June 16, 2025 • 31 mins
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the United States of America, where slavery is
still legal under the Thirteenth Amendment. If you've been convicted
of a crime.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You can be legally enslaved.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
If it looks like slavery, it smells like slavery, It
sounds like slavery, it's slavery.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
It turns out, when Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery by ratifying
the Thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty five, they left in
one little exception convicted criminals.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
Locked like everyone's slave, not just black people.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
To everyone out and refusal to work can be met
with harsh punishments like solitary confinement, loss of privileges like visitation,
phone calls, commissary access, recreation time, family visits, good time credits,
and access to books, hygiene products, and snacks. And the
prisoners that do make small amounts of money can have
up to eighty percent of their earnings deducted for various
(00:51):
prison related expenses before they see any of it, while
seven states pay them nothing. So who benefits off of
their labor? And does America have financial upside? And locking
more and more Americans in prison to maintain a steady
supply of state owned slaves. More importantly, did slavery ever
end in America or did it just rebrand itself to
(01:12):
something more socially acceptable. Some may not know, as almost
half of those men and women fighting fires are convicted felon.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
But it's not money these inmates are working for.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
It's their future freedom. Before I speak up with ex
prisoners who are locked up in Texas work in the
deadly hot fields for their master Uncle Sam, I went
to one of the most incarcerated cities in America to
see if they knew that slavery is still legal in America.
You know, it's still legal to enslaves someone if they
commit a crime in the United States of America. You
know what, I think, we're all slaves. Do you know
(01:42):
about that exception?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Wow?
Speaker 6 (01:45):
Yes, I do know that.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
I did not know that the way the government is going, Yeah,
I would believe it.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, zame as a surprise.
Speaker 6 (01:51):
Yes, doesn't surprise me at all.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
No, I'm not surprised. That is disturbing.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Isn't that crazy? Wow? Yeah? Crazy right? No one really
thinks about it.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
That's weird.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Do you support slavery? No, common buddy, I forget that.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
You're in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You know, you shouldn't be enslaved.
Speaker 7 (02:11):
Hell no, no, no, no, shouldn't even be a thought
in mind.
Speaker 6 (02:15):
Ever.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
I'm not saying they should, but it will happen. And
if you do and people don't fight back, that's on them.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Do you think that slavery ever ended in America?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
No, it's just transformed. It's never changed. It's always been
that way.
Speaker 8 (02:26):
If you knew the process of howland didn't service, who went,
and then how it formed slavery, you understand that this
is what's going on now, just not just black people anymore.
So like everyone's slaves, not just black people, not just color,
people of color, everyone now, and everyone's starting.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
To feel it.
Speaker 6 (02:42):
I think that well should be ratified. It should be
a changed for sure.
Speaker 8 (02:45):
No, you shouldn't be legal saying slave somebody if they
commit a crime.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Is there any crime that would warrant whip flashing in
the fields like plantation style? No? Absolutely, not no matter
the crimes, no matter even like a child rapist. Uh
well no one murder, no one just getting way heavy murder. Yeah,
I mean those guys, I don't know if you them, Yeah,
I mean I just yeah, I don't know even if
(03:09):
you're a hainous criminal who commits a terrible crime, No,
there's no slits. Shouldn't be any slips. I mean, I
think all crimes are different levels. I mean you're getting
dealt with in there by other inmates.
Speaker 9 (03:18):
Justice happen on its own, whipping like that or going
back one hundred years or right there.
Speaker 6 (03:22):
The crime and the time shouldn't matter.
Speaker 8 (03:25):
No, forced labor and the severity of their crime shouldn't matter.
And how much time did they get, Like I said,
I'll leave the system to check though, people are getting
more time than they deserve for small things that are
like as much as the grammar.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Leak right draw. The line is that if there's corporations
making money on it, like not employing actual people and
just using the inmates, they don't see a problem, and
then they can't keep the job once they get released
from prison due to the felony status. Oftentimes, Yeah, it's
not good.
Speaker 10 (03:49):
I feel like the federal prison system is just like
recycling black men, specifically due to like the laws that
are being passed, it is hard to make change. The
oligarchy that holds the power is making it harder for
us to reach the.
Speaker 11 (04:01):
Teams throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth Amendment created two citizenships
within the United States.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Freed the slaves.
Speaker 6 (04:06):
That's one citizenship. You're born a United States citizen.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
You're not under the rule of the United States government
that exists today is a corporation.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And we're employees to this corporation or what you're slavery
to that corporation. Grey, y'all have an income tax your
slave under that.
Speaker 7 (04:20):
Let's make sure that we're not putting ourselves in a
position to become slaves. But when you have predators out there,
it's not a choice. The dezel doesn't choose to get
eaten by the lion locked up.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Do you know anyone who's gotten a felony? One of
my best friends, but you're trying to seek back, you know,
and I do.
Speaker 9 (04:36):
I'm the supporting for that, not immediate family, But I
know somebody who has people who God like a long sentences,
care very very minimal things.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
How has that affected their life?
Speaker 6 (04:49):
Forever?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Forever?
Speaker 6 (04:50):
Forever? Go to jail? That's aroun.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
After talking to the people of New Orleans, I had
it over to Gatesville, Texas, home to five out of
the nine women's prisons in jail in Texas. Meet up
with Marcy Simmons, who spent ten years working the fields
out here after stealing three hundred thousand dollars from her employer.
As I was getting b roll of one of these
women's prisons before the interview, perfect example of the over
(05:13):
criminalization of Americans unfolded before my very eyes. Now, Tradi
is a private property? You own state property?
Speaker 6 (05:19):
Right now?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
This is state property? Private property or the stated taken.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
They try to get a rise out of you.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
No, we wanted again, genuine confusions. As I filmed the
outside of a prison funded by the tax dollars of
Americans in a public parking lot, filming that which was
in plain view, I quickly learned as to how little
we really know about what goes on inside the prison walls.
So we're trying to get some b roll on the
outside of the prison. Are we within our legal first
memorights to film on the outside of the prison? State
(05:47):
property is part of public No?
Speaker 11 (05:49):
No, the public property is over there behind the stuffs.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
State property is still part of public property. Has none
of the property outside?
Speaker 6 (05:56):
Yes, valley, I have two guys.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
Are is gonna leaves?
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well, we're not refusing. We're trying to get some clarity
on the actual line itself. This is constitutionally protected ability
to to film. In the next tier, I'll have the
right to you know, to record and all that.
Speaker 11 (06:13):
Yeah, but mam on state property on the other side
of that stop side.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
That's that's a constitutional.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
Okay, okay, what business they'll have on state on this.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
State first Amendment expression journalism. No, we don't have an appointment.
But we're not trying to come on the inside of
the premises. We're on the outside.
Speaker 6 (06:29):
No, you got too close to the gate. I got
CROs here.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
We don't know who y'all are. We're not trying to
get a rise out of anyone. We prefer your out.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
No, no, no, no, we're not gonna be doing that many.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Once again, show them the preface of that.
Speaker 6 (06:45):
I'll show them respect.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Man.
Speaker 6 (06:47):
You don't you don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
That's what this is going on. On the point whole
you misunderstanding the whole point. We're trying to get some
mir on the outside of the prison officer cruise here,
I guess is setting the example for the lack of
transparency and the billy for any journalists to gain access
and understand what's even happening inside you.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yes, cannot be on the premises filming.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
You don't have authorization. So I'm gonna public property now, sir,
I'm gonna.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Have to ask y'all to leave. You can't be here filming, okay.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
So we're trying to understand is if you're just making
this up, or if we're actually in violation of some
Texas Funal code, your rules, rules, questions.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
I mean your questions. I'm just telling you what you
need to leave, okay.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
I'm not touching on you.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
Or if you don't have authorization to be in corner.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
They're sitting on the floor in the prisons frock or
actually like cattle. Okay, we're trying to get some bureaul
of the facility here. From our understanding, this is state
property and it's abscution some.
