Mr. Jenkins calling from Corcoran State Prison. Today is May the 27, 2025. Today topic is slavery in prison. The reason why I chose this topic is because in the prison system, prisoners have been forced to do programs that they feel uncomfortable with. They’ve been forced to go to do a job that they really doesn’t want to do; go to school, and if you doesn’t go, they write you up what they call a 115. Slavery. Say, back in the day slavery was slavery. They forced you to do stuff that you don’t want to do. In prison, you don’t have a choice. You chose not to, they write you up, you lose your good time, you add up extra days on your time when you don’t go home [unclear] that they give you. And under the Constitution you have a right to say, “No, no, I don’t want to work this job.” On the street, you say, “I don’t want to go to this job, I don’t have to go to this job. I don’t have to go to school.” But in the prison system, you don’t have that choice. You don’t have that option.
They send you what they call a ducat, and you get it, and you have to go. And it’s one hour. Most of the classes is one hour. They get milestones; some classes you get milestones. You get time off, on your time, to put your days off so you can go home early. But the majority of prison is that you have a lot of young men that just come in and they don’t go to job or get to go to school for about a year or two years: and they put programs for most of the guys that been here a long time, so a lot of young men that come here trying to go to program, don’t get a chance to go. They don’t get a chance to get credit. And what we’re saying is a law need to be passed, and I am working on a law to be passed that ensure that you have a right to say yes or no, “I don’t want to go do this program. It’s not the program I want to do in prison.”
A bill was trying to be passed, 2025, but it didn’t pass. So I have rewrote a bill that [unclear], that I feel that it will be passed for next year. I am being released next year, 2026. That’ll be my last year in the prison system, and I’m going to follow up on working with organizations that ensure that bills will be passed so it would not be slavery in prison. And, we need to focus on prison, because a lot of people out there doesn’t know, understand. prison and they doesn’t, you know, focus on it because we too busy to focus on stupidity, with celebrities, what they doing. But in the prison system — people forget that you have a lot of people in prison that shouldn’t be in prison. You have a lot of people in prison that’s coming out and doesn’t have nothing to look forward to. We need to fix that cycle. We need to fix that.
So my thing is this, let’s stop the slavery in prison. Let’s all get together as one, as the United States, because we are constitution rights, we are human. We are people too, and we shouldn’t close the doors on that, because that’s what has been done, and we forget that guys in prison is human. So, my suggestion is, let’s all work together and come up with a better solution and try to go to the House of Representatives, the Senate or whatever we need to do together and make this happen, because nobody should be a slave, and in the prison system, there are slaves. I am one of the inmates, and like I said, I’m paroling next year. So my thing is this, let’s work together, and I hope that we are working, work together and get the slavery out of prison.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
