I have to be honest about something that is a great source of personal shame: I am really, really bad at taking time off of work.
Despite working at a company with unlimited PTO, the last time I took a weeklong vacation was about a year ago, making me a walking cliche of the American who never goes on holiday. You could argue that the reason is cultural, that the Protestant work ethic has me in a chokehold. But I think the root cause is much simpler: For something allegedly relaxing and fun, vacations require a lot of planning and even more money. The price of flights is up, hotel rooms aren’t cheap, you need to factor in the cost of meals, and even that corny souvenir shot glass isn’t going to pay for itself.
Hannah Sampson, who writes about travel for the Washington Post, says one answer is to take a staycation. “It’s taking the time to do things you normally wouldn’t do in your regular life and put on hold all of the burdensome things that you would do in your daily life,” she told Vox. “You’re enabling yourself to discover something that you might have taken for granted.”
Plus, she explains, a staycation can be “really fun and rewarding while also being budget-friendly and hopefully allowing you to put money aside for the bigger trip that you want to take sometime.”
So how do you make the most of a staycation? And how do you keep your typical day-to-day life from creeping in? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Sampson, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
It sounds like the key to a successful staycation is all about mindset. How do you achieve that mindset shift?
The way to really get into the staycation zone is planning and preparing and getting yourself hyped for what you’re going to do. This is something that I love about going on vacation and it applies to staying home too.
Read reviews for places that you might want to go. If you’ve picked a restaurant, look at the menu and start to drool over what you’re going to eat. Think about your favorite bookstores or paths or discover a new corner of your neighborhood that you want to explore in advance. The anticipation of that experience will give you that vacation high.
It’s so hard though, because you’re around the house. How do you make your home feel a little more special?
I think we all got too much practice on this during the pandemic, but there are a lot of things you can do to change the vibes of your house. I have a candle that’s national park-scented, so it’s piney. In my house, we do a lot of things like use audio to set the mood. I have small kids, so we’ll play audio of a ride at Disney World or just ambient sound from a park that we like.
During the pandemic, my husband and I meant to spend our anniversary at the beach where we got married, but I was pregnant. We couldn’t travel. So we found a webcam that showed the sunset on that beach and we got takeout. It was really sad, but we watched the sunset.
It’s sad, but it’s also quite sweet. It’s like, “We’ll bring the beach to us.”
Exactly. And it was a beautiful sunset.
For me, one of the challenges of a staycation — and for all vacations, if I’m honest — is not letting real life creep in. And that’s beyond taking time to do administrative tasks around the house. That Slack goes off. I get that email. A news alert goes out and I’m just like, “Well, what if I just take a little gander?” How do you keep from letting that happen?
Unplugging is so hard. You could have a couple of small kids and teach them to tell you to get off your phone, which mine have learned to do. My husband actually has a Brick device which locks your phone for you. The discipline is real there.
It takes work to force yourself out of that constant need of scrolling through TikTok or just seeing what’s up at work. You don’t need to be on there. If there’s an emergency, they know how to reach you at work. So trust that process. Be super in the moment with whatever you’re doing because you need that mental break, even if you haven’t gone somewhere.
You need to make the most of the time that you have, especially if you’re taking vacation time and spending it at home. Vacation time is a precious resource that you should be using to the best of your ability.
Of all the extinction-level threats vying for our attention, AI, climate change, and nuclear war tend to get most of the airplay. But Annie Jacobsen thinks biological war should be near the top of our mental list of doomsday scenarios, too.
She should know — Jacobsen has carved out a unique niche as America’s foremost reporter on the ways we could end the world. Her bestselling 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario terrified readers and experts alike, and has been optioned by Hollywood.
It was while conducting dozens of interviews with high-level government sources for Nuclear War that Jacobsen was told repeatedly that biowarfare should be her next focus.
She took their advice. Her gripping new book Biological War: A Scenario follows a similar ticking-clock format that shows, step by step, just how a humanity-threatening man-made biological catastrophe could play out. (Spoiler alert: not great.)
The result feels like dystopian science fiction, albeit the kind that comes heavily footnoted with government studies that come to similarly grim conclusions. The fact that tech CEOs are also sounding the alarm that advanced AI could make creating killer germs even easier only adds to the growing sense of anxiety. And this book has also been optioned by Hollywood for a TV adaptation.
Jacobsen sat down with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk through the plot of her nightmare scenario, why we’re still developing biological weapons despite the clear risks, and what needs to happen to avoid disaster. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How does your book start?
The inciting incident in the book is an accident at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, shorthand BSL-4, in Siberia called Vector. And it’s an actual BSL-4 lab, the highest classification. … And there was an actual accident, an explosion there in 2019.
In that real-life incident, a deadly pathogen was not released that we know of. But of course, in Biological War: A Scenario, a deadly pathogen is released. And it’s a form of pneumonic plague, which is a nightmare pathogen and sits at the top of the Tier 1 select agent list of the CDC. And so in the first act of the book, I show the scrambling of the intelligence community and the Defense Department, trying desperately to determine if something got out and what it is. … The release of the pathogen widens, and so once you have escape. You do not have mitigation, which has to happen in the first 24, 48 hours. Now you have a situation which is unstoppable.
You say this is now an unstoppable scenario. What is it?
A plague itself, of course, conjures up images and ideas of the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death. That killed between one half and one third of Europe. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And pneumonic plague is the airborne version of plague. The problem with an airborne pathogen is that because the delivery system is the human lungs, it can move very quickly from a scientist in that lab who now has Yersinia pestis in his lungs out to the general public. And that is precisely what happens in the scenario.
How does it spread from there? The city where this BSL-4 lab sits isn’t Moscow. What happens once the pathogen is in the lungs of the people who work in that lab, or the janitor who was cleaning it that night?
That’s right. Well, suddenly it’s in everyone’s lungs, and those people go out into their community. And even though Koltsovo, the science town where Vector is located, is a small town, it is just 12 miles from Novosibirsk, which is the third-largest city in Russia. And, also, there happens to be in this scenario a group of international hunters on a hunting trip in that area who come across a dying scientist in the snow. One of them gives him CPR, being the Good Samaritan that he is. And lo and behold, those travelers suddenly are now getting on an airplane in Novosibirsk, flying home to where they reside in five or six of the continents.
What makes this form of plague so novel, so dangerous?
I pull this information from actual facts of the Soviet Cold War-era biological weapons program that we know about from Soviet defectors. And I want you to keep in mind: This is 40 years ago when gene editing was in its infancy. But there are two things specifically that the Soviet bioweapons engineers did to plague.
Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you’re infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco.
And the other thing that the Soviet scientists were working on was a way to defeat medical countermeasures, but with an added component of psychological distress. They inserted a gene into the pathogen that would be triggered by the taking of antibiotics. And that second pathogen would give you encephalitis, which is a swelling of the brain. The psychological part of it, according to the Soviet scientists, was that they wanted the last thought of the person dying of what they thought was pneumonic plague, but would in fact be encephalitist to be, “My government and Western medicine has failed me.”
Those of us who try to remain optimistic think there’s a way to stop it. In the movies, there’s an outbreak, then the government gets it under control, and okay, maybe a lot of people die, but we’re all right. That is not where your book is headed. How does your scenario end?
So in the book, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Anarchy is what will happen according to Pentagon war gaming and pandemic planning. And this is because fear of infection becomes a secondary weapon, if you will. People begin to behave like they are about to die, which is most certainly underpinning everyone’s mind. And so after those first six days, the Principals Committee, the President’s Biodefense Committee, must make a decision. The president has to declare the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to step in as a law enforcement agency.
“Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.”
What happens to the president really blew my mind as a reporter. He goes somewhere in the United States very far away from everyone. Because the idea, the goal, is to make sure that the president doesn’t get the airborne pathogen in his lungs. So maybe I’ll leave you with an image. Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.
