“California inmates were sent off to fight what has become the largest wildfire in the state’s history for just $1 an hour. These firefighters, who volunteered for a vocational training program offered by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, are often disqualified from the work after release because a required credential is denied to anyone with a criminal record.
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners are also employed in jobs outside and inside the prisons, most commonly doing work to maintain the prisons. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the average prison worker makes around 85 cents an hour. In 2017, inmates in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas were not paid for most of their work. Proponents of these low-paying jobs have argued that inmates benefit from the work experience and that prisons, which are already often cash-strapped, cannot afford to pay more; opponents have argued that prisoners do need real wages to be able to buy basic necessities other than food in the prisons.”
Arguing that it’s good for them is paternalistic bullshit. The same argument could justify slavery. If prisons are cash strapped, whose responsibility is that? I believe society put these people away and we should pay for it. Either it’s worth it to us or it’s not.
One thing we can do right now is start to use the correct language. Involuntary labor is not employment and we shouldn't call it such. There is even a market where you can buy their products.
But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits
It's disgusting but a reality that the 13th amendment loophole expressly permits slavery of convicts. And so the Civil War was won by the South since Plantations 2.0 continue unimpeded. Some counties' DA's lock up as many people as possible in order for officials to earn kickbacks from private prisons run by the likes of GEO Group.
It should be noted that the US Constitution allows prisoners to be treated as slaves:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
We were comfortable calling slavery by what it was back then, and we shouldn't shy away from the term if that's what's still happening. The constitution defining slavery doesn't make it right. But it does imply we shouldn't mince words.
"Not giving something"(term reduction in this case) and "taking something away" are very-very different things. You would have to be incredibly entitled to confuse them.
The problem is that many "taking something away" cases in prison can be rephrased as "not giving something."
Am I taking away your visitation rights, or am I just not giving them to you? Am I taking away your food, or am I just not giving you food?
Expectation and norms play a role in this. Suppose a judge gives a prisoner a higher sentence under the expectation that they'll work it off. They assume the prisoner will work 7 days a week, so they give a prisoner 6 years instead of 3.
Now suppose another judge gives a prisoner the correct sentence (3 years), but then says, "for every day of your original sentence that you don't work, you will spend one additional day in prison."
You're arguing that there's a fundamental difference between these two scenarios, but what is it? It's certainly not a difference for the prisoners -- they have the exact same incentive structure, and their outcomes and choices are exactly the same. It's not any different for the people benefiting from their labor; the work that they produce will look exactly the same. It doesn't even reveal any compelling differences in the judges' motivations -- both judges might reach their decision for the exact same same reasons.
You would have to be incredibly naive to believe this statement stands on its own, without evaluating implementation details and expectations of the parties involved.
It's interesting to note that the Geneva convention does not allow this treatment in the case of POWs. Wikipedia says German POWs in the US during WWII were required to be paid military wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the...
> "opponents have argued that prisoners do need real wages to be able to buy basic necessities other than food in the prisons"
This seems like a problem even if prisoner wages are raised. If we incarcerate people, we should provide them with toothbrushes even if they can't/won't risk their lives fighting fires for a pittance.
However, as someone whose Dad is in prison, a lot of these guys really do want to get out there and do something useful and want this experience.
Many times the people complaining are privileged elites who are inferring what these populations want, but I would caution them to not make assumptions and do their research. It is not unambiguously bad to do this.
We can talk about the long-term reforms of prison, but there are short-term concerns too that might be helpful to them.
That's true, but if you're going to use labour, then pay for labour. Anything else is slavery. Especially when this "experience" is not useful post-prison.
As they should be. Interns are regularly given work that should be given to paid employees and many businesses now see internships as free labor. How many fields of employment would you work for free just for experience? And then to still be paid as a newly graduated hire because 'internship isnt a real job or experience'.
Getting over on someone seems more and more prevalent these days. I swear businesses weren't as bad about these things in the 80's and 90's,maybe it's rose-colored glasses and all that jazz.
You’re right interns are often given work that should be paid.
But not all of it need be paid. If I take an intern along to a job that I could’ve done in the same time alone, but I let the intern do the work and supervise them on how to do it, that needn’t be paid because the intern is not providing value, they are just getting training.
Slaves didn't get paid either, that doesn't mean the work they did was worth the experience they gained. Don't try to extract morality from the status quo. That literally sets your goal to "nowhere."
> Many times the people complaining are privileged elites who are inferring what these populations want, but I would caution them to not make assumptions and do their research. It is not unambiguously bad to do this.
The loudest voices are often the most removed. Watching people in privileged positions immediately infer solutions about things that rarely impact their lives is like watching Madonna give an Aretha Franklin tribute. At the end of the day, it's self-interested. Bringing attention to the matter is definitely important and a worthy cause for sure, but approaching complex problems with unambiguous solutions without much interaction with those actually impacted is not substantively furthering the cause. What seems like a viable conjecture actually becomes using a hammer to pound in a screw. There are big qualitative and empathetic parts in figuring out a strategy that aren't covered in the headlines about prison or published crime statistics.
It’s worth noting that this is a voulenteer program and that for every day you work you get 1 day off your sentence. So you can effectively halve your time in prison.
This actually seems like a pretty good deal, what would you pay to get a day off your sentence?
That said, I think the Prision system is fucked, has horrible incentives, private companies abuse bought prison labor, etc. etc.
But I actually felt like this program was pretty good - though they ought to let them become fire fighters!
It feels instinctively wrong to tie prison time to pay - it should be tied to rehabilitation. And asking someone to risk their lives so they can gamble on reduced prison time just seems... I dunno, isn't that the thing that's usually done by villains in the story books? I mean, maybe I'm naive about it, but I have a fairly strong cultural background telling me that using people's desperation to convince them to do terrible jobs is kind of on the evil side?
Is there additional nuance I'm missing? My first thought is: suppose they were payed a real wage, but independently the prison system had a vending machine where you could exchange wages for reduced prison time. I wouldn't be OK with a system like that.
My objection also wouldn't be about the details. It wouldn't be, "Oh, maybe it'll get abused or someone might threaten a prisoner for money." If I was forced to describe why a system like that felt so wrong, I would probably say something like, "Rehabilitation isn't transactional, and a debt to society isn't something that can be repaid with cash."
So this feels like an abstraction to me that doesn't ultimately change anything about the underlying mechanics being kind of messed up.
If that's not the case, if fighting fires is purely a rehabilitation strategy and the reduced sentence isn't a substitute for money -- then shouldn't we be paying them as well as reducing their prison sentence? If we're not treating freedom as equivalent to wages, then why are they being denied wages?
I’m all for minimum wage laws to apply to prisoners.
I’m also guessing the reason the “opportunity” exists is in part because those laws don’t apply and you can get firefighters for $1/hour.
Presumably they don’t offer the option to reduce sentences from other prison jobs like laundry or cooking, and these firefighter jobs are seen as providing a form of service to the greater community, and at a risk.
Also, keep in mind that much of our economic system and policy is predicated on the idea of using people’s desperstion to get them to do horrible jobs.
Thinking out loud here - I don't agree with this, and I'm trying to get to why. I think that prison doesn't really have much of a redemptive or rehabilitative effect - quite the opposite, sometimes. So to me allowing people to work their sentences off seems fine. And even the fact that they aren't being paid doesn't necessarily seem unjust. They have a debt to society, but paying that with labour seems far better than the alternative of them sitting around doing nothing/interacting with more hardened criminals.
As others have said, though, it definitely is unjust that they face discrimination when attempting to do the same work as civilians.
> It feels instinctively wrong to tie prison time to pay - it should be tied to rehabilitation.
You seem to be reasoning under the assumption that prison exists for rehabilitation. It doesn't. Incarceration serves to punish. And forced labour is an additional punishment.
Therefore substituting prison time with extra work seems a fair trade-off, and one well aligned with the intended goals of the prison system.
It's a pretty big complete coincidence that all of these additional punishments happen to be a major source of revenue for prisons, states, and private businesses.
The most likely reason we're offering to knock off prison time is because we really stinking need firefighters. It's not a punishment, we're exchanging prison time for a service that we want very much. If there wasn't a forest fire, we wouldn't be offering it.
If punishment was actually the purpose of these programs, we would be a lot more creative and a lot more specific in how we reduced prison sentences: "Okay, here's a bottle of sterilized urine. Drink it, and we'll knock a day off." But in practice, you don't see stuff like that. Forced labor is nearly always phrased by its proponents as something that's good for the prisoner's character, and as an effective way to repay a social debt. Look over the comments on this very article and you'll find more than a few people saying that getting to work outside is a privilege for prisoners and they should be happy just with that as a reward.
