Prison Labor: The Hidden Cost of Cheap Deals

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Lunch time for the average “nine to five” employee can be one of the most enjoyable experiences of the day. Restaurants and businesses like coffee shops realize this, so, they want to offer the best deals they can to garner their consumer’s attention. Four dollar meals and happy hour coffee deals satisfied hunger and the wallets of both the businesses and famished employees for what appears to be of little cost. Except, there is a cost and it is at the expense of nearly thousands of prisoners. Companies like Wendy’s or Starbucks benefit from labor provided by prisoners who, coincidently, get paid an average of four dollars a day.
With the high rise of imprisonment emanates more incentives for businesses to make a higher profit. This, in turn, punishes the poor and the disadvantage through the form of inexpensive labor and unlawful detention. According to Bryan Stevenson, lawyer and author of Just Mercy, incarcerations of US citizens have risen from three hundred thousand people to two million over a forty-year range (Stevenson 15). This unprecedented rise in imprisonment and the entities that benefit from it has …show more content…

Since former President Nixon’s declaration on the War on Drugs, imprisonments have been on a continuous rise. Citizens caught with illegal substances have been sentenced to harsh punishments in the form of lengthy detentions. What appears to be a great movement to halt the use of drugs has been counterproductive. “Between 1980 and 1997, the population of drug offender inmates alone increase by 1000%” according to David N Khey, a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Louisiana and co-author of The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment. In Professor Khey’s article “Privatization of Prison”, he correlates the rise of incarcerations to businesses and governments who take advantage of the ever growing prison population (Khey, “Privatization of

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