In the book, the people who survive are the ones who have gas masks. Everyone else is gone.
And look, we hope we never get to that, by all means. But yes, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its military personnel. And that is a spooky thought in and of itself, coupled with the idea that the military is predominantly male. There’s something like 17 percent women in the military. And so, unlike the Nuclear War scenario in which I had science-based nuclear winter theory to work from, in Biological War, nothing has been written on the science record about what it might be after. And so the one imaginative part of the book is the very end where I write about biological twilight. … And it is a very, very ugly world.
Let’s back up. We did outlaw biological weapons at some point, right?
That’s right. Very mysteriously in 1969, President Nixon just unilaterally declared that the arsenal was going to be destroyed. At the same time that all of the nations of the world were working to sign this treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which would outlaw bioweapons. Soviet Russia at the time signed it but immediately began work on an illegal biological weapons program that was colossal. And this went without notice, without any idea really by the CIA and the Pentagon all the way until 1989, when one of the Soviet scientists named Vladimir Pasechnik had a crisis of conscience and he defected and he told British intelligence all about the program.
Where have we seen biological weapons used?
Maybe the most important example of a biological attack in the past, certainly here in the United States, are the anthrax attacks, which occurred right after 9/11. Weaponized anthrax was sent through the mail to US senators and a number of media outlets. So five people ended up dying; 22 got sick in four states. But that really kicked off what can be considered the biological military-industrial complex, if you will, which led to this buildup in BSL-4 labs around the world today. There are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. There are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs.
Your book has a map of where those labs are, which I found weirdly comforting, mainly because I don’t live too near any of them. If one of these things is going to be released, either accidentally or deliberately, where is the threat coming from? A rogue nation? Terrorists?
Certainly, bad actors getting a hold of a biological weapon was the great concern of the post-anthrax situation. And that is why so much emphasis was put on bioterrorism. Now I avoided that specifically in the book. … And I didn’t even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.
Could somebody be making a biological weapon in a basement somewhere, off books?
Absolutely. And another disturbing document I came across, unclassified in the Pentagon, was a threat spectrum that showed weapons of mass destruction in terms of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons sit at the far end of the spectrum. They are the most destructive. But very close behind were biological weapons. And even more startling was the notion that biological weapons present the greatest overall threat.
Nuclear weapons have an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material. … You have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a submarine. … That creates a situation where most nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, if you will, are in the hands of a command-and-control system within a nation.
Biological weapons have no such barriers. In fact, the barriers for entry are getting lower literally by the day. You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.
Your book reads like a thriller. How much have you exaggerated? How much have you novelized in order to hold our attention?
Everything in the book is based in science fact, meaning all of the facts, all of the figures. I write a hundred or so pages of notes in the back of the book for readers to be able to answer the question that you are asking me. … In the notes, you can find that answer.
Did any of those people give you good recommendations for how to avoid a disaster scenario, or at least how to avoid these things proliferating?
Well, you know, the ticking clock scenario that I write has an even more urgent ticking clock, which is the public’s pressure on lawmakers to absolutely do something about this nightmare scenario before it happens. Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don’t hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.
How do you sleep through the night?
Anyone who knows me personally can vouch for the fact that I am an optimist at heart. I really believe that information is king. Once you know things, it gives you a lot of power. Perhaps that’s whistling by the graveyard, but that’s what works for me.
Do you have a biohazard suit?
I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.
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“This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion last week as he “reluctantly” dismissed charges in the last eight criminal cases against Jan. 6 rioters.
Because Trump’s Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the cases against Stewart Rhodes and his fellow Oath Keepers, Mehta had to oblige. But not before he wrote: “Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy — the peaceful transfer of presidential power — to buckle.”
It’s a remarkable and tragic conclusion. The final chapter of Trump’s Big Lie began with his victory in 2024, and this dismissal almost certainly marks its culmination: The anti-democracy thugs won, decisively.
The system barely held on Jan. 6, but it hasn’t held since. And the next time MAGA Republicans lose a national election, they’re in a much better position to successfully pull off the coup that only narrowly failed.