Speaker 11 (07:45):
Protective You are in valiation and if they ask you
to leave, you need to leave. I need your licens
and your driver.
Speaker 6 (07:51):
Oh yeah, sir.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
As far as secure area, it would be a question
of public accessible.
Speaker 11 (07:55):
I need your driver and I need this is a
fit charactery that have a very violent criminals. We have killers,
rapist murderers, we have everything in here. They have family
members in the world that will come out here and
play the same car. Yeah, when we have people here,
we don't know who you are.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
I see.
Speaker 11 (08:12):
Okay, So why would you come here to mess with
the We're not here to mass though, That's exactly.
Speaker 6 (08:17):
What disrupting their operation.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
So we are in violation of Texas. Finlal Coat does
every say so are we violating Texas? Felt? What you
do is get in your counly. All I'm asking is
are we in violation of Texas?
Speaker 11 (08:29):
Plic one more time for you to get in your
cord lead.
Speaker 6 (08:33):
Uh, I'm confused.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
We saw the prisoners, a bunch of convicted felons in
a van being shipped in and out of the prison.
You just experienced the wrath of a small Texas town.
Big hat, no cattle quite literally zero transparency. The sheriff
of the town himself showed up within five minutes, and
big doug us. But we have five cop cars coming off.
The same people that are elected to protect the constitution
(08:57):
and to uphold the constitution and strove the public are
utilizing that against you. My guess is they're not supposed
to be shuttling prisoners in and out of that freely,
without chains and all that. It was a publicly accessible
parking lot. There's no gates, there's no signs. Just drive
up there fifty feet away. I bet you a lot
of things can go missing, or a lot of abuses
can go unnoticed out here in these small towns. After
(09:19):
nearly getting arrested myself for filming these prison walls and
playing view to understand what really goes on inside of them,
let me introduce you to someone who lived there. I'm
here with Marcy, formerly incarcerated for how many years?
Speaker 4 (09:32):
I was locked up for ten years here in Gatesville
for a theft charge.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
I also want you to meet George.
Speaker 5 (09:37):
I went to prison three different times, and I was
an addict, and I didn't have the money, and I
would target fast food joints and I would wait till
they close, and I would throw down on whoever was
taking the trash on and I'd walk them back inside,
and more often than not they had to either safe
open and they would give me the money and I'd leave. Yes,
I did twenty seven total. I was an addict. I
got out of the Army at like right at nineteen
(09:58):
in South Texas at a dance Cocio a girl.
Speaker 6 (10:00):
I leave the dance. I've been drinking. I get pulled over,
so I get a little mouthy with the cops. He
didn't like it. He took me to a jail.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
He puts me in a tank of men who'd been
convicted and were awaiting transfer to prison. And I found
out later he told them to take care of him.
Speaker 6 (10:11):
I was beaten. I was raped pretty well on light.
Kicked out the next morning, he said.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Gone beaten and raped?
Speaker 6 (10:17):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And where are we right now?
Speaker 4 (10:19):
We are in one of the fields, and I think
that there's actually this was potatoes here that I used
to work at. I worked out here in the fields
just about my entire incarceration.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Ten years straight. How many hours a day did you work?
And how much were you paid per hour?
Speaker 4 (10:33):
So in Texas, incarcerated folks are paid zero dollars an hour.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
And are you forced to work in the fields?
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Yeah, you absolutely have to work. I'm not really against
people working, but I'm against people doing kind of needless work.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Day one you get here and they assign you a job,
and the next morning you get up and go to work.
So day two in Big Girl Prison, right here on
the Doctor Lane Murray unit. I was out in the fields,
and so what that looks like is your strip searched
before going to work. They'll say like three ho because
side note, it's called the host squad.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, the hose dirt or your home.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
I'm sure they mean hoe in the dirt, but of
course it was used derogatory, like hose lineup, hose, get
over here. It was really degrading.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
It's the humanizing from the get go, for sure, one
hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
You hike to a field and you've got officers on horseback,
they're armed, they're shouting directives at you. Day two in prison,
you don't know what the hell's going on. You're scared.
It's really nerve wracking. You get out here and if
it's August, it's one hundred and five degrees out here
in Texas and it's not air conditioned in the dorm,
(11:42):
and so you're already weak. And if you've been in
county jail and the air conditioning, you're really weak because
of the heat. And you're out here doing field labor,
which is really similar to plantation work. Any old plantation
movie that you might have seen. That's what this kind
of work looked.
Speaker 5 (11:59):
Like people used to their tendons, so it's to not
go out to work in the fields. I got taken
from a nice ac job work in the hospital to
the fields because I would not have falsify documentation showing
backing up their allegation.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Beating up some dude.
Speaker 5 (12:11):
Right yeah, and they'll do that on the time for
much minor stuff.
Speaker 6 (12:14):
I was putting the fields for a lot of stuff.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
I got put in the fields because I mouthed off
at the guard one time because I slipped on the
other line in the hall way, so they went ahead
and put me back in the fields.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Do you guys have any rights as a prisoner?
Speaker 5 (12:24):
If a cop rolls up right now, yeah, and tells
you to get down on the ground, I mean, what
rights to you have?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
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and Morgan. Back to prison.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Prison is already the punishment. Slavers should never be a punishment.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
And are people picking cotton? Are they fighting fires? And
then crazy work?
Speaker 3 (13:51):
So like I'm just thinking about the things that are
like sometimes here in New York, but all over the
country we have people in all.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Types of jobs.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Farm or agriculture is a nssive area of prison work.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
In fact, there's some really crazy reporting right now about
sheriffs that are using incarcerated people on their own puberies,
using the people in his jail to like.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Man his own farm.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
What.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
So, we would work anywhere from six to eight hours
a day. I think they've cut that down to half
days now. It was a long day doing very manual labor,
doing things like picking potatoes, hicking corn, cutting grass with
a hoe.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So who was your equivalent of the masta, the prison warden.
Who did you serve?
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah, we served the field boss. We even called them boss,
very culturally similar to plantation days. And you had two
lead hose and we would be at the front of
the line and we would be keeping things organized. We
would be keeping the ladies on task, and quite frankly,
sometimes even participating in degrading them.
Speaker 5 (15:00):
But twenty seven years in prison, totally I got one
hundred bucks.
Speaker 6 (15:03):
I think because Texas.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
To twenty seven years, you earned one hundred dollars.
Speaker 6 (15:07):
They doesn't pay.
Speaker 5 (15:07):
Texas has maybe a few hundred people out of the
twenty one hundred and forty thousand who work, and maybe
in Lockhart they got a couple of private firms that
do least do pay individuals for working.
Speaker 6 (15:18):
But if there's one.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
Hundred and forty thousand people, there's one hundred and thirty
nine thousand, eight hundred and whatever thousand. No, don't get
a penny. No, I never got a penny. I worked
thirteen years in the fields. I worked as a library
clerk clerk in the in the law library. I worked
as a kitchen commissary clerk. I watched pots and pans
for three months because they got mad at me because
I wrote a grievance. It was just kind of effective.
So they transferred me jobs from my job as a
(15:41):
library into the kitchen.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
None of them did I ever get paid?
