Given how many US corps are involved in both what China is doing and the US prison situation, don't hold your breath on those import restrictions.

US needs major reforms first.

Voting is a useful form of harm reduction, but it doesn't solve systemic problems. Voting is something everyone should do because the effort is minimal, but nobody should expect it to be sufficient, as you say.

The trouble is that it's a very common propaganda tactic to draw attention to other nations in order to make it easier to hide what happens at home. People have a finite amount of energy, attention, and outrage. If it is channeled against China, then it isn't being channeled at home. Look at the sheer number of news articles about what China is doing compared to the US prison situation. I wouldn't be surprised if its more than 10:1.

I never said you personally wrote them, surely you aren't this dense. You can't be this stupid.

Arresting and convicting people who have done nothing wrong because you wrote a law to declare them criminals isn't really as different as you think it is.

Except we can do nothing about the Chinese problem that isn't an act of war, but we can theoretically solve the problem at home without invading another country. Going to the UN or using economic sanctions isn't going to work, and could escalate into war anyway.

Further, it's hypocritical to complain about what China is or isn't doing when we aren't putting in any effort to talk about the problem at home.

Fix your own house, then worry about what someone else is doing in theirs. If we want to stop China from doing bad things, then maybe we should have a moral leg to stand on first, or it's just going to go nowhere.

And what the Chinese are doing is quite legal there too. It's almost like something being legal has absolutely no bearing on whether it's right or wrong at all.

So you want to defend the idea that the rich should be more able to avoid penalties from the justice system by arguing that wealth should be able to buy you better defense, and the best defenders should be reserved for the wealthiest clients. It's almost like the rich live by a totally different set of rules than the rest of us.

So you did say that then, it's their fault they're put in a situation where poorly paid or unpaid labor is the best thing they've got going, and have little to no choice but to work. Nevermind that laws are frequently improperly enforced, and are often even written specifically to keep the prisons full (instead of making society safer or healthier).

Claiming you didn't suggest something and then doubling down on it is an odd strategy.

And are you suggesting that there are no innocents falsely convicted as well?

The prison system in the US is a textbook example of a perverse incentive.

Only lower security prisoners are used as firefighters, and there is still a substantial amount of supervision involved. CA has a lot of wildfires and needs a lot of firefighters. It's a dangerous job and few are willing to do it, while the pay isn't that great for such a risky job. So they've got two choices: use prisoners for close to free labor, or pay firefighters more to attract more hires. I'm sure there's the occasional escape. Here's a news story about one in 2021: https://lawandcrime.com/crime/california-prisoner-steals-fire-engine-tries-to-escape-custody-while-fighting-wildfire-video/

They went with the cheaper, vastly more unethical option.

No, but it's exceedingly hypocritical as an American to fixate on what China may or may not be doing when we're doing horrific things here.

Fix your own house, then criticize that of others.

Prisoners make everything man. In texas alone (the largest unpaid prison labor program among the states), prisoners make soap, food products, perform animal husbandry, clothing, and are thus involved in every industry that relies on such products. California uses prisoners as firefighters (30 to 40% of CA firefighters are prisoners) and they are paid around $2 an hour (good luck finding any supply companies in CA that aren't reliant on such prison labor to not burn down). In Mississippi, prisoners are used to clear land for agriculture and the majority of farmland there was built by the hands of prisoners. Federal prisoners making less than $1 an hour make tons of things, ranging from furniture to a tremendous amount of military equipment our soldiers use. In Georgia, prisoners perform a lot of the sanitization work, and work on landfills, recycling, and even upkeeping golf courses (yes, for private clubs). These make up to $3 a day, while totally unpaid prisoners clean the streets, perform transporation work, and janitorial duties.

All around the country, prisoners are rented out to 3rd party companies for labor purposes. Major corporations like AT&T contract much of their work out to 3rd party companies that do this work, and those third party companies use unpaid (or extremely poorly paid) prison labor to win the lowest bidder contracts. Every state uses prison labor for a variety of work (much of which is either unpaid or vastly underpaid).

Things many businesses rely on, like food, food trays for the cafeteria, signs, call center work, paper products (like calendars) and far more are made by prisoners. Hell, even the railroads were originally built via convict leasing, and many of the biggest offenders are still around today as huge corporations after getting rich off of it (Like United States Steel Corporation).

Our entire country depends heavily on prison slave labor. There is a reason the US has the largest prison population on the planet (both in relative and absolute terms). We have 4% of the world's population, and 22% of the world's prison population. It encourages lawmakers to make unfair laws and law enforcment to go out of their way to find offenders to keep the prisons full.

And forced prison labor is used by the US in a ludicrous amount of supply chains, but we like to ignore that.