Since Trump issued his mass clemency, at least 97 of the roughly 1,500 pardoned rioters (about 1 in 16) have been arrested, prosecuted or convicted for other crimes, according to a June 2026 Lawfare study. At least 14 of those “have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and at least six have faced domestic violence charges,” Lawfare’s Katherine Pompilio noted.
The MAGA mob that chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and “Where’s Nancy?” was, for a brief moment, almost universally reviled, even by many Republicans. So despicable was the rioters’ brutally violent rampage that MAGA created conspiracy theories claiming they were antifa supersoldier crisis actors. But soon enough, Trump’s supporters simply embraced the people he called “beautiful,” because MAGA is a cult of personality and believes whatever Trump tells it to believe.
It’s often said by those who’d excuse or downplay Jan. 6 that “the system held,” but far too many people look at the assault as little more than a populist riot that got out of hand. Rather, Jan. 6 was merely the loudest day of Trump’s monthslong self-coup attempt after losing a free and fair election.
The Senate had the chance to hold Trump accountable and prevent what should have been an unthinkable political comeback for an unabashed demagogic criminal. But the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” — that ultimate of powerful institutions — did not convict him at his second impeachment, weeks after he left office in 2021. Then-Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell gave a bravura speech putting the entire blame for Jan. 6 on Trump and eviscerating his self-coup attempt, which he said would put American democracy into a “death spiral.” Yet McConnell — who could have easily whipped the nine additional votes needed to convict — voted to acquit, saying the courts would handle Trump. Over the next four years, both federal and state court systems failed to hold Trump accountable.
The system barely held on Jan. 6, but it hasn’t held since. And the next time MAGA Republicans lose a national election, they’re in a much better position to successfully pull off the coup that only narrowly failed.
Think about institutions that held the line on Jan. 6: the vice presidency, the DOJ, the FBI, Congress. They’re all now under the direct authority of election-denying Trump loyalists.
And you can add to those ranks a growing number of Big Lie boosters who now have authority over state and local elections. The New York Times, citing an analysis of data from the Voting Rights Lab, reported last week that nearly 100 election deniers across the country “oversee or help administer elections in counties across the nation where competitive House and Senate races will determine control of Congress.” The Times reported that these people “have either publicly espoused false conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election or that American elections are rife with fraud, or taken direct action to support those theories.”
On Jan. 5, 2021, America was still a place with a hundred-years-old tradition of peacefully transferring power. But a rage-addicted narcissist — trained by his mentor Roy Cohn to “never admit guilt” and “just deny everything and fight” — ended that tradition because he couldn’t accept being rejected by Americans.
It was a terrible systemic failure that Trump wasn’t convicted at his second impeachment. Just as consequential is the fact that his trials for election tampering in Georgia and in federal court — as well as for allegedly hoarding documents, some classified — never concluded. With the last Jan. 6 cases now swept into the dustbin of history — and belief in Trump’s Big Lie now codified as a MAGA professional prerequisite — it’s hard to argue that America’s institutions truly held the line. It’s even harder to believe they will the next time.
Amid this week’s headlines about flatlining jobs numbers, confirmation votes and the Strait of Hormuz, conservatives on social media (including the vice president of the United States) sniped at each other over an entirely different topic: the humble burrito.
The ongoing imbroglio is part of a broader question for conservatives: A year and a half into Trump’s second term, what should they tell voters increasingly unhappy about rising inflation and sluggish job growth? For many Republicans, including the president, the answer is “Stuff it.”
At least some Republicans and conservatives are admitting the price of food is higher than many Americans can comfortably digest.
Earlier this week, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the conservative advocacy organization focusing on younger Americans, raised the issue of inflation in a way any college student — or, really, anyone — could understand: the price of Mexican food. “One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability: ‘A burrito shouldn’t cost $20,’ TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet tweeted. “It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
The problem is not inflation or affordability, responded a number of conservatives. It’s lazy — and young — Americans, who are refusing to cook or take responsibility for their own finances. “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college,” tweeted Rep. Dan Crenshaw. Commentator Ben Shapiro, seemingly under the impression the student was looking for a handout, wrote, “We have enough problems as a country without insane expectations that the government is going to provide us with gourmet-quality burritos.”