The rephrasing of work as a direct punishment (especially when it's tied to money) manages to somehow makes the entire situation feel even worse to me. At least when it was transactional you could talk about it as being something that's good for both parties. I don't think that argument holds up, it's at least a reasonable starting point.
But it seems obvious to me that the state shouldn't have a financial incentive to punish people. If punishment is our goal, the way we're going about it is super corrupt.
I have to agree with you that the state should never have privatized the prison service. It sets itself up for all sorts of unintended consequences, the chief of which is lobbying by the prison-industrial complex for ever more severe sentencing.
The same applies to a lot of other sectors. All the basic utilities and universal healthcare should be public-sector, because any benefits relating to market efficiency are more than offset by distortions to the political process resulting from lobbying.
Still, the basic point stands that incarceration is a form of punishment, and it is legitimate for it to include a component of hard labour.
This is true. However in this case, they aren’t cashing in dollars for time off.
It’s not like a billionaire (quibble about billionaires being in jail) can load up a commissary card and buy time off.
On the contrary, the billionaire would have to work the same hours as the guy who robbed the booze store and get 1 day off for every one worked.
I’m much more troubled by having private companies buying cheap prison labor to make goods or do customer service.
It’s interesting to note as well that I think I share the same underlying thesis that prisons are fucked, with terrible incentives and I am in favor of revamping the entire system — however this one program does not bother me the same way it does others.
If I was to guess, I’d imagine I have much more progressive views about prison reform than most opposed to this program. This is fascinating to me.
For example, I’ve been speaking with VCs about doing a “prison startup” with the right incentives - including things like cooperative ownership by the prisoners themselves.
In my view crime is a context not a characterstic of an individual.
> It’s worth noting that this is a voulenteer program and that for every day you work you get 1 day off your sentence. So you can effectively halve your time in prison.
The perverse incentive of increasing prison times to generate more cheap labor.
> It’s worth noting that this is a voulenteer program and that for every day you work you get 1 day off your sentence. So you can effectively halve your time in prison. This actually seems like a pretty good deal, what would you pay to get a day off your sentence?
Maybe the sentence was too long to begin with that suggests? If releasing that person in exchange for some simple work is ok (e.g. does not make us less safe, keeps victim whole etc ), why the sentence could not be like that to begin with?
I dont mean to make it general rule, I see why you want shorten sentences in exchange of good behavior to motivate prisoners. But, sentences are very long in America to begin with.
The practical difference between "if you dont work for 80cents an hour you get twice as much sentence" and "your sentence gets halved if you do" is rather small given that the number we are halving/doubling is arbitrary.
> Another way to look at it is for every day you don't work you have to spend a day in jail.
No. This is false.
When you land in prison, the duration of your sentence is fixed. You can't increase it, except by committing additional crimes while behind bars. But you can mitigate it by working as a volunteer.
> It’s worth noting that this is a voulenteer program and that for every day you work you get 1 day off your sentence. So you can effectively halve your time in prison.
Interesting. You could conceivably rationalize that as being equivalent to a fair wage--every day you work gets you one extra day closer to getting out and starting a real job.
Of course that still ignores the obvious problem of how hard it is for a broke ex-con to find work. But it's better than nothing, I guess.
I think the fire program is probably one of the better subsystems.
You get better visitation, you are outside, I’d imagine that though dangerous, fighting fires is rewarding. Plus you earn a day of freedom for every day worked.
They ought to give them the training to become fire fighters when they get out though, and work to change laws preventing felons from firefighting work.
In several states, there are exceptions that specifically allow inmate firefighters to get at least wildland fire jobs (which is what they're typically doing anyway, not structural).
While we're talking about slavery, it might be important to mention that the constitution specifically allows slavery in this context:
> "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
- 13th amendment
No. I am implying they weren't sentenced to be a firemen or a slave so they shouldn't be. People have been sentenced to do community service which I generally don't think is compensated. Going to be honest, I am ignorant and haven't been incarcerated so I am lucky, but from what I can tell community service tends to be a lighter punishment than prison, and doesn't tend to be as exploitative as the uncompensated labor described by these activists. It is also proscribed by the court and not up to wardens and their friends to decide its terms and extent.
And no, I don't think anyone should be sentenced to be a slave or a firemen. Any such sentence probably would violate the 8th amendment.
out of curiosity, do you think an amendment to that could reach consensus with more awareness? federal prison could be fixed easily with congress and the executive branch, but fixing the patch work of state level would require a constitutional amendment.
also, there are a lot of constitutional things - like eugenics programs - that simply aren't practiced anymore anywhere. so awareness and public disfavor can alter the reality without a legal change being necessary.
That exception literally exists to provide a means to cheap labor... It's not accidental. Notice how many laws disproportionately target black people (always in their enforcement and effect, it would be illegal if it were in the text of the law), like drug prohibition, and you start to see a pattern that looks a whole lot like intent. We abolished slavery but we weren't ready to end white supremacy and our laws reflect that. The Civil Rights act was followed closely by the War on Drugs. We deny voting rights and job prospects to felons, enslave them while they're incarcerated, and keep them in an underclass that has few opportunities specifically to ensure they can re-enter the criminal justice system. Is it any wonder that we have the highest per-capita rates of imprisonment?
It's horrifying when you start to see the whole process in its entirety and doubly so when you realize how much money is generated through the system. Criminal justice reform is incredibly difficult to actually pass as a result.
Right, this isn't news to me and also doesn't answer the question
Criminal justice reform has lobbyists against it, and also has a culture that is obsessed with punishment and bloodlust.
I think prisoner wages or the duties of prisoners can be addressed in some capacity, without maintaining a massive slave labor force. The circumstances around wording of the 13th Amendment, and subsequent case law may allow for redress against this outcome.
From the majority opinion in Bailey v. Alabama in 1910
> "The plain intention [of the amendment] was to abolish slavery of whatever name and form and all its badges and incidents; to render impossible any state of bondage; to make labor free, by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit, which is the essence of involuntary servitude. While the Amendment was self-executing, so far as its terms were applicable to any existing condition, Congress was authorized to secure its complete enforcement by appropriate legislation."
So I see what the amendment says - prisoners can be slaves - but honestly, it may be as simple as that having never been challenged. Its probably why they are paid 85 cents in some cases, and only a handful of traditionally southern states paying them nothing.
In conclusion: there may not be public support for prisoner slavery, there may not be Congressional or state legislature support for prisoner slavery, and even if it got to the Supreme Court they might just lean on old case law instead of the plain text of the amendment.
Your analysis completely ignores power structures inside the US. Try to oppose the prison industry, in reality not theory, and get back to me. This is a fight I'm actively involved in. I'm literally an activist and trying to end this mistreatment. You're wrong, but the reason you're wrong isn't your intent. It's the way people assume you're right and ignore the darker sides of capitalism. The truth is that it doesn't matter what the public supports or doesn't. Prisoner slavery exists because it makes people money and it will continue to exist until it does not.
I've offered perspectives to many causes that weren't considered by the people most invested in their cause.
I've offered perspectives to John Jay College of Criminal Justice on what arguments they should attempt in the courts, even though that approach was uncharted territory.
I'm not a lawyer.
I also don't care what the public thinks, I care about influence and outcomes that I like, and the public is VERY far removed from that process except in circumstances where the public coincidentally was already aligned with influential interests.
Thats why I start with simple questions such as "can this reach consensus necessary", that "consensus" can come from a Federal District Judge in Guam for all I care. Sometimes "consensus" is "we - the government - don't find it prudent to appeal this case" such as you saw with the stop and frisk federal appeals case in NYC.
I know the lawyers that came up the Citizens United arguments on some arbitrary first amendment grounds just because they could. Guess what, they ALWAYS go for first amendment. They practically pick the judges to hear their cases too.
And when I look at the 13th Amendment and power structures inside the US, I think there is plenty of room to get closer to the outcome you are interested in.
Amazes me that occupational licensing laws will prevent these inmates after being released from working as firefighter (because CA won't let former criminals work for the government), while somehow CA is fine having them work as slaves for the government while incarcerated.
After working for and dealing with government at various levels, nothing amazes me anymore. They are layered with contradictions, perverse incentives, and sometimes corruption.
Not to mention, who can compete with a jail offering labor for 1$ an hour? It's unfair to both the prisoners and anyone else in the manual labor business
It's the same effect. If you cut labor costs by a factor of ten (or more), you can undercut the competition easily and pocket the difference. Hence, anti-competitive.
Not to be pedantic, but this is slavery, allowed by our own constitution. Of course this argument is used to justify it although under the law, no justification is needed. What we need to do is to get rid of slavery altogether in America in 2018 and beyond. It's ridiculous that we call out other countries for human rights abuses while we have slavery all throughout our prisons, especially in the south (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas).
Prisoners are also unable to become smokejumpers or hot shots because they not only have a criminal record, but don't get the same training such as the EMT requirement, yet they're put in harm's way. Democracy Now covered this topic extensively.
The problem is if this were regulated or changed in some way, it would take only one or two instances of an ex-convict firefighter harming or killing someone before a very high number of people start demanding a return to a zero-tolerance convict hiring policy.
It's often a CYA and public perception issue: org X receives application from convict, considers fallout if convict does something bad, realizes it'll become a PR nightmare and that they'll be torn to shreds for permitting the hire. The risk is never outweighed by the benefit, in their eyes.
> It's often a CYA and public perception issue: org X receives application from convict, considers fallout if convict does something bad, realizes it'll become a PR nightmare and that they'll be torn to shreds for permitting the hire.
Many (most?) western countries do not publish convict names unless it's very serious, such as murder. There's no reason a typical employer, let alone the public, should know you served time in the past.
In the US, most (all?) convictions are public record, and the ones that aren't public record can still be found by employers who retain background check companies.
Such as ? Employers demanding a paper from the police listing all your convictions is everywhere in Western Europe. Even a traffic-related conviction can be a problem. This is also something that comes up when talking to homeless in the Netherlands. Tldr: conviction for something done on the job (can be traffic accident on the way home) -> fired and significant money -> no new job because "strafblad" -> poverty -> homeless
American voters are chock full of paternalistic bullshit. They consistently vote for retribution, and the absolute cheapest way to house prisoners, and give them cheap public defenders. Voters consistently consider white collar crime as relatively benign with sentences below the sentencing guidelines; whereas non-violent drug crimes (let alone violent crimes) consistently at the highest range of sentencing guidelines.
It is a society that deeply believes in retribution for "lower class" crimes and slap on the wrist for "high class" crimes. I don't like it, but I absolutely see it.
Did society put people away, or did the policy-makers who have come to represent a shrinking fraction of the electorate and an increasingly strong corporate sector? If for-profit prisons lobby to maintain non-violent drug offenses and the ludicrously failed drug war, which swell prison ranks and the coffers of prison ownership, then how is it "society at large" that is to blame?
Issue after issue, money is a terrible influence in our politics.
>Arguing that it’s good for them is paternalistic bullshit.
Sitting in a cage or a large room with other inmates with nothing productive to do can itself be considered a form of psychological torture, which is precisely what some proponents of prison industry have argued: https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/1147470
Maybe we should rehabilitate criminals in some fashion that doesn't involve indentured servitude or putting them in cages and reserve the latter only for those who cannot be rehabilitated. Trying to argue that forced labor is more humane is morally bankrupt from the get-go. That it's being made by people with a literal financial incentive to see the system not change only underscores that point.
Private prisons house a tiny fraction of US inmates, an estimated 8% in 2015[0] and the federal numbers are exclusively for the detention of foreigners illegally in the country.
should you construct an argument only by its premise, or should you try to reach the person? I think [s]he assumed that you are not a prison abolitionist and tried to find an argument that might sway you.
There was no prior mention of the person being a prison abolitionist. There was mention of concern about private prisons. I don't know how I am to intuit what a person is truly concerned about vs. what they state they are concerned about.
My biggest beef...is we're worried about losing jobs to Mexicans, but allow slavery here in America...I bet a LOT of slaves..err prisoners have stolen jobs from so-called 'free-loading' mexicans who stole them from Americans....or stole them directly from Americans...
Why isn't the 'right' as upset about this as they are illegal immigrants?
I am not a conservative, but I have a lot of conservative friends so I feel comfortable saying this.
The "right" will usually admit that there are incentive issues in the system, but there is no philosophical issue with incarceration. They would also say that prisoners should work to pay their own way, because it isn't fair to tax payers to shoulder the burden when tax payers didn't do the crime (this is why they love Sheriff Joe Arpaio). In general they are very supportive of "law and order" and police/military/etc in general. Of course there will be conservatives that don't feel this way, but many do.
Given the sheer number of people in jail due to drug possession, including a drug that is now legal in CA, it's clear a good number of those people shouldn't be in jail in the first place.
BTW, I'm not talking legally, I'm talking morally, they should have never gone to jail or prison in the first place for mere possession.
The biggest crime is if they come back into society without the ability to add to the workforce (due to their being former prisoners) or resources to exercise their entrepreneurship (ie, no connections or learning).
Then they are targets for recidivism and society loses out. Otherwise, I'm perfectly fine with less prisons.
The biggest problem then is the stigma of having a criminal record for future job interviews' background checks. Ordinary possession shouldn't leave a lasting black mark on one's record or there will definitely be recidivism barring any cultural change in attitude towards hiring ex-criminals.
Not sure why you're being down voted. For the vast majority of jobs, recreational drug use is commonplace already.
I'm not sure the solution is to ensure that the minority that get caught are unable to ever go back to being productive, effectively being forced into finding alternative means to pay their rent/bills/etc.
> Arguing that it’s good for them is paternalistic bullshit. The same argument could justify slavery. If prisons are cash strapped, whose responsibility is that? I believe society put these people away and we should pay for it. Either it’s worth it to us or it’s not.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument, but why is the focus solely on what is "good for them?" Discussions of over-incarceration aside, there is a legitimate place for prison. These people are already a burden on society--housing a prisoner costs tens of thousands of dollars--why shouldn't they be forced to take on some of their own upkeep?
Note that we do this with another class of people who are wards of someone else: children. Nobody is arguing you should have to pay kids minimum wage for doing chores...
> --why shouldn't they be forced to take on some of their own upkeep?
If keeping people in prison is an economic gain for society, you are going to send people to prison whatever they deserve it or not. And that is the case in the USA.
"He was found guilty in February of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of for-profit prisons for juveniles. Ciavarella who left the bench over two years ago after he and another judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of sentencing youngsters to prisons they had a hand in building." https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2011/08/12/pennsylv...
So over-incarceration cannot be set apart from economical profit for jailing citizens.
> Nobody is arguing you should have to pay kids minimum wage for doing chores...
Children labour is forbidden. And when they actually work, e.g. movie actors, they get paid.
Make society pay for sending people to prison and they are going to be more eager to rehabilitate than to punish. It is not the only factor, but it helps.
As disgusting as that was, at least some justice was served in the end. The judges were sentenced to 17.5 and 28 years, respectively. That pales in comparison to the cumulative prison time they unjustly imposed on others, but it does show judges aren't above the law.
> why shouldn't they be forced to take on some of their own upkeep?
Because taking away someone's freedoms is a serious thing. There should be a high economic cost to society for imprisoning people; it serves as a structural disincentive to over-use of prison.
Perhaps the morality of over-using prison should serve as a sufficient deterrent for society, but the facts demonstrate that this is not the case.
America's very serious incarceration problem needs economic disincentives because the status quo proves that this country is apparently not sufficiently motivated by morality.
And even if you don't accept this argument, it still does not follow that we should under-pay prisoners. We should at the very least pay prisoners market rates and then charge them for the true cost of their incarceration. E.g.,
National average salary for firefighters: $49,330 PLUS (good) health benefits.
National average total cost of incarceration: $31,000 INCLUDING (terrible) health care. And keep in mind that a well-behaved prisoner in a low or medium security facility -- likely the case for those allowed on firefighting crews -- will cost substantially less than the amortized per-prisoner cost.
So even if inmates should "earn their keep", the state is still pocketing on the order of 5 figures per year. Worse still, IMO that money would go a lot further preventing recidivism than any amount of rehabilitation or work ethic.
> Nobody is arguing you should have to pay kids minimum wage for doing chores...
"Chores" and "labor" are categorically different things, and the motivation for the former isn't usually "offsetting their upkeep", so much as it's "instilling a sense of personal responsibility".
> 1. The right to say "no" without repercussions beyond "not getting paid".
Have you ever had parents? I realize it's outside the Overton window to do anything about it, but age-based slavery[0] is ubiquitous and the legal default in essentially (I think literally) every country on Earth. It's an even more pervasive affliction than copyright, so I find your ignorance implausible.
0: in the ownership sense; actually using them for forced labor is less common
So your definition of labor refers only to, for lack of a better term, "work" done in a business relationship?
Then I don't think it really applies to this situation, since just as familial relations are superseding "business" relations in your example, certainly the prison relations change the nature of the business relations drastically.
