This is the big "New Deal" of the 21st century. And it shows how rapidly we forget the lessons and the history of the Real New Deal of FDR and the last century.
In recent months, a broad, cross-ideological coalition has pressed forward to reform mandatory minimum prison sentencing. In some cases mandatory minimum sentencing can lead to a lifetime in jail for nonviolent offenders. But a strange group has appeared on lobby disclosure forms reviewed by Republic Report. Prison labor companies are attempting to influence the bill, and they refuse to reveal what they’re doing and why.
The group is called the Correctional Vendors Association, an organization that represents companies that use prison labor to produce everything from furniture to clothing goods. CVA has spent $240,000 on lobbying over the past year, and forms show the organization is interested in shaping the outcome of the Justice Safety Valve Act, or S.619, a bill proposed Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) to allow judges to impose a sentence below the mandatory minimum in certain drug-related cases.
The prison labor group, which is managed and represented by a lobbying firm called the Leonard Group, has refused to answer multiple e-mails and phone calls from Republic Report.
Lee Fang, in the above cited article, goes on to explain why mandatory and lengthy prisoning sentencing is a really big deal:
In theory, prison labor companies could stand to benefit from harsh sentencing. The more prisoners in the system, the more cheap labor to produce goods for pennies on the dollar.
Federal Prison Industries Inc, a government-owned corporation that is part of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, employs thousands of federal inmates to work at an assortment of prison factories and workshops that produces over $900 million in goods for various contractors, including military clothing. Critics have accused the system for exploiting prison labor — many earning between 12 cents and 40 cents per hour — to the detriment of American businesses and free labor.
But it's all part of the
ongoing Republican agenda:
Not to Republicans, of course. .. They oppose every attempt by government to reward hard work and protect the rights of workers – unless it applies to the very wealthy. ... the greatest economic boom and the biggest middle class in history. The 40-hour work week. The weekend. Vacations. Child labor laws. The minimum wage. Social Security. Health and safety protection. All of these represented government intervention on the side of working people, to balance the playing field with exploitive employers, and to carve out a realm of family and personal life that could be protected from ceaseless labor.
.... Some on the right have even clamored to bring back child labor. Newt Gingrich suggested poor kids should work as janitors to earn their school lunches, in order to fight the “culture” of poverty. (Like Paul Ryan, he doesn’t seem to see that food is the best answer for hunger.) Utah’s Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee has declared federal child labor laws “unconstitutional,” while up in Maine, wingnut Gov. Paul LePage would like to lower the legal working age from 16 to 12.