to help rebuild the South's shattered economy after the Civil War. Entrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned, except as punishment for a crime.
That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year. Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where the slaves harvested cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane more than 150 years ago.
With some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past, in Louisiana, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, men working on the farm line will stoop over crops stretching far into the distance. And I don't think I need to tell everybody, but I probably should. Most of these people who are doing the work are black. I was just gonna say they're probably all black because of... I mean, it's a huge problem. The cycle of all this.
Poverty and crime cycle is pretty terrible. Yeah, yeah. Is this done? No, it's a lot more. I just want to read a few more paragraphs and I'll be done because I... You should go read it as a huge article. Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola. During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men working with little or no water passing out in triple digit heat.
Some days he said workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, citing knowing the potential consequences. Quote, They come maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you, and beat you again. Said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn't commit.
He was told he would serve 10 and a half years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn't until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him when he was 73. So he was 22 when he went to jail. The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 70s, just as Ingram entered the system, disproportionately hitting people of color.
Now with about 2 million people locked up, US prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multi-billion dollar empire, extending far beyond the classic images of prisoners, stamping license plates, working on road crews, and battling wildfires. And I think that's as far as I'm gonna go. There's a lot more. I highly recommend reading it. It implicates a lot of the products that you know and at least consume. That made me very uncomfortable to say. I'm glad you read it.
I had never thought about it because obviously I knew about it with prisoners, but my thoughts, I don't feel like this is right at all. And you said that this law was initially, and this is the thing with laws. I mean, things change over time. They said that it was to rebuild the economy in the south after the civil war, right? Yeah, which do you know? I don't know if you know this Chelsea, but that was over 150 years ago at this point. So obviously not a thing any longer.
And now you have big corporations taking advantage of this and making slavery a thing again, to parts of society that are more prone to that cycle of poverty and being put into prison and stuff like that in a country where having like a gram of weed is going to put you in jail. And the jails are like pack full in the United States because it's a business. Yeah. And they need that cheap labor. This is infuriating. And it's the big corporations that are taking advantage of a loophole in a slavery.
And to put it bluntly to the public, not us because we're not American, but the public pays to house, secure, clothe and feed these people. And the corporations get basically work for nothing. They don't do anything for these people. Like it is literal slavery. I can't even. This makes me so angry. Yeah. Anyhow, please go read that article. It is very interesting and there's a lot more to it. So that will give you guys something to do over the next 48 hours. Yeah. Be angry.
And then I'm going to hear this again and be angry all over again. I guess that's good. I have to keep being angry about this. Yeah. And that's the one thing that's super important is don't let this go away. Just like they said, this is on the ballot in a lot of states. So maybe we'll see some change with this one. But who knows? The big thing is just don't let it go away. Anyhow, bye. Bye.