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Aaron Cameron's avatar

If my sad sack Oakland A’s aren’t wearing “CHICO’S BAIL BONDS” on the backs of their jerseys next season, Rob Manfred should be fired.

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drmag00's avatar

If you want to really dig into what that clause in the 13th Amendment allows, explore Convict Leasing. Essentially it allows companies to pay the state for prisoners to work for the for free (or nearly free, like 65 cents/hr. There are prisons where companies have built factories on the grounds so they’d have access to that on-demand labor pool.

There was a story earlier this year from Arizona where the state was debating building a new prison even though they still have significant capacity in others. Some of the people arguing for it publicly said that they needed the prison to get the roughly free labor or it would hurt the economy.

When you put that together with the private for-profit prison industry that incentivizes the state to put more people in prison and the drug laws that were written starting in the 1970s with the express purpose (according to the Republicans who wrote them) of putting more Black and Brown people in jail, the picture just gets uglier and uglier.

So yes, we absolutely need to close that loophole in the 13th.

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