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen echoed Crenshaw’s dietary advice: “When I graduated I lived on ramen noodles, had two roommates, and worked two jobs. I didn’t whine about affordability, I worked hard so I could one day afford a better life.” As if on cue, Fox Business ran a segment decrying Gen Z’s supposed proclivity for spending on “little treats.”
This is unlikely to be a palatable message at the ballot box, and at least some Republicans and conservatives are admitting the price of food is higher than many Americans can stomach. “How about young families with kids who are struggling to afford groceries because prices have doubled in 10 years while wages haven’t?” Christine Pushaw, a prominent aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, replied to Crenshaw. UnHerd editor Sohrab Ahmari pointed the finger of blame straight at the president. “[T]his is what happens when commentators refuse to be honest about the consequences of their preferred policies — in this case, the inflationary effects caused by President Trump’s war with Iran.” Even Vice President JD Vance chimed in to criticize Thiessen.
Despite the vice president’s comments, the denial is coming straight from the top. Trump has claimed he’s brought down prices “incredibly” and has called the affordability crisis a “con job” and a “hoax.” His Cabinet members and political supporters follow his lead. On Tuesday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC’s Squawk Box that not only is he “sick” of hearing about a “K-shaped economy” — the term for economic gains going disproportionately to the wealthiest people — but it is also untrue. “I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over, and we’re seeing a more of a C economy, where the lower wage earners are finally calling it back.”
There’s little question Trump and his enablers are responsible for the current round of inflation.
Well, we Americans are “sick” of the nation’s economic situation too. Gallup’s regular polling recently found that “Americans remain broadly pessimistic about the economy,” while Glassdoor’s monthly polling revealed that employee confidence is at record lows. The July jobs report, released Friday, showed that Americans are hardly imagining things: The economy shed 23,000 jobs last month, and estimates for May and June were also revised down by 103,000 jobs. The labor force participation rate continues to fall in the face of weak demand for workers. And wage growth continues to trail inflation.
No wonder that, when The New York Times asked the Treasury Department what data Bessent based his assessment on, the newspaper didn’t even receive the courtesy of a response.
In fact, there’s little question Trump and his enablers are responsible for the current round of inflation. It’s not just the ongoing war with Iran. As I pointed out last month, the Trump administration has resisted cracking down on monopolies that dominate markets and raise prices, allowing corporations ranging from airlines to healthcare companies to greedily raise prices and degrade services to juice their own profits.
Meanwhile, the stock market hit a record high this week, and corporate profits are soaring, further strengthening the winners of the K-shaped economy. As the right debated whether people should stuff their own burritos, the Wall Street Journal reported that a $100 hot dog stuffed with caviar sold out at Formula One’s Miami Grand Prix and the Miami Open tennis games. That should give everyone food for thought.
The $20 burrito joins avocado toast and fancy coffee in the long list of spending boogeymen used to wave away complaints about the cost of living. Think of it this way: Americans are begging for financial relief, not financial scolding. Telling those who think the price of burritos is increasingly too much to stuff it is not just politically unappetizing; it’s also offensive and tasteless.
The 25 states that have sued the Trump administration over its latest effort to impose tariffs on dozens of countries correctly pointed out that the claim that those countries haven’t sufficiently cracked down on goods made with forced labor is the administration’s pretext to reimpose tariffs the Supreme Court struck down.
On top of that, the Trump administration’s claim that tariffs are needed to punish those 59 countries and the European Union, which it says are too permissive of forced labor, is also hypocritical. I write this from Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades and is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.
Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades, is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.