But I think this is certainly labor, but the distinction between labor and chore is not so clear. I don't think it matters to the inmates, but I found it bizarre how confident HNers are that chores and labor are intrinsically different.
I think it all comes down to how the words are typically used in everyday speech. Labor is typically associated with economic gain (or general economic activity) (or pregnancy) while chores generally aren't. I know I often hear people use the word chore when talking about errands or tasks they must perform for which they won't be compensated directly by another party (like taking out the trash as a chore).
I think we started off on the wrong foot with the comparison. Even government recognizes some difference between chores and labor, as childhood labor is illegal but it's not illegal to have your kids mow the law (afaik).
Yeah. It also like, putting away clothes was a childhood chore, but using a tractor to mow a field was also a childhood chore. I guess. It was something that had to be done anyway.
Its really just an ever so tempting argument of semantics that is at this point distracting me from the real plight of prison laborers. But that's how the internet goes.
> why shouldn't they be forced to take on some of their own upkeep?
My humble opinion is that this creates a perverse incentive which undermines the pursuit of justice. If we as a society feel that imprisoning people is an sound, effective form of justice, then we as a society should accept the full costs associated with imprisonment. If we are unwilling to pay for such, then we should sit back and think of a more cost-appropriate solution.
The use of prison slave labor encourages more crime (via ambigiuously written laws), harsher sentencing(mandatory minimum sentencing), and recidivism because it is profitable for those in the justice system.
I can see why people would agree with your sentiment; I certainly use to. But now I think it is naive, short-sighted, and doesn't align well with what I feel is the purpose of prison (reformation).
That's one difference, sure, but the two situations are similar as well. In both cases, a person's basic life needs (food, housing, etc.) are met by someone else. When it comes to children, we generally accept that forcing people to contribute to their own upkeep is not wrong, whether it's working on the farm or cooking, etc. Why is it different for prisoners?
We explicitly do not say it's ok to force children to pay for their own upkeep. A parent is required to take care of their child and that is legally enforced, but a child can refuse all chores and the government doesn't punish them.
In fact, the government will punish the parents if they try to not take care of their child or punish them too severely for not doing their chores
That's absolutely not true. Parents are legally entitled to use coercion and punishment to force children to pay for their own upkeep. That's one of the key reasons people used to have kids until relatively recently--for help on the farm.
Go ahead and beat your kid because he's not doing the dishes. Feed them sub standard food and not enough at that. If he talks back at all, throw him in an empty room for a week or two with no human contact.
Let's see how long you can do that before the government and society come down on you
Edit: I don't think "relatively recently" even applies here. Child labor laws were passed long before we had laws allowing things like mixed race marriage, gay marriage, civil rights for minorities, and other social changes. We are no longer an agrarian society that needs mass free labor to survive
I think the tenses are inconsistent in the sentences you wrote there.
Life has more value in well off western countries today. Child mortality is low. Families have few children. So no, you can’t abuse your kids, the state doesn’t like that.
One is an adult. They have freedoms which we, as a society, have taken away due to whatever offense they have committed (potentially as light as possession of Marijuana).
One is a child. They do not have the freedoms which we, as a society, have given them yet due to their age, lack of maturity and lack of means.
What is the logic for giving more preferential treatment to someone who is a ward because they did something bad, versus a child who is a ward despite being completely innocent?
My argument for treating prisoners better than children (at least in regard to being paid for working) is that once you leave prison, you're likely in a really bad situation unless you have money to help with the transition.
Finding a job is tough as an ex-con. Your support network may well be gone, or it may be entirely composed of people who enabled you in the first place.
Most kids have years of supported, gradual transition from unpaid chores to fully-independent adults, although there are obviously exceptions to that. I feel really badly for kids who enter adulthood from foster care.
parents typically don't sell the products of their children's labor, and even if they do, there aren't systemic incentives to exploit their children, and if there are, maybe we should stop that from being a thing.
and parents usually give a shit about their own kids
Kids on farms are not systemic in the sense that it's not a blackbox that can be scaled. You can't bribe the police chief to give you more children, for example.
Is it really for the good of the society to have a class of people who does work for pennies on the dollar? It'd seem to me that that would have a negative effect on the labor market too.
>Note that we do this with another class of people who are wards of someone else: children. Nobody is arguing you should have to pay kids minimum wage for doing chores...
Eh, I could argue that, particularly if you're adopting child after child just to use them as free labor, like society does when "adopting" prisoners.
I never understood the idea of paying prisoners absurdly little “because prison”. Why, because they’re not paying rent? And there’s no way they will find a job on Day 1 after release, meaning they essentially have not enough money while in prison, no way to save money, and poverty at release. Given that, they’ll probably be forced to steal to survive after release and...end up back in prison.
It’s inhumane garbage, and I’m amazed at how much people protest things like Netflix price increases when we have way worse problems that warrant our time and money.
I think they should pay rent and should be paid proper wages, to accelerate reintroduction to society. Don’t do any work? Get the worst cell, with rent written off. Work as a firefighter? Get $30/hour which you can use to get better living conditions and better food in prison.
You're totally right. What better way to show inmates the virtue of living an upright life than to treat them just like real people. If you pay them 85c/hr they'll resent The Man even harder and see a life of crime as the only way they'll ever succeed. Pay them for their hardwork and they'll learn they can succeed in life by hardwork, determination and honesty, all virtues that prison _should_ be about instilling.
I'm going to use a alt account for this ( for obvious reasons )...
I disagree with this sentiment, I was ( some 20 years ago ) incarcerated for drug dealing. I broke the law ( much more than I was caught and prosecuted for btw... ) and I deserved what I got, probably more.
For the record, being in prison sucks... it's SUPPOSED to suck, it's supposed to make you regret what you did to get put in there and actively look forward to the day of your release, it's not supposed to be a cushy summer camp for confused snowflakes... if it was, it WOULD NOT rehabilitate errant individuals like myself. The fact that it did suck SO BAD, is STILL some 20 years later FRONT-AND-CENTER in my mind - actively DETERRING me from doing something stupid and illegal again.
Also, for the record, I was allowed to EARN the right to work outside the prison ( good behavior / etc... ), for about a dollar a day ( usually removing trash and cleaning roadsides and tending parks and other municipal assets ) and I made more ( triple if I remember correctly ) when on fire duty.
Fire duty started the minute you got on a bus and left the prison, and ended when you got back, even if you did nothing but sit on the bus on the side of some road... you got paid for every hour you were on duty - 24 hours a day / 7 days a week - IT WAS GOOD MONEY ( for being in prison ) and it was a PRIVILEGE... because more than the money ( which was nice to have in prison, believe me ) it allowed you to go OUTSIDE of the prison, which was PRICELESS.
"Pay them for their hardwork and they'll learn they can succeed in life by hardwork, determination and honesty" -- Again I disagree, I learned nothing of the sort, what I learned is this: There are NO SHORTCUTS to success, and I should quit breaking the law and instead become a productive member of society INSTEAD of being a criminal.
Giving criminals (like my former self) better pay and treatment in prison has to be the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. If it wouldn't have been terrible I maybe would still be a criminal, because the deterrent would be insufficient.
The author of the parent comment seems not to understand recidivism in the United States if they were ever in prison at all. The Nordic example is leagues more potent than an anonymous anecdote.
Leave it to the typical HN comment on things like that to equate heaps of evidence with "I read X somewhere" and praise some anon anecdote over solid data.
Well, I'd like to remain anonymous for obvious reasons and will provide no proof of this assertion, but I'm actually that commenter's mother and they never went to jail.
Well, things like more lienient drug laws, harsher gun control, and social welfare usually keep people out of prison or from re-offending when they get out. Outcomes are better there because, truthfully, life is better there.
Sure, those help, but there is a lot more to the idea.
Most prisons are places where the word "criminal" is imprinted on your soul. You live as a criminal and learn from criminals. Or you're isolated which damages your mental health. If you have children, they normalize the idea of being a criminal. You lose your friends and colleagues (your "support network") so when you get out, where else do you go other than crime?
The idea behind Norway's incarceration system is simple. You deprive the person of their freedom, then simulate real life in a controlled environment. You teach them skills. You teach them how to socialize. You do everything to make sure that the criminal learns how to live a normal life.
So why don't other countries implement this system? Two reasons, both of which have to do with politics:
1- Politicians who act "tough on crime" are applauded (as if that will make the streets safer).
2- You produce cheap products and compete with the cheap labor of the third world. Why destroy a system that can produce a lot on the cheap (while banning the import of products of prison labor)?
Aside from the obvious difference USA <> Norway, saying "everyone copy Norway" is a huge generalization without much consideration for the situational and confounding variables present in different countries/societies/cultures.
Norway has ~5M people while the US has ~325M people. The US has a 5.35/100k murder rate compared to .51/100k murder rate for Norway [1]. In 2014, Chicago alone had 14x the number of murders the entire country of Norway had [2][3]. Pretty much across the board, the US has a ton more crime than Norway [4]. The scale and expanse of the problem is so vastly different between Norway and the US that is would take nothing short of a societal shift to begin to approach overhauling such a massive problem. Norway is basically sample size data when planning a criminal justice system for countries with 100M+ people that are already more socioeconomically strained.
Politics is a part of the problem, but fixing criminal justice is immensely more complicated than a 2-step solution of fix politics and copy Norway.
I'm sure ALL of your fellow inmates are now stellar citizens with not one in recidivism. Not one back where they started, or leading a life of crime still... because our criminal justice system has a 100% success rate at rehabilitation.
The issue is not that I want to make prison suck any less. I believe it sucks and that's done by design. What I care about is instilling the skills, attitude and experience that will allow seamless re-introduction back into society. Teaching inmates how to handle money, understand finances and giving them something to buy a car, rent an apartment, a uniform for work and tuition for education isn't going to make their prison stint any less awful, but it will reduce recidivism, increase participation in the legal economy and make these inmates _people_ in the real sense of the term.
The issue is that if you fuck up and go to jail, your life is effectively over.
The "suck" might please puritanical values. However, it doesn't encourage inmates to get on a better path. It just churns out bitter unemployable people with high rates of recidivism.
We have no way to check if they were actually an inmate or just a sock puppet for their political position. Even then, they never experienced the alternative, so they don't have any more information than we do. A classic "alternative history" problem.
We haven't experienced an alternate-history version of America without slavery, so does that mean we don't have any information on whether it was bad or not?
"Make prison suck" is just one possible means to an end (the ends being to deter crime and recidivism, and keep dangerous people off the streets), not an end in itself. For some offenders, the sucky experience is enough to set them straight. For others, their whole lives already sucked at least as bad as prison, so prison is just more of the same.
Right... and who will decide that? Prison Wardens aren't exactly known to be fair arbiters of such things.
Apologies, I don't mean to come off as pessimistic. But its clear to me that prison for most folks meant a place for really bad people so nobody in regular society gives a shit for the plight of prisoners and over time it has created a system where its hard to introduce any meaningful reform.
We the People? This is why voting is important, but I’m afraid that even if everyone participated, most people still condone treating prisoners like crap. “Othering” really helps justify it in people’s minds: “oh, it’s fine to treat them poorly because they’re monsters, and everyone knows only Bad People go to prison”. Never mind that a lot of prisons are stuffed full of nonviolent drug offenders whose only crime was possessing a plant and maybe being the wrong skin color.
We have a long way to go. Treating our inmates better requires Americans to have some semblance of compassion, and considering how we can’t even agree that everyone should be able to see a doctor and not die or go bankrupt from an infection, I have sincere doubts that we will ever make things better for prisoners in our lifetimes.
Completely agreed. It also psychologically devalues legitimate work in the minds of prisoners. After working 10, 20, 30 years at grueling jobs that pay you $1 or less, combined with inability to work almost anywhere after release due to having a conviction, it's not a big shock that theft or selling drugs will seem like a good option once they get out.
There would need to be an equivalent or greater effort to help them obtain jobs and nice living spaces outside of prison, otherwise: "Can't find a job out here! I'm gonna go back to prison and get me that sweet $30/hr prison job, where I can afford nice food and place to live. Also if I don't feel like working they'll take care of me."
Not to mention, prisons now incentivized to soak up that larger cashflow and get more prisoners
Everything should be much worse on the inside than the outside. You can use your job to get yourself a single cell rather than a shared cell, etc. and since prisoners are largely able bodied men they should be able to make enough money to defeat the cost of their room and board (probably not their guarding).
Prisons often have incentives for good behavior and things prisoners can buy to make things more comfortable for themselves. Is your primary argument that earning more and paying more money for incentives will teach them how to budget money so they know how to do that after release, and that will increase their success upon release?
I am saying that the more that life in prison encourages behaviors that will be constructive outside of prison, the more likely that ex-prisoners will succeed outside the walls. For example, it seems like right now the best things you can do for yourself in jail are to build huge muscles to defend yourself, don't interact with anyone to avoid conflicts, etc... these create very bad traits for living in civilization.
Instead, if prisoners had to pay their monthly rent, make sure their income covered that rent, budgeted for extras like meat with their dinner, etc... those skills all translate to proper functioning outside of prison.
Perhaps it would do well to reflect on the kind of society that treats people and handles poverty in such a way that they would rather be locked up and almost every aspect of their life controller, because at least they get some food.
Many states will absolutely "charge you rent" to be incarcerated. Upwards of $70/day in sometimes, handed to you a bill, or lien, on your released from prison.
I know I'm going to deeply regret asking, but I'm morbidly curious why you think this rhetorical strategy is relevant and meaningful.
If the only people going to prison were rapists, we wouldn't have the largest prison population in the developed world as an absolute and a percentage of our population.
> If the only people going to prison were rapists, we wouldn't have the largest prison population in the developed world as an absolute and a percentage of our population.
That's not the point though, it's that no distinction is being drawn here. We already put a considerable effort into predicting recidivism, but people in this thread seem to assume that the majority, or all prisoners warrant an expensive supported release, despite the obvious likelihood that a certain number are virtually guaranteed to want to reoffend, and would use any resources they're given to do so.
As much as anyone, I am against the excessive policies which force fine people into a lifetime of criminality. However that problem can not be solved with release policy, it has to be solved in criminal law.
New Yorkers, don't seem to bring issues like their ridiculous knife laws (which frequently target innocent people who use folding knives at work; knives which are sold openly in major cities) to the ballot; many states chock full of people who complain about excess imprisonment don't vote on issues surrounding the policies and law which make soft recreational drugs an underground criminal enterprise, and produce unexpected black markets in services like hair styling.
Ironically, the people who complain about the prison population most vocally, are frequently the same people who say "there ought to be a law!" whenever the slightest issue arises in public life.
Possibly unfortunately (though it's not that simple, as prosecutors, being human, still err), the legislature disagrees with you. With personal experience in a proceeding of a charge like this, I assure you child rapists are usually let out of jail before murderers.
>child rapists are usually let out of jail before murderers.
And for damn good reason. If murder carries a shorter sentence than raping a child, well guess how a rapist might make sure their victim never testifies.
Make them a eunich (surgically remove balls/testicles/penis/leave a catheter to pee out of), and a life-time ankle bracelet, and a brand on their forehead saying they're a child molester.
This way they still suffer for life, and people know to steer clear, but they don't cost $$ to keep in prison. Win/Win.
>Given that, they’ll probably be forced to steal to survive after release and...end up back in prison.
But that's precisely the thing, isn't it? For-profit prisons, a multi-billion dollar business, are precisely incenctivised to bring and keep and many prisoners inside as possible. It's an economic incentive that works precisely against the social goals we as a society would like to achieve (for the great gain of a select few). Absolutely disgusting.
> For-profit prisons, a multi-billion dollar business, are precisely incenctivised to bring and keep and many prisoners inside as possible.
For-profit prisons are obviously a bad policy, but only 8% of America's prisoners are incarcerated in them (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...) and it's not clear that they are either necessary nor sufficient as a cause for these problems.
Not the only cause, no, but their impact can be felt far beyond those 8%, via their intense lobbying for e.g. mandatory minimum sentencing, making life tougher for convicts after they're freed to maximise recidivism, etc
As long as there's a corrections officer union you'll have the exact same lobbying.
Most of these policies were enacted during the 1960's-1990's crime wave as a response to it, and not as some sort of special-interest conspiracy. It turns out that unintended consequences are a lot more common than sinister special interest conspiracies.
I mean, I think you might understand why people protest Netflix price increases because it affects them. When things affect people personally, they care. That's why prisoners themselves are striking here, to bring attention to their struggle as well as advocate for themselves.
I’m not sure prisons should offer gainful employment to prisoners.
Teaching, training, therapy, yes, please, absolutely. Humane conditions and treatment from the guards most definitely.
But minimum wage? I’m not sure. I like the idea of inmates being able to complete their sentence with some funds they’ve saved up to help get back on their feet. But that’s what halfway houses are supposed to support I guess?
But we don't provide that stuff either. Most prisoners have to pay for basically everything but the bed they sleep on, prison clothing, and food - which is sometimes bad. Need soap? Tampons? Underwear? Be prepared to buy it.
