Must be joking jsnipy.
Anyway..
So 99.3% percent of our population isn't in prison? Holy crap that's slavery!!! Disregarding how that's an insult to the American slavery institution
which held huge amounts of people and was the backbone of the south's economy or how in Iran, China and a few other places you run a higher chance of getting executed than imprisoned I'll instead argue around the video.
First off Stephen Fryer seems a bit ignorant of how our system works. The three strikes policy is determined state by state. It's not a blanket policy that covers all of America. In the my state the prisons are revolving doors since we don't have a three strikes policy. Furthermore in states with three strikes laws a certain amount of them have to be forceful felonies like assaults and mugging.
The stuff produced by the workers are used to ease the burden of tax payers for holding up the the prison. Free up state money for other programs or rolling over any profit into crime prevention is smart management.
We couldn't pay them a fair wage (whatever the hell that is) and still make enough to cover even a bit of prison cost or compete with foreign products. The reason why prisoners produce so much of that stuff is because labor laws in the U.S. don't allow domestic companies to compete with Chinese slave wages (for better or for worse). It's wage laws and economics. Not a conspiracy to keep the brother enslaved.
Finally, most of those people are there on their own in the first place. My heart breaks for the people in there for victimless crimes like selling some pot and stuff but in the end it's not like we have groups going into Detroit to capture and enslave workers.
But whatever Stephen Fry so clever tehehehe
Now if you want to have a discussion about the U.S. industrial prison complex and how that's a mess we have to work out I would be very interested. But the video in the OP is Dilbert territory.
