You know they had something up their sleeves, and it wasn’t no popsicle! In 1971, President Nixon fixed the profit problem by declaring a “war on drugs.” In 1970, almost 200,000 Americans were in prison. By 1985, there were almost 482,000.9 By the end of 2019, there were 1.4 million people locked up in U.S. prisons, and Black Americans were incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of whites. Private prisons aren’t the only ones profiting from this stolen labor. It’s the $1.3 billion earned by telecom companies that have exclusive contracts with prison systems. It’s the food companies that
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