Posts tagged ACLU
Prison Labor: Modern-Day Slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment
Prison Labor: Modern-Day Slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment

As numerous wildfires tore across California, approximately 1,500 inmates worked alongside professional firefighting crews to quell the flames. Typically, professional firefighters earn around $74,000 a year, excluding benefits. Prisoners working as firefighters earn about $1.45 a day for their work, roughly thirteen percent of the hourly minimum wage in California. [1] The discrepancy between the pay of salaried and incarcerated firefighters reduces firefighting costs by $100 million dollars a year for the state, and incarcerated firefighters, who must volunteer to participate, are compensated with a two-day reduction of their sentence for every day of good behavior. [2]

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Jake GrayThirteenth Amendment, Constitutional law, prison, ACLU, firefighting, minimum wageComment
U.S. Mass Surveillance: Striking the Balance Between Security and Liberty
U.S. Mass Surveillance: Striking the Balance Between Security and Liberty

Over a year before the Snowden leak, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s concurrence in United States v. Jones raised light on issues of government surveillance that came with the public disclosure of the NSA programs. Sotomayor warned that the digital age should reconsider whether “an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.”

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Tanya Reynamass surveillance, privacy, 2nd circuit, ACLUComment