We don't provide halfway houses for everyone either [1]. No job placement after getting out. No help finding housing nor any money to start a life. Parole officers often won't work around work hours, so folks have to take off work to see them.
I don't really mind prisoners doing basic upkeep in prisons (housekeeping, laundry, food prep, and things like that) for a few hours a week. This sort of thing is normal in a household, after all, and part of being a productive member of society. Anything outside of that is slave labor if you aren't getting paid anything but a pittance for it and have nothing to show for it when you leave. I don't mind it being reduced minimum wage (25-33% less, for example), but it should be more than it is.
If anything, prisoners would have a fund saved up for when they leave. We wouldn't have to make the prisoners families suffer if they can send money home for food and such. And they could buy basic toiletries.
> I’m not sure prisons should offer gainful employment to prisoners.
> Teaching, training, therapy, yes, please, absolutely. Humane conditions and treatment from the guards most definitely.
> But minimum wage? I’m not sure. I like the idea of innates being able to complete their sentence with some funds they’ve saved up to help get back on their feet. But that’s what halfway houses are supposed to support I guess?
So, don't let people save on their own and instead force them into a new aspect of the justice system upon "release"? Didn't they serve their time in prison? Why prolong the sentence and force them to remain in the system?
Prisons should absolutely offer gainful employment because that's one of the best ways they can be reintegrated into society which I would hope is the goal of prison!
If prisoners could be given a living wage then I would bet you would have less of them returning to selling drugs etc in order to survive because they leave prison with literally nothing to their name.
Isn't that a problem with modern society in general that sustenance equals employment, barring some exceptions, that are more or less hated depending on the current political climate?
Also, what if they cannot find jobs paying living wage? Wouldn't they just be more motivated to return to prison?
hmmm, about this not having to pay rent - prisoners with partners and children currently can't pay their chunk of the rent, but I bet many would, if they could.
Either you like a rule for minimum wage or you dont, if you start choosing who gets it you subvert the very core principle that people deserve a sustenance wage.
It would be reasonable to devote 10-20% of the wages to prison maintenance or victims reparations, but saying their labor is worth 1$ is preposterous.
There are a lot of rules and regulations which do not apply to prisoners. Likewise there are a lot of rules and regulations which only apply to prisoners.
It’s not unreasonable to treat prisoners as a unique population / special case. They are not incarcerated so that they can continue gainful employment.
Prisoners should not be getting paid to cook, clean, do laundry, etc. to help operate the prison, for example.
My understanding was jobs that provided for options to work outside the prison (like cleaning up roadside garbage) were coveted chances to get outside and maybe earn some time off for community service.
Court ordered community service can also be a reasonable punishment instead of incarceration.
The prisons are a service for the free people to have safety, they should paid by them. It is insidious to make prisoners pay for the prison, they are not the recipients of the service, its just adding a layer of oppression.
But if you dont like a moral argument, make it an economic one. Each prisoner in california costs like 100k a year: if you paid them reasonable salaries, and they reduce re-incarceration rates you will be saving orders of magnitude more money.
Because it's part of the day to day upkeep of life in general. You don't get paid for cooking, cleaning, or doing laundry (unless you're a middle class child earning pocket money from your parents). It's just stuff that has to be done.
Part of daily upkeep if it's just for yourself (possibly plus partner/roommate/whatever). I think we're talking about cooking/washing/whatever for a couple hundred people. As a job.
You also dont get to go to the toilet in, be confined in a small room, barred from using the internet and generally deprived of your freedom in life in general.
Why should prisoners not get minimum wage when everyone else does? How is forcing people to work for less than is levally allowed, in dangerous conditions as well, any different from slavery?
Right, it does, but I think this discussion is a moral one, not legal one. Constitution can be changed, like any law, it's just a hell of a lot harder.
I very much share this sentiment, I often think of prisons as quarantine. But that’s the descriptive dimension, not the normative.
Crime victims seem to crave “revenge”. It’s a very human thing. In fact psychological studies have shown it turns out that revenge feels quite fulfilling to the perpetrator. Societies without an institutionalized punitive systems (like much of western society has historically) tend to have family feuds which can last for generations.
I don’t think that should be a norm, bit plenty seem to think so, often quite strongly.
Exactly, but those feelings don't make revenge rational.
Trying to rationalize irrational behavior is an uphill battle. So instead of rationalizing the prison system we should aim to minimize it - and over time (likely generations) phase it out completely.
A few prisons do pay min wage, like some Arizona prisons that allow outside contractors but generally inmates can't access the funds until they are released (to prevent extortion from other inmates) which means walking out with a lot of savings after a 5 yr bid. They're doing cold calls selling SAP Hana dbms and Oracle stuff https://youtu.be/y4kkYnobf_U and former inmates move up to management. https://www.televerde.com/who-we-are/
> I never understood the idea of paying prisoners absurdly little “because prison”.
A visceral demonstration of decent rewards from legitimate work might reduce recidivism, which seems like a social good but is reducing the labor supply for prison industry and reducing the demand for (and leverage of) correctional officers and other prison employees. Lots of people have lots of money on the line, and the prison labor population is felons, who both can't vote and lack sympathy from those who can. So, the weight of the political pressure is virtually all on one side.
>they’ll probably be forced to steal to survive after release
Given the welfare system and what I've seen of crime stats, my impression is that crimes that could be described as "stealing to survive" are nearly non-existent. Even mentally ill homeless people rarely "steal to survive". The soup kitchen, subsidized apartment and welfare cheque are a lot easier.
And anyway, how many times do you need to shoplift bread from the market before you get sent to prison? Is such a thing even possible?
People commit prison-worthy crimes because they need a lot of money fast for drugs, or out of anger or for revenge or over gang disputes and personal disputes. "Stealing to survive" doesn't really exist in developed countries, so your argument makes no sense.
I'd be really interested in any crime stats to support the idea that a substantial number of prisoner are there for crimes that were necessary for survival. Do we even send people to prison for crimes like this?
I've had "low value" things stolen from me like tarps, tents and food (and yes, I realize I'm dumb for not learning to lock these things up the first time they were stolen). While it may have been vandals, I have a strong feeling it was people steeling to survive.
A factor in punishment is “repeat offender”, and these people were already in prison so any new crime looks bad from the start, regardless of how petty it may be.
It is clearly the government's responsibility to align the prison's incentives with the best outcome for society. That includes people not reoffending.
You are right that currently the US fails in this regard, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.
I would have said that the responsibility of government is to act on behalf of the people. The people may have different ideas than what is technically the best outcome for society.
I don’t disagree but just wanted to say something:
The whole point of money was to make it possible for 2+ good actors to do legal (and different) work/goods/services for each other while profiting.
Most people who end up in prison were “bad actors” by definition. The system was not benefiting from them. And thus I can’t help thinking that they don’t really deserve any of the system’s monetary medium of exchange.
It's not about what criminals deserve, it's about how to make sure they stop being criminals. A broke ex-con without a support network is much more likely to return to crime just to survive. Helping them avoid that is a net gain to society as a whole, whether they deserve it or not.
Focusing on what people "deserve", instead of on what's best for society, is the reason the US has the worst health care in the western world while also spending more tax money on health care per capita than anyone else on the planet. We'd rather spend 10 dollars making sure no one ever gets more than their fair share than risk one dollar going to someone who doesn't "deserve" it.
Most people in prison today are there because of "drug offenses" which usually means they got caught doing drugs themselves (not dealing drugs or being involved in drug induced crimes).
I agree with you that we should get the drug offenders out. But the characterizations that "most people are in prison for drug offenses" should be updated.
Is incarceration rate not somewhat deceptive though? A more interesting statistic would be how many of each 100,000 had ever spent time in prison.
From here on is only speculation and I'll do a deeper dive when I'm not on a phone. I'd like to see the rest of the statistics broken down by offense. Additionally I suspect that drug offenses would lead to repeated incarceration and perhaps eventually worse offenses.
Most violent offenses are committed in the context of existing relationships though, so there are certainly non-policy and certainly non-drug-policy ways to address crime in the United States.
The linked article is interesting but also slightly misrepresented. The 693 number is incarcerations without federal drug offenses. The change would be from 725/100k to 625/100k across state and federal, which is a slightly more significant change.
Note, you have a minor misquote of the statistic from the article; it's 725 per 100000:
> From BJS [Bureau of Justice Statistics], [...] an incarceration rate of about 725 people per 100,000 population.
