Who's on cleanup duty?

I was going to write an economic article tonight for you, but Mia Mingus, fabulous activist that she is, tweeted this story from AlterNet this afternoon and I have to write about it. There's a similar article up at thenation.com. The other post will be up soon.

In short, BP, who since capping the gushing well in the Gulf early this week has been a bit more off the radar than they should be, has been using local prison labor to clean up Gulf beaches. I'm a southerner born and raised. I don't know why I didn't think to write about this before. When I initially saw photos of the cleanup crews working on the beaches I noticed that they were pretty much all African-American men. That should have been all the tip off I needed to start digging and see where BP's labor force is coming from. I didn't. But thankfully several other people are on top of the issue. Although it's been WAY underreported in my opinion if it's only being mentioned now. This was also a topic for discussion for Mike Malloy on my way home from work tonight. It seems he was keyed in from The Nation article.

So, lets take a look at this situation critically. BP is a foreign corporation. The US has higher incarceration rates than most industrialized nations and the inmate population is heavily skewed toward men and racial minorities. Inmates have few recognized rights when it comes to work including little to no pay. BP gets a tax write-off for every inmate they employ in the clean up effort. And every employed inmate is one less Gulf Coast resident who isn't being hired in an economy where jobs are already scarce.

According to the Pew Center on the States 1 in 31 US adults are either in prison or on parole. Men are five times more likely to be imprisoned than women and African-Americans are four times more likely to be imprisoned than white Americans. Is it any wonder that BP is using our prison population to do this dirty and dangerous work? And then denying them the rights to talk to the public and the press as well as the right to wear protective gear and respirators? No one else in society seems to care about these people, their welfare, or their rights. So BP is just following our lead. They found a cheap, disposable work force to clean up their mess for them. They don't have to pay anyone to do the clean up and they get a tax break for doing it to boot! BP has been all about saving money here from the beginning. In fact, the drive to save/make as much money as possible is why we have this problem. Just days before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig as they were finishing the drilling a BP employee made the decision to use six pins to keep the riser pipe in line rather than the recommended twenty-one. That's #2 on this list published on BP's own website for reasons the well failed.

This is about BP and their behavior, make no mistake. But it's about much more than that. We (that is Americans) have been using free or nearly free prison labor for years. Starting with the mental image of prisoners stamping license plates we now uses these people to clean up highways, mow public right-of-ways, make goods for government usage including basic protective gear for the military, and the list goes on. This is about race relations in America. When African-American men are over-represented in the prison population, and we willingly employ prisoners to do dirty, dangerous, and difficult labor for little or no pay, that's called slavery. We simply find different ways to justify it in our modern era. This Prison-Industrial Complex is the true reason for such harsh sentencing in non-violent drug offender cases that pass though the US Justice System. An excellent example is the 100 to 1 ratio for mandatory minimum sentencing for cocaine and crack as outlined below from www.drugwarfacts.org:

As a result of the 1986 Act, federal law10 requires a five-year mandatory minimum penalty for a first-time trafficking offense involving five grams or more of crack cocaine, or 500 grams or more of powder cocaine, and a ten-year mandatory minimum penalty for a first-time trafficking offense involving 50 grams or more of crack cocaine, or 5,000 grams or more of powder cocaine. Because it takes 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to trigger the same mandatory minimum penalty, this penalty structure is commonly referred to as the '100-to-1 drug quantity ratio.'"

What is not explained here is that many many times more African-Americans are arrested in possession of crack than white Americans. It's important that we keep feeding the system after all.

So, we feed the system and BP makes use of it. And the end result is that when BP makes an error and releases millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and then makes only a half-hearted attempt to keep it off the area's beaches, they call in the free labor to clean it all up later. Nobody will care.