From Truthout:
Johnny Perez was arrested and incarcerated two days after his daughter was born, a heart-wrenching fact by itself. Perez wanted to be there for his daughter, but he was stuck at a state prison in Coxsackie, New York. He worked hard to save money, but his prison job sewing bed sheets started at 17 cents an hour. There were no sick days, no time off and refusal to work could result in solitary confinement, a form of torture. Perez wanted to support his daughter, but there wasn’t much left after paying for the expensive phone calls home and other hidden costs of a prison sentence.
“I couldn’t do jack with 17 cents an hour,” Perez said in an interview. “It took me three years to save up enough to buy my daughter a bike.”
Perez is now the prison program director at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a group committed to ending torture in U.S. policy, including forced labor and solitary confinement in jails and prisons. Labor trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to induce people to work, and it is a serious crime often denounced by politicians. However, Perez says the definition of “labor trafficking” sounds just like what millions of incarcerated workers experience in state and federal prisons. Continue reading >>>
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