Call it trickle-down exploitation.

Since crack cocaine began infesting black communities in the 1980s, and, in turn, spawned a wave of criminality and misguided get-tough-on-crime laws, the incarceration industry has been booming. There are now prison factories, where prisoners make furniture and other goods for the government in jobs that virtually no one will hire them to do once they are released. And there are the privately-run prisons -- prisons that, for the most part, do more to provide jobs for rural whites than to rehabilitate the vast number of blacks who have landed there.

So, it was only a matter of time before someone like Ronald Evans would find a way into the game.

Evans owns a labor camp in East Palatka, Florida, a rural town outside of Jacksonville. County officials recently raided it and shut it down after they uncovered numerous health and sanitation violations. But the most egregious accusations had less to do with the camp’s physical conditions and more to do with human exploitation.

Police who raided the camp found 148 rocks of crack cocaine, 20 cases of beer and dozens of cases of cigarettes. Former workers, such as Will Anderson, told the Florida Times-Union that the drugs were basically used as payola to workers, most of whom were transported to the camp from homeless shelters and other flophouses from throughout the state to harvest cabbages in the middle of nowhere.

Most were black men. Black men who couldn’t shake drug habits. Black men whose prior convictions made it tough for them to start over with a square job. Black men who were desperate.

Yet, what those men found at the camp wasn’t a way to amass cash, but another prison.

Former workers at the camp told the Times-Union that Evans, who has been indicted on five counts of labor law violations, turned his camp into a virtual penal farm by selling drugs, beer and cigarettes to laborers to the point where they wound up owing thousands of dollars. And if they owed money, they weren’t allowed to leave until they worked off their debt. Most never did. Most, in fact, had resigned themselves to the notion that they would be there for life -- that they had traded one jail for another.

In short, they had resigned themselves to slavery.

But Evans, who shamefully enough, happens to be black, is really the bottom feeder in all of this. With the United States being the world’s biggest jailer now, and with so many people being fed up with crime, no one is looking at how, slowly but surely, profiteers are figuring out ways to make crime pay.

All Evans may have done, it seems, was take things a step further -- by finding a way to make the vulnerabilities that lead to crime, vulnerabilities such as drug and alcohol addictions, pay.

There ought to be a sense of outrage over this. But chances are there probably won’t be. It is, after all, easier to admire people who know how to work the system and make a buck than it is to feel for people who were either too weak or too stupid to avoid drugs and criminality. Capitalism, not compassion, rules.

But even if you don’t feel sympathy for the men whose debt and addictions left them stranded at Evans’ camp, feel anger at the fact that someone would offer honest work to men like Anderson, and then keep them on the job by doing dishonest things, such as encouraging their addiction. Feel anger at the fact that now, if someone close to you or someone that you know makes a mistake in life, he might have a harder time starting over not just because he will face an unforgiving society, but because now he might wind up in a labor camp run by someone who sees dollar signs in keeping those who need a new start shackled to their old habits.

Most of all, feel anger that more than 200 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, someone has found a way to make slaves out of so many broken black men.

With no escape in sight.