New America Media, Audio, Shirin Sadeghi, Posted: Aug 22, 2011

Prison labor is no secret. It is widely known that prisoners do such things as work the roads on the outside and produce goods on the inside -- all of which they are barely paid for.

What is relatively new information for those of us on the outside is that prison labor is the new sweatshop -- a system where highly disenfranchised individuals are forced into labor for the greater profit of corporations.

At least that is what independent journalist Rania Khalek says. Her recent Alternet article 21st Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor -- details the ways in which prisoners in the United States have now merely become a cog in the system of maximizing profit. She spoke with New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi.