A Daily Wire column published this week takes aim at prison abolition rhetoric from the left, singling out Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon for recently describing prisons as “modern day slavery” and calling for an end to for-profit incarceration.
The piece, written in a sharply opinionated first-person voice, frames the debate over prisons as a proxy for a broader argument about whether Democrats are willing to defend civilization itself — invoking a line often attributed to economist Thomas Sowell: “If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”
According to the column, Nixon — whom the author characterizes as a socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — said in recent remarks that ending for-profit prisons is neither radical nor extreme, arguing that such facilities rely on “cheap labor or free labor” amounting to “modern day slavery.” The article quotes her as saying there is “nothing wrong with wanting to make sure that people have the things they need to live a decent high quality life.”
A dispute over the 13th Amendment
The Daily Wire piece pushes back on that framing by pointing to the 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That exception, the author argues, was deliberately written into the amendment to permit work assignments for convicted inmates — kitchen duty, laundry, maintenance, and manufacturing among them.
The column contends that low prison wages — roughly 12 to 40 cents per hour for federal inmates in standard jobs, with some states paying nothing at all — reflect the fact that the labor is part of the sentence rather than a market wage. It argues that such work curbs idleness, imposes structure, and gives inmates experience earning a paycheck. As supporting evidence, the piece cites Bureau of Prisons long-term research finding that inmates who worked in prison industries were about 24% less likely to reoffend after release and less likely to commit misconduct behind bars.
The author also disputes the scale of the for-profit prison industry, writing that private facilities house only about 8% of America’s prisoners — meaning, in the column’s telling, that abolishing them would barely affect the system abolitionists claim to be targeting.
Broader claims about crime and family structure
The piece widens its argument beyond prison labor. It asserts that Democrats have no real interest in reforming prisons and would prefer to eliminate incarceration altogether, including for undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes — a claim the article offers as an assertion rather than supporting it with a specific proposal or vote.
Turning to Nixon’s stated concern about a “school-to-prison pipeline,” the columnist questions whether schools are funneling children into crime and instead points to home environment as a driver. The article cites the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which it says found that children from single-parent families are more likely to become delinquent than children from two-parent homes. The author argues the fix lies in changing habits, mindset, and domestic circumstances before children grow up to commit crimes.
The column also references unrest and crime abroad — masked rioters burning cities and firemen in France, and what it describes as lenient treatment of criminal rapists and terrorists in the U.K. — as evidence that a broader culture of impunity is taking hold. It claims similar dynamics are visible in parts of the United States, though it does not cite specific cases or data for those assertions.
The piece closes with a call not to “invite chaos” but to “criminalize it, condemn it, and keep it out.”
What the column is and isn’t
The Daily Wire article is an opinion column rather than a news report, and it blends policy argument with sarcasm aimed at Nixon and the left more broadly. Several of its sharpest claims — that Democrats want to free all prisoners, that abolitionists welcome disorder as a way to tear down the existing system — are the author’s characterizations of opponents’ motives rather than documented positions.
Nixon’s campaign did not respond to the column within the piece, and the article does not include any comment from her or her representatives beyond the quoted remarks.
The underlying policy questions the column raises are live ones. Debate over prison labor, private incarceration, and sentencing reform has intensified in recent years, with advocates on one side arguing that unpaid or low-paid prison work amounts to exploitation and opponents arguing that work programs reduce recidivism and that eliminating incarceration wholesale would endanger public safety. The Daily Wire piece lands firmly on the latter side, using Nixon’s remarks as its entry point.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-leftisms-appetite-for-the-destruction-of-order-will-be-our-undoing