Why Climate Change Is a Human Rights Issue

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Should companies provide a ‘Made In an American Prison’ label if the product is made in an American jail? Over the last few decades there has been a huge surge of products made in prison factories by inmates. These products—which range from clothes to military equipment and everything in between—are made extremely cheaply because the workers are often paid pennies, if at all. Is this the continuation of slavery? Renowned playwright Liza Jessie Peterson thinks so, and she talks to us about how today’s privatized prison labor problem is a huge human rights problem happening right here on American soil.

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LIZA JESSIE PETERSON

Liza Jessie Peterson is a renowned actress, poet, playwright, educator and activist who has been steadfast in her commitment to incarcerated populations both professionally and artistically, but specifically with adolescent boys and girls detained at Rikers Island for eighteen years. She has worked as a program counselor for the Department of Corrections, a reentry specialist, a teaching artist (with poetry and theater), GED instructor for the Board of Education at Rikers Island, and a life skills workshop facilitator. She was recently featured in Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th (Netflix) and was a consultant on Bill Moyers documentary RIKERS (PBS).

She has written several plays, including The Peculiar Patriot, which she performed excerpts of in over 35 penitentiaries across the country, and opened for Angela Davis at Columbia University’s conference on mass incarceration.

Also known for her exceptional poetic skills, Liza began her poetry career at the Nuyorican Poets Café and was a vital member of the enclave of notable poets who were part of the “underground slam poetry” movement. It was this electric group of artists that inspired Russell Simmons to bring “spoken word” to HBO where Liza appeared on two episodes of Def Poetry.

As an actress Liza appeared in several feature films: Love the Hard Way (costarring with Pam Grier and Adrien Brody), Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, K. Shalini’s A Drop of Life, and Jamie Catto’s What About Me.

Liza’s first book, ALL DAY; A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids, was released in Spring 2017.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Liza Jessie Peterson: Why should people be concerned with the issue of mass incarceration? People should be concerned with the issue of mass incarceration because it is a human rights crisis that is happening right in front of our face, and it's being cloaked with crime and punishment.

So “These people are bad people, they've committed a crime so we can ignore them, we can lock them up, we can throw them away and we can basically ignore a large swath of our population because they've been criminalized as bad people. They're disposable.”

Human beings are not disposable. We have value. We have traumas, we have hearts, we have families, we have the communities so we're not disposable, no matter what we've done we're not disposable.

Well, so you have prisons that are privatized but in addition to private prisons even state run prisons you have corporations who are profiting from people's incarceration. So what does that mean?

Ok. The 13th amendment in the Constitution, in the United States Constitution, it says that slavery is illegal. So we can't have slavery anymore, except for punishment of a crime. So everybody get your constitution out, look up the 13th amendment and you see the clause that says “except for punishment of a crime.” So if you are convicted of a crime then you're exempt from that 13th amendment saying that slavery is abolished. So that means that you're allowed to work as a slave, slave labor, slave wages.

So you have people working for ten cents an hour, 11 cents an hour who are doing agriculture, working for huge corporations. I don't want to name them because there's so many, but a lot of the goods and services that we take for granted, clothing lines, computer parts, airplane parts, military equipment, food that we buy organically grown, these things are being manufactured in prisons, in prison farms, in prison factories by inmates.

So, y'know, we talk about “buy American,” yeah—okay I have this line in my play The Peculiar Patriot and it says “made in China, made in prison is now the new China” because China, people were outraged about the slave labor and all these sweat shops in Taiwan, in China,...

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