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Were you obligated to wark those jobs? Do you have
to work in prison like you did?
Speaker 5 (15:48):
If there is a job that needs to be done
in takes prisons, they will find somebody to do it,
regardless of their qualifications.
Speaker 6 (15:54):
Give you in order to do it.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
And if you don't do it for whatever reason, you
will get disciplined, you would lose custody in class, you
would end up in solitary, and you may end up
with more time. Now having said that, of course, I
wanted to word I don't want to sit on my
damn ass all the damn time, but I want to
do something that's fulfilling, not necessarily spiritually right, but something
that I learned something from and I think that's most
prisoners want.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
That thirty two degrees or below. We're not working in
the fields anything below freezing exactly. So we're at the
back gate and we can hear the officers' radios and
they do these every hour temperature checks on the radio.
And we're at the back gate, lined up, cold as hell,
ready to go to work, no issued thermals, I mean,
just in these state issued clothes that are thin, the
(16:35):
airs hitting our skin, and we hear on the radio
that it's thirty one degrees, and we started cheering like
we were really excited to go back in. And I
remember the boss, the lieutenant, he looked over at the
other boss and said, I didn't hear anything, did you.
And they rolled that gate and we came on out
here and we were picking cabbage. It was frozen and
(16:55):
it had been raining, so our boots and bottom of
our legs were wet, our socks were wet. They issue
these little cotton gloves in the mud. They're not going
to stay on your hand. You finally just have to
put the gloves down. And we're just picking cabbage, which
the people around me, their lips are blue, snots running
down our faces and frozen, and I remember filling ice
(17:16):
on my eyelashes and thinking they really don't give us
about us. You brought up tampons, and so I need
to say working in the field is absolutely insane. When
you're on your menstrual cycle. There's no restroom. They have
a porta potty that they carry on a trailer and
tractor pulls. It comes around once every four hours. Not
(17:37):
everybody gets to use it. So I might be on
a squad with thirty five other women. They'll say, douce
it up, restroom break. We all line up the trailers there.
I would remember like waving my tampon in the air
because you're trying to show the boss like I need
to go, like this is important for me to go
because they're only going to pick five or six.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
But is the thirteenth Amendment that allows for the enslavement
of criminals in violation of the Eighth Amendment that protects
Americans against cruel or unusual punishments.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
The thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, right, However, there's a clause
there that says, except for someone who's been duty convicted,
if you had been convicted in the United States of America,
according to a thirteenth Amendment, you can still be enslaved.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
So a lot of people don't realize that. That's the
silver lining of the thirteenth Amendment, right, right, A lot of.
Speaker 5 (18:19):
People don't realize that. And it was very likely a
result of backroom bargaining between.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Betrius corporations who has vested interest.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
Back in the day with Abraham Lincoln, the one of
the Southern states on board, right. And but what happened
was is now these black people who we freed, now
we're going to get them all in the street, and
we're going to pass the black codes, and we're gonna
arrisk them and we're gonna police.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Them harder, and then we can reincarcerate them.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
And reincarcerate them and use their labor now, but now
we're not slaves now their.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Prison deonkap eighteen sixty five. Does Lincoln free the slaves?
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Yes and no.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
There were certainly millions of people that were free during
that time.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
But unfortunately what happened at that time was also that
the institution of moved behind prison walls.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
There's quite a few organization out there that go to
prison and say, hey, we'll hire some of your people
and we'll pay them a dollar an hour whatever, right,
and then they'll go out and sell those goods for
whatever they send them out in the free world.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Right.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
And then here's the rub. Once I leave prison, Whole
Foods won't employ me.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Why won't they employ you?
Speaker 5 (19:16):
Because they have restrictions against people who' been incarcerator.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
They're working for us, so they'll hire you when you're
in prison, but you're no longer viable once you're free.
Speaker 6 (19:24):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
So, the average wage for somebody who's incarcerated, right is
fourteen cents an hour, and in seven states it's actually nothing.
Majority of states do pay something, but we're talking about pennies.
People will work for two straight weeks and their checks
will be thirty bucks, right, and with that they are
(19:46):
expected to support themselves in prison. There is a really
really big common misconception, right that prison is a free ride.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Far from it.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
The cost of communication, the cost of commissary of food,
of hygiene product, a medical codepase, these are all things
that people in prison.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Actually pay in prison.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
They've recently introduced emails and people have to buy stamps
to send an email.
Speaker 12 (20:10):
As if this is like a physical piece of mail
that's going like ups usps, right, Like we're talking about
an email at fifty cents an email?
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Is it slavery if they compensate you, And if they
compensate you, is there a certain amount that qualifies it?
As I guess this is some form of employment by
the state. What is slavery in your opinion? In the
context of imprisonment, slavery means that.
Speaker 5 (20:33):
You are coerced daily into eating when they tell you
the working, when they tell you to work, behaving in
a way that is conducive to furthering the aims of
the institution. And if you don't do those things, they
can have you beaten, they can have you a good
time taken away, they can have your throne in solitary.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Is there an argument that you're working to pay the
cost of what the taxpayer is paying to keep you
in prison after you've committed let's say, a heinus crime.
Is that a reasonable argument or do you say, hell no.
Speaker 5 (20:56):
It's not unreasonable that if I'm a taxpayer and you
omit to hainus crime, my first thing is I don't
want you to do it again. Yeah, and I want
to ensure that person who you committed it on, if
it was found heals or is a system that I have.
If they're gonna make you work, then okay, But I
want you to work or something, or I want you
treated in a way that allows you to address whatever
(21:18):
trauma or anger whatever you had, so that you don't
hurt anybody else. When I was raped, even now, forty
years later, I have visions of doing some really ugly
to these dudes. I understand punishment, I understand the need
for revenge, the desire for revenge, but that's not gonna
help me heal.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Are American prisons designed in such a way to rehabilitate
criminals or is it simply a system to punish offenders,
traumatizing them further and increasing the likelihood of them reoffending
after their release real quick.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
I'd be like going down the road, you fucked.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
If you want to support our boots on the ground
independent journalism that is not bond and paid for my
corporate interests, along with exclusive DLC content that YouTube won't
let me up and uncensored early access to all my
videos before they go off on YouTube. Go subscribe at
patreon dot com slash Tyler olivera for less than five
bucks a month. Is internal assaults and sexual assault common.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
The threat in a female prison for sexual violence is
from staff, not from each other.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Different dynamic therabis.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
I think one hundred percent. We had to be weary
of who was working. We had to pay attention if
we knew the officers that would creep around the shower
area or come around at night, and you knew who
not to get into a private nook with or not
to make eye contact with. The Prison Rape Elimination Act
that's supposed to offer protection, I guess Frison.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Rape Elimination Act. So it must be common enough to
where they had to implement an act.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
Yeah, absolutely, very common.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Day one. You're fighting people multiple times, How does it evolve?
You get some respect? Eveventually or is it just fighting
NonStop until you build an alliance with someone.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
The violence is usually early on, and it's again to
see what you're going to do.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Whether you week with you're going to be a vic
measuring you up.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
If you get with a gang or with a click
or with whatever, right, then it may be a little
different because at that point the gangs may be called
out as a group to do some stuff. Right, I
would fight. I would jump on dudes looking at me wrong?
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Are you looking at Did you ever end up in
solitary confinement?
