President Donald Trump’s tariffs are already unpopular and deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, but a man who claims to have been wrongly imprisoned for murder argues that his claim to target nations that engage in forced labor is hypocritical. By his account, America engages in literal slavery by forcing prisoners to work for the profits of large companies.
“The Trump administration’s claim that tariffs are needed to punish those 59 countries and the European Union, which it says are too permissive of forced labor” is hypocritical, wrote MS NOW's Jeremy Busby, a writer and activist incarcerated in Texas for murder (he claims it was self-defense) and founder of the nonprofit JoinJeremy, on Sunday. “I write this from Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades and is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.”
Busby described that he has “seen guards attack a man for his refusal to chop grass. I have seen countless others pepper sprayed for refusing to perform work details. Some of my college classmates were expelled from religious and educational programs for failing to show up for prison-mandated work. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are behind bars in this country. More than half of them, approximately 1.2 million, are held in state or federal prisons, where work is compulsory.”
In his essay, Busby argued that prisons effectively enslave their inmates in order to provide cheap goods and services for wealthy corporations.
“Those assigned to agribusiness operations harvest some of the same crops — like cotton — that enslaved people once did,” Busby argued. “They work under an armed guard on horseback, following the ‘same marching orders as their predecessors,’ the Texas Observer reported. In 2022 alone, Texas prisons raked in $58 million from sales of industrial products — such as soap and stainless steel tables — produced through forced labor. That sum was completely separate from the reported $51 million in earnings that same year from agriculture.”
He added, “Incarcerated workers have a long history of inhumane treatment for any type of work stoppage. In 1908, Frank Pinkard received 39 lashes after refusing to continue digging a ditch in Texas. Other incarcerated workers were killed for disobeying work orders, according to historian Robert Perkinson, author of ‘Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.’”
Busby listed the punishments given to prisoners who refuse to work including “long-term placement in solitary confinement, which requires confiscation of all personal property” and loss of “privileges like family visitation, telephone calls or the good-time credits needed for release can be stripped away. Commissary, entertainment and recreational access can be suspended.”
He ultimately concluded, “If tariffs are an appropriate response to countries looking away from forced labor, then other countries would be justified in placing tariffs on us.”
Speaking to AlterNet in July, economist Dr. Ed Gresser, the Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the liberal-leaning think tank Progressive Policy Institute, characterized Trump’s tariffs as a “big-government” move despite his claim to be a small government president. Economist Dr. Robert Shapiro, who served as a top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, argued they harm the American economy by creating “uncertainty. Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it.”
He added, “So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”
