Nationally, upwards of 10% of incarcerated persons are innocent. In Louisiana, that % may be much higher.

Louisiana has a slavery problem. Prison labor is used everywhere from farm fields the Governor’s mansion to sanitation workers in New Orleans right this moment. https://twitter.com/simoncowell/status/1263862677715054592

Right this moment, everyone in my street has their trash on the curb that will be picked up by incarcerated laborers because our sanitation workers are striking for better safety precautions in a global pandemic.

One in ten of those incarcerated workers are innocent.

And that is *outrageous* and disgusting and even more disgusting, is the banality of it that is so easy to normalize even if you don’t *want* to.

There’s so much going on right now that I’d forgotten the awful truth that *slaves are picking up my trash* til I saw this.

And I am ashamed.

There’s a subset of vampire stories where the vampires want to rule the world and use human beings as cattle.

Those stories exist in part because modern slavery exists, and vampires are us.

A representative for the state of Louisiana once said that the state literally could not afford to operate _at all_ without prison labor.

Without slaves.

The truth is we could- we could adequately tax the multi billion dollar corporations we subsidize instead-

- but no one in power wants to do that.

They’d rather have slave labor, for-profit prisons, and look the other way.

What other forms of exploitation are we in the “West” dependent on? Fast fashion, cheap electronics with built in obsolescence, fresh strawberries in winter?

Margot Adler wrote, “vampires allow us to ask the questions we usually bury.”

Every vampire’s victim is a person trapped in a deadly circumstance beyond their control.

Archie Williams is a free man with a story to tell the world and a voice that breaks your heart to hear him tell it.

And we need to understand more than just his story of survival. We need to understand the system that created his need to survive something awful.

10% of incarcerated Americans are innocent. There are over 2 million incarcerated Americans right now.

200,000 Archie Williams’s.

It’s hard to grasp the scope of it all without faces and names.

Vampires are us.

The systems we employ, depend on, and conveniently ignore drained Archie Williams of 37 years of his life.

His story is powerful, and it makes his voice and delivery powerful.

But it came at a horrifying price.

So please, if you encounter this video on social media, remember: Louisiana condemns more young black men to death or life in prison than anywhere else on earth.

Innocent men make the best workers.

Louisiana absolutely depends on this.

Louisiana is full of vampires.

I’m one of them. We all are.

I’m so glad Archie Williams’ story is out there, putting a face and a name to a huge and disgraceful system.

I’m so happy he’s had this opportunity.

And I’m so damn angry at the path he was forced to walk to get there.

𝗪𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺.