US prison inmates used as slave labor for mil/ind defense contractors
Through the US Government owned company UNICOR, thanks to Federal Acquisition Regulation's "mandatory source clause", federal inmates build the tools of war for defense contractors like Raytheon, Haliburton, and Lockheed Martin, which are then purchased by the US Government at nearly no overhead cost. Effectively laundering money through contractors themselves by utilizing a near slave labor force. In general, federal inmates earn about 23 cents an hour building missile parts and various tools of war in the 110 UNICOR factories stationed within 65 federal prisons. Their pay is largely withheld. Those same defense contractors then fund global think tanks that push for things like mandatory minimums for low level drug offenders and lockup quotas etc. in order to pack their labor force. We can see here, as violent offenses fell in the USA, the system corrected the flow of near-slave labor by imposing incredibly harsh sentences on low level drug offenders, purposefully creating exponential growth in the number of incarcerated individuals that could be used to build weapons at massively reduced cost to the US Gov.
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Source PDF from a secret Congressional report released by Wikileaks: http://file.wikileaks.org/file/crs/RL32380.pdf