I have seen guards attack a man for his refusal to chop grass. I have seen countless others pepper sprayed for refusing to perform work details. Some of my college classmates were expelled from religious and educational programs for failing to show up for prison-mandated work. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are behind bars in this country. More than half of them, approximately 1.2 million, are held in state or federal prisons, where work is compulsory.
The Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which Congress ratified in 1865, abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. That exception continues to be exploited by individual states and by corporations. Prison administrators nationwide have legally used incarcerated people for forced labor, both for prison operations and for-profit purposes. More than two years ago, The Associated Press launched a series that traced forced prison labor to the supply chains of some of the country’s most prominent companies.
If President Donald Trump’s attempt to impose tariffs on those other countries were really motivated by an opposition to forced labor, then we would expect him to show concern for people forced into labor in the United States. But there’s no indication that he cares.
In May, a federal judge in neighboring Louisiana agreed with four people incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections had acted “with deliberate indifference to the health and safety of incarcerated persons” forced to work that prison’s “farm line,” but the judge said a 5th Circuit ruling that made it harder to prove a case of cruel and unusual punishment meant he couldn’t grant the plaintiffs any relief. Trump would object to that ruling if the idea of forced labor offended him.
Prisons nationwide are using forced labor to grow crops or to manufacture products like furniture and textiles. Angola, as the Louisiana State Penitentiary is more commonly known, used to be a plantation worked by enslaved Africans and their descendants, and as a farm, it is almost entirely self-sustaining. According to a recent statistic, 74% of the incarcerated men at Angola are Black. Men on the prison’s “farm line” earn nothing the first three years. After that point, they can earn 2 to 4 cents an hour.
That’s more than people incarcerated here in Texas get. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, we’re one of five states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida and Georgia are the others — where incarcerated people forced to work get nothing. Of the states that do pay, according to that group, incarcerated people get 86 cents to $3.45 per day.
Men on the prison’s “farm line” earn nothing the first three years. After that point, they can earn 2 to 4 cents an hour.
In 2019, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Global Human Rights Clinic, state prisons in Texas had at least 121,167 incarcerated workers assigned to duties related to agriculture, maintenance, food service, laundry and other unit support details.
That report found that these workers are often forced to perform their mandatory job requirements in substandard and hazardous work conditions. Again, for zero pay.
Those assigned to agribusiness operations harvest some of the same crops — like cotton — that enslaved people once did. They work under an armed guard on horseback, following the “same marching orders as their predecessors,’ the Texas Observer reported.
In 2022 alone, Texas prisons raked in $58 million from sales of industrial products — such as soap and stainless steel tables — produced through forced labor. That sum was completely separate from the reported $51 million in earnings that same year from agriculture.
Incarcerated workers have a long history of inhumane treatment for any type of work stoppage. In 1908, Frank Pinkard received 39 lashes after refusing to continue digging a ditch in Texas. Other incarcerated workers were killed for disobeying work orders, according to historian Robert Perkinson, author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.”
A freshman’s dorm mattress at Mississippi State University. A Georgia Medicaid patient’s eyeglasses. The goalpost padding at Bauxite High School in Arkansas. The burn ban flag at the Boerne Fire Department in Texas Hill Country.All of them were made by people incarcerated in American prisons.
Today, incarcerated workers are threatened with all types of punishment for failing to perform job assignments. In multiple states, the punishment is indefinite, long-term placement in solitary confinement, which requires confiscation of all personal property. Privileges like family visitation, telephone calls or the good-time credits needed for release can be stripped away. Commissary, entertainment and recreational access can be suspended.
Incarcerated individuals in Florida are informed in their orientation handbook that they do not have the option to refuse work assignments. Oregon’s Constitution mandates 40-hour work weeks for everyone incarcerated. Refusing to work in Illinois could cost an incarcerated person access to warm food.
Even by Trump’s “do as I say, not as I do” standards, the hypocrisy of him turning a blind eye to the forced labor all around him while declaring a need to make other countries do better is galling.
If tariffs are an appropriate response to countries looking away from forced labor, then other countries would be justified in placing tariffs on us.
