No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.
Most jobs are inside facilities, where the state’s inmates — who are disproportionately Black — can be sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for free doing everything from mopping floors to laundry. But more than 10,000 inmates have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from major car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart, the AP determined.
I'm pretty sure you can say it's the largest prison system in history. This documentary from 2015 is named that: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/biggest-prison-system-history/
O! say does that star-spangled Banner yet wave,
O'er the Land of the free and the home of the brave?
(Emphasis mine)
America was founded on contradictions.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.[...]"
(Emphasis mine)
Written by a slave owner that had a sexual relationship with his enslaved sister in law. Her father was also the father of his late wife. Both had such affairs after their wives died. He even knew that he held incompatible views. Some say he had moderate views on slavery for the time and wanted it abolished some time in the future but the fact is he profited from slavery including child slavery (also his own children), bought slaves and encouraged slaves to procreate (children born would also be his slaves). His "solution" to slavery was to establish African colonies of American freedmen believing that no joint government would be possible.