Speaker 4 (23:15):
I'm a disruptor out here and I was a disruptor
in there, and I ended up in solitary confinement lots
of time. The first time I went to solitary was
for hugging. There was a lady that was crying over
her mail. She was sitting in the floor and I
kind of bent down and hugged the top of her
shoulders and they saw it on camera. They came and
got me. It was like the swat team coming in. Yeah,
handcuffed me, marched me to solitary. I was there for
(23:36):
two months.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Two months you're in solitary, so that's enough time to
have permanent psychological damage.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
I'm sure right, yeah, absolutely absolutely. It was wild in there,
nothing to do but like read graffiti on the wall,
which is and those cells were hugely disgustingly dirty. Sometimes
you would see blood or even feces like on the walls.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Solitary confinement.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
It's very commonly referred to gain the prison system by
people who.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Have done time as the whole or the box. Those
terms date back to antibellum slavery.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Oh interesting, Okay.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
The whole was a literal hole that enslaved people were
put in if they disobeyed the rules of their enslavery.
Got it right, No food, darkness, heat. Similarly, the hot
box was the same thing, was a box. These are
the terms that then migrated into the system and then
you don't even.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Know are related to antibellum slavery.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
The field work you guys are doing loses money, but
it still happens. Is the goal just to break your
spirit and your will? And when you leave prison to
feel like a piece of shit? What is the goal?
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Texas is a really punitive state, and I think that
this idea that if we just make it as miserable
as possible, people won't come back.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
But the thing does it work.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
Oh, it absolutely does not work right because people are
here because they have done something that, probably especially women,
resulted of trauma and they have to work through that
and heal, or they're going to get out and still
not know how to handle their emotions and handle what
they've been through and still go back to their same
old ways and they end up back to prison. And
(25:10):
our recidivism rates show that.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Do you think ten years helped you more than one
year or two years or five years in prison would
have helped you understand you did a bad thing and
you need to stop doing that.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Or I think that after about twelve months inside, I
really emerged myself into the prison life. After a year,
any thoughts of good things were gone. So no, I
think that it doesn't matter. I think that you humans
are going to survive where they're at. They're going to
change to be able to survive. I was the worst
version of myself while I was incarcerated.
Speaker 5 (25:41):
The American printon system is set up to humiliate, degree punish,
and minimize. The American prison system is full of individuals
who are in fact used as free labor for corporations,
for companies, for the state. The takes Princes as an example,
they have one hundred and forty thousand people there. The
guards turn the keys, hand out the mail, count maybe
(26:02):
drive the buses. Everything else is done by incarcerated individuals. Right,
all right, the prisoner's fun.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
The prison again, We're sitting in the city of New York.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
It costs US over five hundred thousand dollars a year
to incarcerate one person on Rikers Island.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Five hundred k.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Do you know what we can do with five hundred k?
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Do they want you to end back up in the
prison system. Do they want you to live a happy, fruitful,
bountiful life after prison as the goal to set you
have success afterwards?
Speaker 6 (26:32):
I think that maybe the ideal.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
Well, I don't think that there is a huge universe
of individuals we're plotting to ensure that individuals have been
incarcerated go back to their cage.
Speaker 6 (26:41):
Sure, I don't think that exists.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
But politicians have done a good job at demonizing anyone
who gets in a cage in the first place. Right,
they cannot be trusted around your kids. Most prisons you
go to down TDCJ have maybe one psychologist. If that
they don't have psychology none. If You've been in an
environment where you've been degraded and dehumanized for two a
fourteen year and you get out there you expected just
to walk along so sidey. You feel usele, you feel
(27:04):
worth it. You got twenty twenty five. Thirty percent of
the people who are in jails in prisons have severe
mental health issues.
Speaker 6 (27:10):
It's not helped by.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
Being in jail, which means that I don't believe that
putting someone in a cage, a little cage where they're
subject to rape, to kill each other, without access to
meaningful health, with incredibly deficient way to meet your whatever
nutritional needs, all that.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
In other words, deprivation, I don't think that helps.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Torture all that.
Speaker 5 (27:29):
I don't think none of that helps. If what you
want to do is subject to the most violent brutality
you want, then say it, and don't say that. What
you want is people to be changed and rehabilitated. With me,
as someone who put a pistol on somebody's heads.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
How do you appeel to someone who maybe doesn't even
care about these people, but wants a better system, better
functioning society. How would you redesign the prison system?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Well, I'm not sure I would redesign the prison system.
And I think the system that we have.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Has no redeeming qualities, and I think we need to
like reimagine entirely how we want to address harm in
our communities.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
What are some immediate changes you would make to the
prison system.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
We're suing for air conditioning, so that's a big one.
Is stop cooking people alive. People are dying every summer.
Texas A and M did a report that showed some
sales at one hundred and forty degrees in the summer.
And I've seen people die from the heat, and I've
seen officers fall out from the heat. So that's probably
like the immediate thing.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
They need to live a dignified life where inequity is crushed.
Speaker 13 (28:33):
Sure, where people feel fulfilled, purpose driven and loved, feel
connected to the communities and the land that they're on,
and then together in a connected world, we can cure
a I am less likely to cause you harm.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
I have everything I need and because I'm connected to
you as a person. But should I ever cause you
harm that we have the tools between us and in
a system to address.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
That harm in a way that doesn't cause or produce
more harm. Because this is this system is not producing safety.
If incarceration produce safety, then the US should be the safest.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Place on the planet.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
To me, it's like all these root causes, right, and
one of them is addressing the exception in the thirteenth Amendment.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
At what point do you stop getting second chances?
Speaker 6 (29:19):
I don't think any human, I don't care what you do,
deserve to be enslave. I don't care what you did.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
So you are anti slavery regardless of the worst crimes
possible you came in.
Speaker 5 (29:28):
Yes, But I also want to say some of these
people who, because of things that decisions they made at
a very high level way distance from the tens of
thousands of people who may get killed or poisoned right
because of some of the stuff that they do, don't
get charged with it. I would say that's more oninous
than somebody gets out of kills.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
Maybe a group of.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Five busting the food, poisoning the water and story the environment.
Speaker 5 (29:48):
None of them ever went to jail, None of them
emble went to prison. Should they have in my view, No,
I don't think anybody should be in prison. No one
should be sent to prison, No, no one. I'm an
ebolition No what should they do. I'm not saying I
don't believe in some sort of separation some folks a
lot of time. It takes resources, and it takes time,
and it takes a willing I guess to fail. And
I understand that given an infinite supply and an infinite
(30:13):
maybe you'll watch maybe sort of regulation on the movement.
I don't know, so I have to come down on
the site of some sort of separation that is not
punitive in nature. You need to find a way to
allow individuals who are leaving prison to have kind of
a ceremony of return and say you have quote unquote
paid your debt to society. Go on there, sign up
and say that you do not believe that we should enslave.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Anybody or you're the man dude. Thank you to mess
your time.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
You can hit me up on my link tree. It's
www dot Marcymarrie dot com.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
First thing is obviously follow us on all the social
platforms Worth Rises on the different platforms as well as
Andy exception on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
You can also visit us on our website at.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Worthriises dot org to set up on the newsletter or
to donate, and if you want to send a message
to your Congress.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Remember to end the exception the thirteenth Amendment. Visit endyeexception
dot com to take action.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
You support whatever you want to support, but full disclosure.
I do endorse the enslavement and murder of certain heinous criminals.
