Except for that Little Detail...

[paft]

Via Raw Story

Colin Heaton, 1/16/12 speaking to the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention, on how to finance building a secure wall between Mexico and the United States: You take all these incarcerated illegal aliens, even some of the guys who are US citizens in the prison system who make about 27 cents a day doing ridiculous work, kick

Comments

[devil_ad_vocate]

If the teabaggers want to build a fence in South Carolina, that's OK with me. However, I will not permit them to build one in the state of Texas. The GOP may be afraid of them. I'm not.

[paft]

Why would that be okay with you?

[devil_ad_vocate]

I was being facetious, but if South Carolina is 99% tea partiers (which I doubt), they can build whatever they want. I live in Texas. We know a fence won't work, and is a stupid idea.

[paft]

da: if South Carolina is 99% tea partiers (which I doubt), they can build whatever they want.

And build a forced labor camp to do it? No, actually, I don't think they can, not if it conflicts with federal law.

[allhatnocattle]

How is this proposal for labour camps any different then the labour already done by imprisoned Americans? What upsets you more; the scale of these proposed labour camps or the blunt racism that American justice likes hidden?

[paft]

I am no supporter of America's use of labor in prisons, but this is different because he's proposing the creation of a massive concentration camp incarcerating, not just prison inmates, but entire families rounded up because they were undocumented, including kids taken out of school. It's an expansion of our already enormous and badly run prison system and sure to be a human rights nightmare. And it would exist solely to provide forced labor with a completely helpless workforce who could be abused with impunity.

[dreadfulpenny81]

I'm all for bringing back prison labor in general. If its a way for the country to get things done without government workers standing around doing NOTHING for two hours or more (don't act like that doesn't happen -- you know you've seen them) AND a way for them to work-off the cost of their incarceration, it's a win-win. I'm not just talking about illegal aliens who are arrested building a border fence or something, I'm talking about ANY criminals.

[paft]

A "win win" for who? The Americans who would be put out of jobs because they had to compete with what amounts to slave labor?

And are you telling me you like the idea of this concentration camp Heaton has proposed? You like the idea of rounding up kids from American schools and sticking them in a place like that, putting them to work building a wall rather than educating them? What about illegal immigrants who are elderly or too sick and inured to work building a wall? How would medical care be provided? What kind of housing would be offered the entire families who'd be rounded up? What kind of security to ensure that the prison inmates mixed in didn't prey on those who were guilty only of coming here illegally?

What Heaton is proposing is a human rights nightmare.

[dreadfulpenny81]

I said I support bringing back prison labor. What part of a specific statement do you not understand?

[meus_ovatio]

Prison labor became a racket which is why it went away. It is a model ripe for corruption. Which is why it's kept to a meaningless minimum.