> Suppose every federal drug offender were released today. That would cut the incarceration rate to about 693 inmates per 100,000 population. Suppose further that every drug offender in a state prison were also released. That would get the rate down to 625
This is linked elsewhere in the thread (as well as that FiveThirtyEight article), but it bears repeating here: as far as the federal incarceration rate goes, the number is actually 46% [1]. Which isn't a majority, but it's damn close — and way too high.
(It should go without saying that these are all simplistic lenses on a very complex, multifaceted problem, and in reality many parts of the justice system need reform.)
I think you are wrong about "the whole point of money" and do not believe that profit is a requirement for currency to function. Money has many simple purposes outside of profit.
Even taking your claim at face value, whether or not someone "deserves" to benefit from some profit-based exchange of labor for currency seems irrelevant. If work has a concrete value and someone is unable to receive fair compensation for that work, and all of the value is received by someone else who did not do the work, this is inherently unfair and unethical (and by definition, slavery).
The point of a medium of exchange (money) is to make it easy for there to be a coincidence of wants between people who might transact. It has nothing to do with whether you're a "good" or "bad" actor.
Well... sure, but it depends on how you look at it.
In a monetary society (as opposed to credit or barter (intermediary like you suggest) — monetary circuitist terminology), money is created as a debt/credit tuple to facilitate an intertemporal private contract (tit-for-tat), of which cash is a physical token representation. The etymology of “credit” is “faith”, “honor”, “merit” etc. That of debt, at least in some germanic languages (“schuld”) literally means “guilt” and has connotations of sin and atonement.
Money is a tool, nothing more (ideologically). Calling on ideology to restrict potentially helpful uses of a tool is a dangerous path to tread.
No matter what crime someone's committed, they're still a person, and if our goal is more productive members of society, cutting people off from the main tool for goods exchange will not move us toward that goal.
> Most people who end up in prison were “bad actors” by definition.
Disagree. Majority of the offenders are there for non-violent drug offenses. It is also possible some of them are serving sentences for crimes that are no more crimes. California has liberalized marijuana but the prisoners are still in jail for the crimes that no more crimes.
Note: But the offense data oversimplifies how people interact with the criminal justice system. A person in prison for multiple offenses is reported only for the most serious offense so, for example, there are people in prison for “violent” offenses who might have also been convicted of a drug offense. Further, almost all convictions are the result of plea bargains, where people plead guilty to a lesser offense, perhaps of a different category or one that they may not have actually committed.
For reference, here is the linked list of demands by the national organizers [1]:
> 1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.
> 2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.
> 3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.
> 4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.
> 5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.
> 6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.
> 7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.
> 8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.
> 9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.
> 10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count!
As someone from Australia who doesn't understand the prison thing in the US. Is it essentially modern slavery? They choose non-white demographics, send them to prison for minor offences, and use the for cheap/free labour. Is this right?
My brother just went to jail and I’m just learning how crazy some things are there. They keep the bright lights on until midnight, and turn them back on at 4am (and require the inmates to get up).
No one can properly function after repeated nights of less than 4 hours of sleep. I seriously think the jail just wants to push people to misbehave so they stay there longer and the jail can reap more profits.
Killing all prisoners will make recidivism 0. I think you can understand that just as I can. But I assume that we both agree that that is not a good solution.
Why is this being downvoted? Jon Oliver did a bit a while back on private prisons. The investigation uncovered an investor sales pitch which bragged of "high recidivism rates"
Probably because it's unlikely the other poster is talking about a private prison.
"Jail" often means a county operated facility and then at the state and federal level most prisoners are still held in publicly administered facilities.
I went to the Design2Part show in Santa Clara a few months ago. The California Department of Corrections had a booth there, offering slave labor as a service.
It's technically not illegal under the 13th amendment.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
It's immoral and unethical, but it's legal. Not saying I agree with that part of the 13th amendment, I abhor it personally.
The only time I heard anyone being sentenced to "hard labor" was in the military, so it seems like if you're given incarceration at your sentencing then that shouldn't automatically mean you're being sentenced to work while you're there?
The punishment is incarceration, not labor, right? I guess this is an area where I'm exceptionally under-educated, so if you've got any good suggestions for reading on the topic I'd appreciate it.
As a person with Autism, I have always been scared of a misunderstanding with a police officer that would land me in jail, which is a common issue. I would calm my nerves by telling myself “it will be OK. I will think of it as a lot of time to read.”
I later learned books are very hard to come by at prisons, which adds a bit to my fear of going out and doing things.
Knowing I would be forced to work is terrifying because it would necessitate so many more misunderstandings.
Just don't drink and drive, don't hang out with volatile people, respect police offers, and you'll be ok. It also helps to be white / be female when dealing with law enforcement but not everyone has such luxuries. Living in fear is no way to live! Think of it this way: if cops weren't around things would be MUCH less safe, so thank god we have them
I don't think you can really be forced into community service per se. They basically say the sentence is x time in jail or if you agree we will accept x hours of community service.
Is it immoral by default, or due to implementation?
For example, consider a prison which forces (which I'll define as however the prisons currently gets inmates to work the jobs) it's inmates to attend classes to learn job skills and avoid behaviors that landed them in prison. Would this not also be a form of slavery given they are forced to attend? Slavery isn't defined by the slave doing something useful to the owner. A slave is still a slave even if they are doing nothing or if they are being commanded to improve themselves. And in this case I wouldn't see it as immoral.
What about if the slaves are equally forced to clean up the class once done (think stereotypical Japanese school where the kids do much of the cleaning). This could potentially be saving money for the prison by reducing the number of janitors needed, but I don't see it as any more immoral that I see the kids cleaning the classroom as a form of child labor.
In a general sense, imprisoning is a subset of enslavement, though one we generally see as just as long as the laws and legal system which lead to imprisonment is seen as just. In the US in particular, we see some cases as just and some cases as unjust.
> For example, consider a prison which forces ... it's [sic] inmates to attend classes to learn job skills and avoid behaviors that landed them in prison. Would this not also be a form of slavery given they are forced to attend? Slavery isn't defined by the slave doing something useful to the owner. A slave is still a slave even if they are doing nothing or if they are being commanded to improve themselves. And in this case I wouldn't see it as immoral.
This raised all sorts of alarms in my head, so I decided to look up a more formal definition. In this case, the source is Wikipedia[0]:
> Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave is unable to withdraw unilaterally from such an arrangement and works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will.
Your redefinition of slavery is significantly broader than the accepted definition of it. This is extremely problematic in trying to talk about whether or not it's immoral.
>Your redefinition of slavery is significantly broader than the accepted definition of it.
Please note this is not my redefinition of slavery as I was largely using the definition many other posts here assume, but only pointing out that it isn't limited just to hard labor on the enslaver's behalf.
If you think this definition of slavery is wrong, then this would apply to numerous other posts here and the core take away would be that prisoners aren't slaves. At which point we can just pick a different word or create a new word and continue to the point.
So, if you have an issue with the word slave, then I'll define a new word to capture what people in other posts are complaining about, praves (yes, just combining prisoners and slaves into as single word). Now, I repeat my point using praves instead of slaves.
> In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will.
Seems like what they were saying fits well with this.
If prisoners are slaves, then it isn't that far a leap to the concept of wage slavery or being enslaved to nature. But please note that I am not the first post in this thread to use a definition that disagrees from the one you are suggesting.
Do you think it is reasonable for people in prison to work to offset some of the cost of their room and board or do you think it should all be paid for by taxpayers?
(I have a problem with creating an economic incentive to keep people in prison, but less of a problem with giving people something to do that helps pay for their food.)
> I have a problem with creating an economic incentive to keep people in prison
You're going to be in for a real surprise when you learn why they get paid a $1/hr to do life-threatening work (that they're banned from afterwords), and where the rest of the money goes. Do you think corrections departments who sell these services charge $1/hr? Do you think them buying an overpriced toothbrush at over $20 and being price gouged by a prison actually saves the ever-deified "taxpayers" any money? Or that prisons don't pocket that and want more of it?
Of course, historically, some slaves got paid by their masters, too. Unsurprisingly, it was a very popular argument (by slave owners and apologists) against their freedom (from being enslaved) because at least they got something (besides being a slave) instead of nothing (from the slave owners who got everything) and hey -- we're all making a buck, so that's their fair share.
It's almost like.... slavery -- of all forms -- is really economically effective and has really, really good margins, and can make lots of money. Super weird. Can't imagine why people got rid of it.
So what about cases where the penalty is a fine instead of (or in addition to) prison time? If I get a ticket, I have to pay. For the majority of people, that money comes through doing work of some form, which I'm now being required to do or else face possible prison time.
Yes, fines are far more punitive to poor people than they are for the rich. They're effectively just a small expense which allows them to commit crimes.