I do not believe that every criminal can or wants
to be rehabilitated into society. Some people are simply menaces
to society, but largely if we zoomed out and created
a more rehabilitative prison system rather than one focused on punishment,
(31:29):
I think the criminals that leave prison will go on
to commit less crimes and fit into society better
This is the United States of America, where slavery is
still legal under the Thirteenth Amendment. If you've been convicted
of a crime.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You can be legally enslaved.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
If it looks like slavery, it smells like slavery, It
sounds like slavery, it's slavery.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
It turns out, when Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery by ratifying
the Thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty five, they left in
one little exception convicted criminals.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
Locked like everyone's slave, not just black people.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
To everyone out and refusal to work can be met
with harsh punishments like solitary confinement, loss of privileges like visitation,
phone calls, commissary access, recreation time, family visits, good time credits,
and access to books, hygiene products, and snacks. And the
prisoners that do make small amounts of money can have
up to eighty percent of their earnings deducted for various
(00:51):
prison related expenses before they see any of it, while
seven states pay them nothing. So who benefits off of
their labor? And does America have financial upside? And locking
more and more Americans in prison to maintain a steady
supply of state owned slaves. More importantly, did slavery ever
end in America or did it just rebrand itself to
(01:12):
something more socially acceptable. Some may not know, as almost
half of those men and women fighting fires are convicted felon.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
But it's not money these inmates are working for.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
It's their future freedom. Before I speak up with ex
prisoners who are locked up in Texas work in the
deadly hot fields for their master Uncle Sam, I went
to one of the most incarcerated cities in America to
see if they knew that slavery is still legal in America.
You know, it's still legal to enslaves someone if they
commit a crime in the United States of America. You
know what, I think, we're all slaves. Do you know
(01:42):
about that exception?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Wow?
Speaker 6 (01:45):
Yes, I do know that.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
I did not know that the way the government is going, Yeah,
I would believe it.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, zame as a surprise.
Speaker 6 (01:51):
Yes, doesn't surprise me at all.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
No, I'm not surprised. That is disturbing.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Isn't that crazy? Wow? Yeah? Crazy right? No one really
thinks about it.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
That's weird.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Do you support slavery? No, common buddy, I forget that.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
You're in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You know, you shouldn't be enslaved.
Speaker 7 (02:11):
Hell no, no, no, no, shouldn't even be a thought
in mind.
Speaker 6 (02:15):
Ever.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
I'm not saying they should, but it will happen. And
if you do and people don't fight back, that's on them.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Do you think that slavery ever ended in America?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
No, it's just transformed. It's never changed. It's always been
that way.
Speaker 8 (02:26):
If you knew the process of howland didn't service, who went,
and then how it formed slavery, you understand that this
is what's going on now, just not just black people anymore.
So like everyone's slaves, not just black people, not just color,
people of color, everyone now, and everyone's starting.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
To feel it.
Speaker 6 (02:42):
I think that well should be ratified. It should be
a changed for sure.
Speaker 8 (02:45):
No, you shouldn't be legal saying slave somebody if they
commit a crime.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Is there any crime that would warrant whip flashing in
the fields like plantation style? No? Absolutely, not no matter
the crimes, no matter even like a child rapist. Uh
well no one murder, no one just getting way heavy murder. Yeah,
I mean those guys, I don't know if you them, Yeah,
I mean I just yeah, I don't know even if
(03:09):
you're a hainous criminal who commits a terrible crime, No,
there's no slits. Shouldn't be any slips. I mean, I
think all crimes are different levels. I mean you're getting
dealt with in there by other inmates.
Speaker 9 (03:18):
Justice happen on its own, whipping like that or going
back one hundred years or right there.
Speaker 6 (03:22):
The crime and the time shouldn't matter.
Speaker 8 (03:25):
No, forced labor and the severity of their crime shouldn't matter.
And how much time did they get, Like I said,
I'll leave the system to check though, people are getting
more time than they deserve for small things that are
like as much as the grammar.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Leak right draw. The line is that if there's corporations
making money on it, like not employing actual people and
just using the inmates, they don't see a problem, and
then they can't keep the job once they get released
from prison due to the felony status. Oftentimes, Yeah, it's
not good.
Speaker 10 (03:49):
I feel like the federal prison system is just like
recycling black men, specifically due to like the laws that
are being passed, it is hard to make change. The
oligarchy that holds the power is making it harder for
us to reach the.
Speaker 11 (04:01):
Teams throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth Amendment created two citizenships
within the United States.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Freed the slaves.
Speaker 6 (04:06):
That's one citizenship. You're born a United States citizen.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
You're not under the rule of the United States government
that exists today is a corporation.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And we're employees to this corporation or what you're slavery
to that corporation. Grey, y'all have an income tax your
slave under that.
Speaker 7 (04:20):
Let's make sure that we're not putting ourselves in a
position to become slaves. But when you have predators out there,
it's not a choice. The dezel doesn't choose to get
eaten by the lion locked up.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Do you know anyone who's gotten a felony? One of
my best friends, but you're trying to seek back, you know,
and I do.
Speaker 9 (04:36):
I'm the supporting for that, not immediate family, But I
know somebody who has people who God like a long sentences,
care very very minimal things.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
How has that affected their life?
Speaker 6 (04:49):
Forever?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Forever?
Speaker 6 (04:50):
Forever? Go to jail? That's aroun.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
After talking to the people of New Orleans, I had
it over to Gatesville, Texas, home to five out of
the nine women's prisons in jail in Texas. Meet up
with Marcy Simmons, who spent ten years working the fields
out here after stealing three hundred thousand dollars from her employer.
As I was getting b roll of one of these
women's prisons before the interview, perfect example of the over
(05:13):
criminalization of Americans unfolded before my very eyes. Now, Tradi
is a private property? You own state property?
Speaker 6 (05:19):
Right now?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
This is state property? Private property or the stated taken.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
They try to get a rise out of you.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
No, we wanted again, genuine confusions. As I filmed the
outside of a prison funded by the tax dollars of
Americans in a public parking lot, filming that which was
in plain view, I quickly learned as to how little
we really know about what goes on inside the prison walls.
So we're trying to get some b roll on the
outside of the prison. Are we within our legal first
memorights to film on the outside of the prison? State
(05:47):
property is part of public No?
Speaker 11 (05:49):
No, the public property is over there behind the stuffs.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
State property is still part of public property. Has none
of the property outside?
Speaker 6 (05:56):
Yes, valley, I have two guys.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
Are is gonna leaves?
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well, we're not refusing. We're trying to get some clarity
on the actual line itself. This is constitutionally protected ability
to to film. In the next tier, I'll have the
right to you know, to record and all that.
Speaker 11 (06:13):
Yeah, but mam on state property on the other side
of that stop side.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
That's that's a constitutional.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
Okay, okay, what business they'll have on state on this.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
State first Amendment expression journalism. No, we don't have an appointment.
But we're not trying to come on the inside of
the premises. We're on the outside.
Speaker 6 (06:29):
No, you got too close to the gate. I got
CROs here.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
We don't know who y'all are. We're not trying to
get a rise out of anyone. We prefer your out.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
No, no, no, no, we're not gonna be doing that many.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Once again, show them the preface of that.
Speaker 6 (06:45):
I'll show them respect.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Man.
Speaker 6 (06:47):
You don't you don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
That's what this is going on. On the point whole
you misunderstanding the whole point. We're trying to get some
mir on the outside of the prison officer cruise here,
I guess is setting the example for the lack of
transparency and the billy for any journalists to gain access
and understand what's even happening inside you.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yes, cannot be on the premises filming.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
You don't have authorization. So I'm gonna public property now, sir,
I'm gonna.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Have to ask y'all to leave. You can't be here filming, okay.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
So we're trying to understand is if you're just making
this up, or if we're actually in violation of some
Texas Funal code, your rules, rules, questions.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
I mean your questions. I'm just telling you what you
need to leave, okay.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
I'm not touching on you.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
Or if you don't have authorization to be in corner.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
They're sitting on the floor in the prisons frock or
actually like cattle. Okay, we're trying to get some bureaul
of the facility here. From our understanding, this is state
property and it's abscution some.
