People long to live in a time of heroes: Advocates of many causes compare them to abolitionism or the civil rights movement, for obvious reasons. A recent campaign focused on allowing adult males to enter all-ages women’s bathrooms invoked Jim Crow laws as an allegory for the situation of “trans women.” But, any thinking citizen and certainly any good Californian should be able to distinguish true gold from fool’s gold. If a state with almost no actual history of slavery has so far opted not to pay “reparations,” and has rejected the claim that low-wage work in the prison shop is “slavery,” this is a very good thing.
On Election Day, Bear Flag Republic voters confronted — along with referenda on increased bond funding for public schools and in-state colleges, the creation of a constitutional right to marriage, and an increase in the $16 per hour minimum wage — a proposal to eliminate so-called involuntary servitude, the California Department of Corrections’s practice of forcing prison inmates to work.
Nothing contained in this blog is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Pacific Research Institute or as an attempt to thwart or aid the passage of any legislation.
Making the incarcerated work is not slavery
Wilfred Reilly
People long to live in a time of heroes: Advocates of many causes compare them to abolitionism or the civil rights movement, for obvious reasons. A recent campaign focused on allowing adult males to enter all-ages women’s bathrooms invoked Jim Crow laws as an allegory for the situation of “trans women.” But, any thinking citizen and certainly any good Californian should be able to distinguish true gold from fool’s gold. If a state with almost no actual history of slavery has so far opted not to pay “reparations,” and has rejected the claim that low-wage work in the prison shop is “slavery,” this is a very good thing.
On Election Day, Bear Flag Republic voters confronted — along with referenda on increased bond funding for public schools and in-state colleges, the creation of a constitutional right to marriage, and an increase in the $16 per hour minimum wage — a proposal to eliminate so-called involuntary servitude, the California Department of Corrections’s practice of forcing prison inmates to work.
Nothing contained in this blog is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Pacific Research Institute or as an attempt to thwart or aid the passage of any legislation.