The prison-industrial complex allows the government and businesses to profit off slave labor. Slavery isn't gone, it's evolved into overflow imprisonment. People in prison do SO MUCH labor for our day to day products and get no insurance, no days off, no unions, nor raises. They make about 90 CENTS to $4 a DAY. They are treated as less than human. 

Whitney Benns writes in The Atlantic, "We now incarcerate more than 2.2 million people, with the largest prison population in the world, and the second highest incarceration rate per capita. Our prison populations remain racially skewed. With few exceptions, inmates are required to work if cleared by medical professionals at the prison. Punishments for refusing to do so include solitary confinement, loss of earned good time, and revocation of family visitation. For this forced labor, prisoners earn pennies per hour, if anything at all." This means we have created a society that has made slavery acceptable within legal confines, but as is evident, our legal system is rigged and racist–therefore flawed and not a relable parameter as to who deserves to be in prison to begin with.

On top of that, when/if they are released from prison, they are not readily allowed back in the workforce even though they'd been doing similar work while in prison. Thus, due to their circumstance, they are more likely to go back to prison. According to PrisonPolicy.org, "At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail in a given year will return to jail over the course of a year [and] At least 428,000 people will go to jail three or more times over the course of a year – the first national estimate of a population often referred to as “frequent utilizers.”" There is much on recidivism even by the Bureau of Justice in a special report called, "2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014)". 

What I propose is that all the listed companies STOP using prison labor in ANY shape or form and stop working with suppliers that rely on prison labor. Signing this petition would be in support of these businesses to make such a change. 

Image by @Camilo Jimenez from Unsplash