Speaker 11 (07:45):
Protective You are in valiation and if they ask you
to leave, you need to leave. I need your licens
and your driver.
Speaker 6 (07:51):
Oh yeah, sir.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
As far as secure area, it would be a question
of public accessible.
Speaker 11 (07:55):
I need your driver and I need this is a
fit charactery that have a very violent criminals. We have killers,
rapist murderers, we have everything in here. They have family
members in the world that will come out here and
play the same car. Yeah, when we have people here,
we don't know who you are.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
I see.
Speaker 11 (08:12):
Okay, So why would you come here to mess with
the We're not here to mass though, That's exactly.
Speaker 6 (08:17):
What disrupting their operation.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
So we are in violation of Texas. Finlal Coat does
every say so are we violating Texas? Felt? What you
do is get in your counly. All I'm asking is
are we in violation of Texas?
Speaker 11 (08:29):
Plic one more time for you to get in your
cord lead.
Speaker 6 (08:33):
Uh, I'm confused.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
We saw the prisoners, a bunch of convicted felons in
a van being shipped in and out of the prison.
You just experienced the wrath of a small Texas town.
Big hat, no cattle quite literally zero transparency. The sheriff
of the town himself showed up within five minutes, and
big doug us. But we have five cop cars coming off.
The same people that are elected to protect the constitution
(08:57):
and to uphold the constitution and strove the public are
utilizing that against you. My guess is they're not supposed
to be shuttling prisoners in and out of that freely,
without chains and all that. It was a publicly accessible
parking lot. There's no gates, there's no signs. Just drive
up there fifty feet away. I bet you a lot
of things can go missing, or a lot of abuses
can go unnoticed out here in these small towns. After
(09:19):
nearly getting arrested myself for filming these prison walls and
playing view to understand what really goes on inside of them,
let me introduce you to someone who lived there. I'm
here with Marcy, formerly incarcerated for how many years?
Speaker 4 (09:32):
I was locked up for ten years here in Gatesville
for a theft charge.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
I also want you to meet George.
Speaker 5 (09:37):
I went to prison three different times, and I was
an addict, and I didn't have the money, and I
would target fast food joints and I would wait till
they close, and I would throw down on whoever was
taking the trash on and I'd walk them back inside,
and more often than not they had to either safe
open and they would give me the money and I'd leave. Yes,
I did twenty seven total. I was an addict. I
got out of the Army at like right at nineteen
(09:58):
in South Texas at a dance Cocio a girl.
Speaker 6 (10:00):
I leave the dance. I've been drinking. I get pulled over,
so I get a little mouthy with the cops. He
didn't like it. He took me to a jail.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
He puts me in a tank of men who'd been
convicted and were awaiting transfer to prison. And I found
out later he told them to take care of him.
Speaker 6 (10:11):
I was beaten. I was raped pretty well on light.
Kicked out the next morning, he said.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Gone beaten and raped?
Speaker 6 (10:17):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And where are we right now?
Speaker 4 (10:19):
We are in one of the fields, and I think
that there's actually this was potatoes here that I used
to work at. I worked out here in the fields
just about my entire incarceration.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Ten years straight. How many hours a day did you work?
And how much were you paid per hour?
Speaker 4 (10:33):
So in Texas, incarcerated folks are paid zero dollars an hour.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
And are you forced to work in the fields?
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Yeah, you absolutely have to work. I'm not really against
people working, but I'm against people doing kind of needless work.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Day one you get here and they assign you a job,
and the next morning you get up and go to work.
So day two in Big Girl Prison, right here on
the Doctor Lane Murray unit. I was out in the fields,
and so what that looks like is your strip searched
before going to work. They'll say like three ho because
side note, it's called the host squad.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, the hose dirt or your home.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
I'm sure they mean hoe in the dirt, but of
course it was used derogatory, like hose lineup, hose, get
over here. It was really degrading.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
It's the humanizing from the get go, for sure, one
hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
You hike to a field and you've got officers on horseback,
they're armed, they're shouting directives at you. Day two in prison,
you don't know what the hell's going on. You're scared.
It's really nerve wracking. You get out here and if
it's August, it's one hundred and five degrees out here
in Texas and it's not air conditioned in the dorm,
(11:42):
and so you're already weak. And if you've been in
county jail and the air conditioning, you're really weak because
of the heat. And you're out here doing field labor,
which is really similar to plantation work. Any old plantation
movie that you might have seen. That's what this kind
of work looked.
Speaker 5 (11:59):
Like people used to their tendons, so it's to not
go out to work in the fields. I got taken
from a nice ac job work in the hospital to
the fields because I would not have falsify documentation showing
backing up their allegation.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Beating up some dude.
Speaker 5 (12:11):
Right yeah, and they'll do that on the time for
much minor stuff.
Speaker 6 (12:14):
I was putting the fields for a lot of stuff.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
I got put in the fields because I mouthed off
at the guard one time because I slipped on the
other line in the hall way, so they went ahead
and put me back in the fields.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Do you guys have any rights as a prisoner?
Speaker 5 (12:24):
If a cop rolls up right now, yeah, and tells
you to get down on the ground, I mean, what
rights to you have?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
You do it to get shot? And this is Bianca Tilek,
Harvard educated, leading expert in the prison industry and founder
of the nonprofit Worth Rises, working to dismantle the prison
industry and the exploitation of those it touches. Real quick,
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and Morgan. Back to prison.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Prison is already the punishment. Slavers should never be a punishment.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
And are people picking cotton? Are they fighting fires? And
then crazy work?
Speaker 3 (13:51):
So like I'm just thinking about the things that are
like sometimes here in New York, but all over the
country we have people in all.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Types of jobs.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Farm or agriculture is a nssive area of prison work.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
In fact, there's some really crazy reporting right now about
sheriffs that are using incarcerated people on their own puberies,
using the people in his jail to like.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Man his own farm.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
What.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
So, we would work anywhere from six to eight hours
a day. I think they've cut that down to half
days now. It was a long day doing very manual labor,
doing things like picking potatoes, hicking corn, cutting grass with
a hoe.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So who was your equivalent of the masta, the prison warden.
Who did you serve?
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah, we served the field boss. We even called them boss,
very culturally similar to plantation days. And you had two
lead hose and we would be at the front of
the line and we would be keeping things organized. We
would be keeping the ladies on task, and quite frankly,
sometimes even participating in degrading them.
Speaker 5 (15:00):
But twenty seven years in prison, totally I got one
hundred bucks.
Speaker 6 (15:03):
I think because Texas.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
To twenty seven years, you earned one hundred dollars.
Speaker 6 (15:07):
They doesn't pay.
Speaker 5 (15:07):
Texas has maybe a few hundred people out of the
twenty one hundred and forty thousand who work, and maybe
in Lockhart they got a couple of private firms that
do least do pay individuals for working.
Speaker 6 (15:18):
But if there's one.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
Hundred and forty thousand people, there's one hundred and thirty
nine thousand, eight hundred and whatever thousand. No, don't get
a penny. No, I never got a penny. I worked
thirteen years in the fields. I worked as a library
clerk clerk in the in the law library. I worked
as a kitchen commissary clerk. I watched pots and pans
for three months because they got mad at me because
I wrote a grievance. It was just kind of effective.
