The countertop of this home was made by prisoners.

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image showing The countertop of this home was made by prisoners.

rando4724 on February 15th, 2021 at 13:46 UTC »

I'll just leave this here..

TL;DR:

Men at the woodshop are paid anywhere from one to three dollars per hour.... From this salary, men pay for daily necessities—the infirmary, for instance, charges a starting fee of five dollars for new medical issues, and basic commissary items tend to cost five times the retail price.

The Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC) Industries woodshop at the Maine State Prison is not alone in rebranding carceral slavery as ameliorative. Across the state of California, incarcerated people fight fires for two dollars a day. In Boston, they clear snow off train tracks at 20 cents per hour, where union workers would be paid a negotiated $30 to work the long, grueling hours in below-freezing temperatures. This practice is particularly prevalent in private prisons, where corporate stockholders—who make money off of prisoners’ work—have lobbied for longer sentences, where prisoners can receive as little as 17 cents per hour for factory labor and facilities aren’t subject to the same rules of disclosure as a federal institution or publicly held company.

The message is not particularly new. For centuries prisons have operated under similar convictions: Laws have accumulated to create a thinly-veiled system of slavery, and their implementation changes shape according to contemporary acceptability. Where prisoners once broke rocks, they now provide goods and services that the outside population might deem useful. The rhetoric, meanwhile, increasingly frames such sanctioned work as salubrious for anyone who might dare to question it. In the liberal consciousness, it seems, prison labor is more palatable when couched in the lexicon of efficiency or creative expression.

Maine has sold its program to tourists as a form of arts-and-crafts nostalgia: Where cottage industries for handmade items have shrunk or evaporated, the story goes, these men work together to produce interesting objects. But the state’s labor program is no different from any other; its artisanal veneer may even make it more insidious. The majority of men are fulfilling monotonous duties. They aren’t learning marketable skills. At the MDOC, the chosen method of rehabilitation is conveniently braided with punishment. Moreover, such punishment provides direct material benefit to the MDOC, those who are responsible for these men’s captivity in the first place. And yet we on the outside are told to think it is good to feel purpose—and that a task, however extractive, is one kind of purpose. So we give cover to this lie, purchasing wooden bowls and re-upholstering chairs at bargain prices.

rustysaiyan69 on February 15th, 2021 at 13:58 UTC »

Weird way of saying you own a product made by slaves

Edit: the BNB owners

mekdot83 on February 15th, 2021 at 14:37 UTC »

I would be so pissed to have a manufacturer's stamp visible on my countertop, regardless of where it was made.