Al Jazeera English: Prison slaves in China

"Once an isolationist communist state, over the last 20 years China has become the world's biggest exporter of consumer goods. But behind this apparent success story is a dark secret - millions of men and women locked up in prisons and forced into intensive manual labour.

China has the biggest penal colony in the world - a top secret network of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons and camps known collectively as "The Laogai". And the use of the inmates of these prisons - in what some experts call "state sponsored slavery" - has been credited with contributing to the country's economic boom."

Check out the al Jazerra video at the source.

In the US prisoners also work:

1. Number of prisoner workers in UNICOR, the federal prison industries: nearly 23 thousand
2. Pay scale for federal prisoners who work outside of UNICOR in prison maintenance, in dollars per hour: $0.12-$0.40
3. Minimum UNICOR wage, in dollars per hour: $0.23, max is $1.15. 
4. Most prisons that pay prisoners for work have a range of pay depending on the job. Average of the minimum wages for prisoners paid by the states, in dollars per day for non-industry work: $0.93
5. Average of the maximum wages paid to prisoners by the states, in dollars per day: $4.73

Conditons is US prisons are porbably more humane and we pay our prisoners a trivial amout, far below the minimum wage of $5.15. Of course, the US is a First World nation. Comparisons of the US with China are often apples and oranges irrelevant. 

source: Prison slaves - Slavery: A 21st Century Evil - Al Jazeera English

http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

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