So they transferred me jobs from my job as a
(15:41):
library into the kitchen.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
None of them did I ever get paid?
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Were you obligated to wark those jobs? Do you have
to work in prison like you did?
Speaker 5 (15:48):
If there is a job that needs to be done
in takes prisons, they will find somebody to do it,
regardless of their qualifications.
Speaker 6 (15:54):
Give you in order to do it.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
And if you don't do it for whatever reason, you
will get disciplined, you would lose custody in class, you
would end up in solitary, and you may end up
with more time. Now having said that, of course, I
wanted to word I don't want to sit on my
damn ass all the damn time, but I want to
do something that's fulfilling, not necessarily spiritually right, but something
that I learned something from and I think that's most
prisoners want.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
That thirty two degrees or below. We're not working in
the fields anything below freezing exactly. So we're at the
back gate and we can hear the officers' radios and
they do these every hour temperature checks on the radio.
And we're at the back gate, lined up, cold as hell,
ready to go to work, no issued thermals, I mean,
just in these state issued clothes that are thin, the
(16:35):
airs hitting our skin, and we hear on the radio
that it's thirty one degrees, and we started cheering like
we were really excited to go back in. And I
remember the boss, the lieutenant, he looked over at the
other boss and said, I didn't hear anything, did you.
And they rolled that gate and we came on out
here and we were picking cabbage. It was frozen and
(16:55):
it had been raining, so our boots and bottom of
our legs were wet, our socks were wet. They issue
these little cotton gloves in the mud. They're not going
to stay on your hand. You finally just have to
put the gloves down. And we're just picking cabbage, which
the people around me, their lips are blue, snots running
down our faces and frozen, and I remember filling ice
(17:16):
on my eyelashes and thinking they really don't give us
about us. You brought up tampons, and so I need
to say working in the field is absolutely insane. When
you're on your menstrual cycle. There's no restroom. They have
a porta potty that they carry on a trailer and
tractor pulls. It comes around once every four hours. Not
(17:37):
everybody gets to use it. So I might be on
a squad with thirty five other women. They'll say, douce
it up, restroom break. We all line up the trailers there.
I would remember like waving my tampon in the air
because you're trying to show the boss like I need
to go, like this is important for me to go
because they're only going to pick five or six.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
But is the thirteenth Amendment that allows for the enslavement
of criminals in violation of the Eighth Amendment that protects
Americans against cruel or unusual punishments.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
The thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, right, However, there's a clause
there that says, except for someone who's been duty convicted,
if you had been convicted in the United States of America,
according to a thirteenth Amendment, you can still be enslaved.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
So a lot of people don't realize that. That's the
silver lining of the thirteenth Amendment, right, right, A lot of.
Speaker 5 (18:19):
People don't realize that. And it was very likely a
result of backroom bargaining between.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Betrius corporations who has vested interest.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
Back in the day with Abraham Lincoln, the one of
the Southern states on board, right. And but what happened
was is now these black people who we freed, now
we're going to get them all in the street, and
we're going to pass the black codes, and we're gonna
arrisk them and we're gonna police.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Them harder, and then we can reincarcerate them.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
And reincarcerate them and use their labor now, but now
we're not slaves now their.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Prison deonkap eighteen sixty five. Does Lincoln free the slaves?
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Yes and no.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
There were certainly millions of people that were free during
that time.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
But unfortunately what happened at that time was also that
the institution of moved behind prison walls.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
There's quite a few organization out there that go to
prison and say, hey, we'll hire some of your people
and we'll pay them a dollar an hour whatever, right,
and then they'll go out and sell those goods for
whatever they send them out in the free world.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Right.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
And then here's the rub. Once I leave prison, Whole
Foods won't employ me.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Why won't they employ you?
Speaker 5 (19:16):
Because they have restrictions against people who' been incarcerator.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
They're working for us, so they'll hire you when you're
in prison, but you're no longer viable once you're free.
Speaker 6 (19:24):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
So, the average wage for somebody who's incarcerated, right is
fourteen cents an hour, and in seven states it's actually nothing.
Majority of states do pay something, but we're talking about pennies.
People will work for two straight weeks and their checks
will be thirty bucks, right, and with that they are
(19:46):
expected to support themselves in prison. There is a really
really big common misconception, right that prison is a free ride.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Far from it.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
The cost of communication, the cost of commissary of food,
of hygiene product, a medical codepase, these are all things
that people in prison.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Actually pay in prison.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
They've recently introduced emails and people have to buy stamps
to send an email.
Speaker 12 (20:10):
As if this is like a physical piece of mail
that's going like ups usps, right, Like we're talking about
an email at fifty cents an email?
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Is it slavery if they compensate you, And if they
compensate you, is there a certain amount that qualifies it?
As I guess this is some form of employment by
the state. What is slavery in your opinion? In the
context of imprisonment, slavery means that.
Speaker 5 (20:33):
You are coerced daily into eating when they tell you
the working, when they tell you to work, behaving in
a way that is conducive to furthering the aims of
the institution. And if you don't do those things, they
can have you beaten, they can have you a good
time taken away, they can have your throne in solitary.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Is there an argument that you're working to pay the
cost of what the taxpayer is paying to keep you
in prison after you've committed let's say, a heinus crime.
Is that a reasonable argument or do you say, hell no.
Speaker 5 (20:56):
It's not unreasonable that if I'm a taxpayer and you
omit to hainus crime, my first thing is I don't
want you to do it again. Yeah, and I want
to ensure that person who you committed it on, if
it was found heals or is a system that I have.
If they're gonna make you work, then okay, But I
want you to work or something, or I want you
treated in a way that allows you to address whatever
(21:18):
trauma or anger whatever you had, so that you don't
hurt anybody else. When I was raped, even now, forty
years later, I have visions of doing some really ugly
to these dudes. I understand punishment, I understand the need
for revenge, the desire for revenge, but that's not gonna
help me heal.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Are American prisons designed in such a way to rehabilitate
criminals or is it simply a system to punish offenders,
traumatizing them further and increasing the likelihood of them reoffending
after their release real quick.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
I'd be like going down the road, you fucked.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
If you want to support our boots on the ground
independent journalism that is not bond and paid for my
corporate interests, along with exclusive DLC content that YouTube won't
let me up and uncensored early access to all my
videos before they go off on YouTube. Go subscribe at
patreon dot com slash Tyler olivera for less than five
bucks a month. Is internal assaults and sexual assault common.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
The threat in a female prison for sexual violence is
from staff, not from each other.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Different dynamic therabis.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
I think one hundred percent. We had to be weary
of who was working. We had to pay attention if
we knew the officers that would creep around the shower
area or come around at night, and you knew who
not to get into a private nook with or not
to make eye contact with. The Prison Rape Elimination Act
that's supposed to offer protection, I guess Frison.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Rape Elimination Act. So it must be common enough to
where they had to implement an act.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
Yeah, absolutely, very common.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Day one. You're fighting people multiple times, How does it evolve?
You get some respect? Eveventually or is it just fighting
NonStop until you build an alliance with someone.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
The violence is usually early on, and it's again to
see what you're going to do.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Whether you week with you're going to be a vic
measuring you up.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
If you get with a gang or with a click
or with whatever, right, then it may be a little
different because at that point the gangs may be called
out as a group to do some stuff. Right, I
would fight. I would jump on dudes looking at me wrong?
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Are you looking at Did you ever end up in
solitary confinement?
