Welcome to the circus of UNICOR, where the government plays ringmaster and inmates are the unwilling performers!
Picture this: It’s 1934, the Great Depression is in full swing, and FDR decides, “Hey, why not solve unemployment by enslaving prisoners?” And voila! Federal Prison Industries is born, later rebranding as UNICOR because nothing says “we’re totally not exploiting people” like a weird acronym!
Fast forward to today, and we’ve got ourselves a bona fide slave empire! UNICOR boasts about “employing” 16,000 inmates annually. Employment? Ha! More like glorified indentured servitude with a side of false hope! But wait, there’s more! UNICOR pays a whopping $0.23 to $1.15 per hour! Wow, how generous! I’m sure those pennies will really add up when they’re released into a world where a cup of coffee costs more than their daily wage! Oh, wait! Didn’t they just rid the earth of the penny? Will they round up or down for slave labor?
And let’s not forget the other 92% of work-eligible inmates who don’t even get the “privilege” of UNICOR slavery. They’re stuck with regular old prison slavery, earning a luxurious $5.25 per month! That’s right, folks, less than 20 cents a day! Who needs minimum wage when you can have minimum existence? But fear not! UNICOR is here to save the day with their magical “skill development” program! Learn how to operate a forklift or do basic accounting, because nothing says “rehabilitation” like preparing inmates for the booming 1950s job market!
Oh, and did I mention UNICOR is “self-sustaining”? That’s right, it costs taxpayers nothing! Except, you know, our souls and the very concept of human rights. But hey, small price to pay for “reduced recidivism,” right? Wrong. For starters, recidivism stats are often used as a smokescreen to justify barbaric practices (like indefinite incarceration and penal labor). By excluding those who never leave prison or are released only when they’re too old to reoffend, these numbers paint a distorted picture of success while attempting to hide systemic failures of the criminal justice system (and still failing). True reform requires dismantling exploitative practices—not manipulating data to sustain them.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more dystopian, remember this is all perfectly legal thanks to that 13th Amendment loophole! Who needs abolition when you can have government-sanctioned slavery with a side of “job training”? So, there you have it! UNICOR: Where slavery is freedom, exploitation is opportunity, and human dignity goes to die!
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