"The commissioner says that you can take the skills home and use them. Name me one company in the United States — not just New York, but the United States — that presses license plates"
Ronald Dennis, who served 36 years, some of it pressing license plates for Corcraft. "The commissioner says that you can take the skills home and use them. Name me one company in the United States—not just New York, but the United States—that presses license plates. I'm 66 years old, and I still have pain in my hands by putting them dies in the machines."
In an article on prison slave labor, which is something only inmates and former inmates have ANY knowledge of, as the rest of the world is just living day to day with zero interest in the conditions inside prisons, the New York Prison system forces inmates to work for Corcraft just to get toothpaste, showers, soap, and shampoo
"I know men have worked in Corcraft their entire sentence—15 years, 20 years, 25 years," said Jose Saldana of the Release Aging People from Prison campaign, who served 38 years in New York prisons. "Imagine you're working for an entire lifetime and your labor is measured in pennies. When we are released, all in the years, the decades of labor do not count for unemployment benefits. Not a single day."
Saldana urged lawmakers to abolish Corcraft. "If it wasn't designed as a training program, it wasn't designed to help men and women become better humans, if it wasn't designed to help us learn how to take responsibility, help us develop insight into the harm, help us embrace as our moral obligation that we are commanded to repair harm, if it doesn't do any of those things, then what value does it have?"
Soto wasn't optimistic that any legislative investigation could dislodge Corcraft from the prison system. "You got the slaves and you got the masters, right? If the slave say something, who's going to believe the slave over the master?" Soto asked. "Corcraft is a powerful industry that, I'm sorry to say, but I don't really think anybody else in this room is gonna make a difference, because they're so powerful. The masters are at work."
Food for thought.
The system is in place, because someone is making money off it, the inmate labor costs about 65 cents an hour. The products are sold at about market value.
That's pure profit for the people "managing" the company, the New York prison system employs 230 people to manage and run Corcraft.
I'm guessing they are mighty rich.
And that's been the PSA of the week.
Most states stopped pressing them and print them now.
ReplyDeletethey all look fake since they are not 3 dimensional
Yes, I've been posting about the printed ones, peeling ones, paper ones, and digital ones. I'm pretty up to date on license plates.
DeleteBut the state of New York still has prisoners making them, and that's what this article is about