Speaker 4 (23:15):
I'm a disruptor out here and I was a disruptor
in there, and I ended up in solitary confinement lots
of time. The first time I went to solitary was
for hugging. There was a lady that was crying over
her mail. She was sitting in the floor and I
kind of bent down and hugged the top of her
shoulders and they saw it on camera. They came and
got me. It was like the swat team coming in. Yeah,
handcuffed me, marched me to solitary. I was there for
(23:36):
two months.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Two months you're in solitary, so that's enough time to
have permanent psychological damage.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
I'm sure right, yeah, absolutely absolutely. It was wild in there,
nothing to do but like read graffiti on the wall,
which is and those cells were hugely disgustingly dirty. Sometimes
you would see blood or even feces like on the walls.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Solitary confinement.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
It's very commonly referred to gain the prison system by
people who.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Have done time as the whole or the box. Those
terms date back to antibellum slavery.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Oh interesting, Okay.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
The whole was a literal hole that enslaved people were
put in if they disobeyed the rules of their enslavery.
Got it right, No food, darkness, heat. Similarly, the hot
box was the same thing, was a box. These are
the terms that then migrated into the system and then
you don't even.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Know are related to antibellum slavery.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
The field work you guys are doing loses money, but
it still happens. Is the goal just to break your
spirit and your will? And when you leave prison to
feel like a piece of shit? What is the goal?
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Texas is a really punitive state, and I think that
this idea that if we just make it as miserable
as possible, people won't come back.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
But the thing does it work.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
Oh, it absolutely does not work right because people are
here because they have done something that, probably especially women,
resulted of trauma and they have to work through that
and heal, or they're going to get out and still
not know how to handle their emotions and handle what
they've been through and still go back to their same
old ways and they end up back to prison. And
(25:10):
our recidivism rates show that.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Do you think ten years helped you more than one
year or two years or five years in prison would
have helped you understand you did a bad thing and
you need to stop doing that.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Or I think that after about twelve months inside, I
really emerged myself into the prison life. After a year,
any thoughts of good things were gone. So no, I
think that it doesn't matter. I think that you humans
are going to survive where they're at. They're going to
change to be able to survive. I was the worst
version of myself while I was incarcerated.
Speaker 5 (25:41):
The American printon system is set up to humiliate, degree punish,
and minimize. The American prison system is full of individuals
who are in fact used as free labor for corporations,
for companies, for the state. The takes Princes as an example,
they have one hundred and forty thousand people there. The
guards turn the keys, hand out the mail, count maybe
(26:02):
drive the buses. Everything else is done by incarcerated individuals. Right,
all right, the prisoner's fun.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
The prison again, We're sitting in the city of New York.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
It costs US over five hundred thousand dollars a year
to incarcerate one person on Rikers Island.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Five hundred k.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Do you know what we can do with five hundred k?
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Do they want you to end back up in the
prison system. Do they want you to live a happy, fruitful,
bountiful life after prison as the goal to set you
have success afterwards?
Speaker 6 (26:32):
I think that maybe the ideal.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
Well, I don't think that there is a huge universe
of individuals we're plotting to ensure that individuals have been
incarcerated go back to their cage.
Speaker 6 (26:41):
Sure, I don't think that exists.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
But politicians have done a good job at demonizing anyone
who gets in a cage in the first place. Right,
they cannot be trusted around your kids. Most prisons you
go to down TDCJ have maybe one psychologist. If that
they don't have psychology none. If You've been in an
environment where you've been degraded and dehumanized for two a
fourteen year and you get out there you expected just
to walk along so sidey. You feel usele, you feel
(27:04):
worth it. You got twenty twenty five. Thirty percent of
the people who are in jails in prisons have severe
mental health issues.
Speaker 6 (27:10):
It's not helped by.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
Being in jail, which means that I don't believe that
putting someone in a cage, a little cage where they're
subject to rape, to kill each other, without access to
meaningful health, with incredibly deficient way to meet your whatever
nutritional needs, all that.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
In other words, deprivation, I don't think that helps.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Torture all that.
Speaker 5 (27:29):
I don't think none of that helps. If what you
want to do is subject to the most violent brutality
you want, then say it, and don't say that. What
you want is people to be changed and rehabilitated. With me,
as someone who put a pistol on somebody's heads.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
How do you appeel to someone who maybe doesn't even
care about these people, but wants a better system, better
functioning society. How would you redesign the prison system?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Well, I'm not sure I would redesign the prison system.
And I think the system that we have.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Has no redeeming qualities, and I think we need to
like reimagine entirely how we want to address harm in
our communities.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
What are some immediate changes you would make to the
prison system.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
We're suing for air conditioning, so that's a big one.
Is stop cooking people alive. People are dying every summer.
Texas A and M did a report that showed some
sales at one hundred and forty degrees in the summer.
And I've seen people die from the heat, and I've
seen officers fall out from the heat. So that's probably
like the immediate thing.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
They need to live a dignified life where inequity is crushed.
Speaker 13 (28:33):
Sure, where people feel fulfilled, purpose driven and loved, feel
connected to the communities and the land that they're on,
and then together in a connected world, we can cure
a I am less likely to cause you harm.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
I have everything I need and because I'm connected to
you as a person. But should I ever cause you
harm that we have the tools between us and in
a system to address.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
That harm in a way that doesn't cause or produce
more harm. Because this is this system is not producing safety.
If incarceration produce safety, then the US should be the safest.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Place on the planet.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
To me, it's like all these root causes, right, and
one of them is addressing the exception in the thirteenth Amendment.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
At what point do you stop getting second chances?
Speaker 6 (29:19):
I don't think any human, I don't care what you do,
deserve to be enslave. I don't care what you did.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
So you are anti slavery regardless of the worst crimes
possible you came in.
Speaker 5 (29:28):
Yes, But I also want to say some of these
people who, because of things that decisions they made at
a very high level way distance from the tens of
thousands of people who may get killed or poisoned right
because of some of the stuff that they do, don't
get charged with it. I would say that's more oninous
than somebody gets out of kills.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
Maybe a group of.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Five busting the food, poisoning the water and story the environment.
Speaker 5 (29:48):
None of them ever went to jail, None of them
emble went to prison. Should they have in my view, No,
I don't think anybody should be in prison. No one
should be sent to prison, No, no one. I'm an
ebolition No what should they do. I'm not saying I
don't believe in some sort of separation some folks a
lot of time. It takes resources, and it takes time,
and it takes a willing I guess to fail. And
I understand that given an infinite supply and an infinite
(30:13):
maybe you'll watch maybe sort of regulation on the movement.
I don't know, so I have to come down on
the site of some sort of separation that is not
punitive in nature. You need to find a way to
allow individuals who are leaving prison to have kind of
a ceremony of return and say you have quote unquote
paid your debt to society. Go on there, sign up
and say that you do not believe that we should enslave.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Anybody or you're the man dude. Thank you to mess
your time.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
You can hit me up on my link tree. It's
www dot Marcymarrie dot com.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
First thing is obviously follow us on all the social
platforms Worth Rises on the different platforms as well as
Andy exception on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
You can also visit us on our website at.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Worthriises dot org to set up on the newsletter or
to donate, and if you want to send a message
to your Congress.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Remember to end the exception the thirteenth Amendment. Visit endyeexception
dot com to take action.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
You support whatever you want to support, but full disclosure.
I do endorse the enslavement and murder of certain heinous criminals.
I do not believe that every criminal can or wants
to be rehabilitated into society. Some people are simply menaces
to society, but largely if we zoomed out and created
a more rehabilitative prison system rather than one focused on punishment,
(31:29):
I think the criminals that leave prison will go on
to commit less crimes and fit into society better
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