The fact that society forces us to work harder and harder in order just to live, when it could easily sustain a dignified standard of living for all at minimal cost, is the fundamental problem that people on the left are against.
That's why I love how Finland does at least some of their fines: set at X days' income for each given offense. Granted, my losing a week's income would be a lot less painful for me than it would be for a single mother working as a home health aide, but it at least approaches fairness (we both lose the benefit of a week of our own work, but without the complete upheaval that a week in jail would have caused us)
Well, yes. Food and housing should be human rights. A fulfilling or comfortable life is not, but life is a human right.
But even if you don't agree with that interpretation of the human right of life, prisoners typically aren't free participants in the market. They're being paid well below average wages for the work they're doing, which a) makes it feel like a technicality that they're getting paid for their work, and b) distorts the market for everyone else.
The right /to/ life is different from the right /of/ life.
The right to life means that no one can deprive you of your life, but neither is society obligated to ensure you have a life.
The right of life means that you are owed a life and it must be given to you by the relevant authorities.
The reason this is important because the former gives you control over your life, and the latter operates at the whim of the governing authority. To make that a little clearer, the right to life requires passive governmental involvement, the right of life requires active governmental involvement. Guess which one goes out the window as soon as its inconvenient.
This seems inconsistent with how, if you are put in prison, the government is obligated to provide you with food and shelter at no cost to you. If you only have a right "to" life in your interpretation, could not the government say, you need to pay out of pocket for food and shelter, and if you can't afford it, it's your fault you're starving to death in a dungeon?
And given the potential savings, why don't more governments do exactly that?
If I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t be working in the sense that I do now. I’d be pursuing interests that may or may not make money, but would bring me personal fulfillment.
If we chase this line of logic we will find that we are all slaves to something or another.
It's about whether or not we want society to force certain types of slavery. We've barred "defacto" slavery, but what about these myriad other forms?
Dragging old concepts out of their graves by repurposing words we thought we already knew the definitions is one way that progressives are trying to re-try, or appeal, certain concepts.
This one being modern imprisonment. I don't think the term slavery should alarm anyone in this instance, but it will, which is how we get progress in 2018.
Not all of us are slaves. Those with enough wealth get to buy their way out of rules that apply to ordinary people. Do you really think Jeff Bezos is a slave?
A non-incarcerated person has agency. They have a choice of what work to do, where that work takes place, when to work, the ability to negotiate wages, etc.
Not being independently wealthy, I don’t have a choice to work or not. In that sense, if I wanted not to work, then, yes, I would be working against my will.
Sure you do have a choice; you can go live in the wilderness and live entirely self-sufficiently. Just because a choice is unreasonable to you doesn't make it less of a choice.
More importantly (and my entire point) is that you have a choice of exactly what kind of work you want to do. That self-determination differentiates you from a prisoner or slave.
There seems to be a huge break in the "it's unreasonable to do x therefore" in this argument, and many in American society.
If the prisoners who didn't work were next to starving, and sleeping on the ground, you would sure have someone come in asserting that they are "forced" to work. Because they are OSTENSIBLY being forced to work by the choices they are offered.
This type of pedantry goes beyond semantics and into deeper meaning that is very hard to communicate.
You’re really reaching here. Who’s to say I have the skills to do that? Where do I get the basic supplies to do so, without working for money? And on whose land do I do it? What do I do when I need medical care? What if I already have a chronic illness that needs periodic attention (as, in fact, I do.) You’re telling me that going off into the woods to die is a viable alternative to working a job for money to live in an apartment and be able to go to doctors?
My point is that I have no choice other than to do something someone else will pay me to do. You haven’t addressed the argument; you are begging the question. “Work or die” sounds a lot like slavery to me.
Please reply again when you have a good faith argument.
I responded with an extreme example because of your extreme conflation of "needing to do some type of work of your choosing" with wage slavery. You seem to be ignoring the central point that you GET TO CHOOSE THAT WORK.
You said I get to choose exactly what type of work I want to do. That’s like saying I can choose to be executed by the gas chamber or lethal injection. The consequences of not working, as someone who is not independently wealthy are so extreme as to make that not a valid choice.
You are still begging the question. Do I get to choose not to work, or not? “Just go off and die,” on the streets or in the wilderness is not a valid choice.
I know this will sound pretty simplistic, but a prisoner is either a threat to society or they are not.
If they are a threat to society, why are they given access to computers, the internet and programming tools? (The security implications should be obvious there.) Even better, why are they let outside the prison at all?
If they are not a threat to society, why am I paying any amount of tax money to keep them in prison? We should pay zero dollars for any offender who is so little of a threat that we can let him/her outside of the prison. (Or, indeed, give him/her hacking tools.)
Any prisoner qualifying for these work release programs, should probably be released. And the money paid incarcerating them can be saved, or at least put to better uses.
This strikes to the heart of what the prison strike is supposed to point out.
Certain companies (like private prisons and contractors who make money off of prisons) make profit out of people being in prisoned, so it is in their self interest to keep people, even people who are not dangerous to anyone in prison because it affects their bottom line. They then lobby politicians and the like to keep their place, get more funding, as well as lobby for legislation like mandatory minimums so they get a fresh supply of humans to exploit.
So, it never was for the general public's interest, it's in the private interest of these corporations.
> Do you think it is reasonable for people in prison to work to offset some of the cost of their room and board or do you think it should all be paid for by taxpayers?
But they are taxpayers. Or more likely were before being incarcerated and will be again once released.
The same is said for people losing their job: no unemployment coverage since they aren't working. No, it's not how the social net is supposed to work.
Nobody should be in prison longer than their rehabilitation takes and the focus of their stay should 100% be rehabilitation. The prison system should be structured around reducing costs by getting people out of the system, not reducing costs by getting those in the system to do work.
What business does the state have telling you how you should feel? How you think think? What you believe? Rehabilitation is much more totalitarian than just giving you what you deserve and letting you get on with your life. The true content of your character is your business and your business alone. The rest of us should just be concerned with what you intentionally do.
If you think you were justified in your crime and can never be convinced otherwise, you don’t belong in jail for the rest of your life. You belong in jail for as long as you deserve and not a second longer.
Before forming an opinion on the role that "Rehabilitation" should play in parole hearings, HN readers should talk with (or at least read about) someone who has been through that process. Even when the intent is sincere, the implementation in American prisons can be downright draconian. "Rehabilitation" means learning what you are supposed to say/do and saying/doing it in a convincing way. Including, e.g., believing in God [1].
Rehabilitation makes sense in the abstract, but its implementation often boils down to "learn how to lie convincingly about your true beliefs", sometimes even about beliefs that are explicitly enshrined in our constitution. Which is pretty much the opposite of what we should be going for.
Now consider the case where the intent is not sincere; e.g., the case of a prison chaplain or guard who was rubbed the wrong way by a particular prisoner's personality. Rehabilitation is effusive and basically boils down to "anyone have anything negative to share with the parole board?"
And all of this without considering civil disobedience. E.g., should MLK Jr. have stayed in jail until he publicly denounced his own Letter from a Birmingham Jail?
Must drug offenders publicly profess their undying allegiance to status quo drug scheduling laws before earning their freedom?
IMO we should always allow for the possibility that criminality and morality are not intrinsically linked. And the modern practice of considering rehabilitation in parole hearings too often runs counter to tht belief.
I don't think most people here arguing for a more rehabilitation-based prison system think it works perfectly or even good in the US. But on the other hand the US prison system has more inmates per capita than any other, so clearly something in either the legal system or the prison system has gone wrong.
Reform is needed, and IMO more punishment and less opportunity after exit will probably not help.
Advocating for shorter prison sentences is not the same thing as wanting to change the philosophical underpinning of the justice system to rehabilitation instead of retribution. I think a lot of people are confusing the two.
I do think some of the sentencing in the US is too high. But also that people deserve punishment for their crimes.
Yes, unfortunately prison isn't about rehabilitation. It's about punishing people, it's about vengeance. And a lot of crimes are manufactured, laws created to hurt people we don't like.
And for a lot of people when someone does something pretty awful or scummy, we kind of want them to be punished severely for their crimes and are outraged when they're not, because we've been conditioned to feel that way.
We want some people to be punished and spend years or decades in prison. Maybe not you specifically, or maybe there isn't always agreement about who, but for a lot of people that's the deep seeded idea of justice.
It's a tough row to hoe to change that at every level. People need to agree with more sensible ideas and vote that way. But it's clear that a lot of folks prefer the most draconian approaches because that's what makes them feel better.
>Nobody should be in prison longer than their rehabilitation takes and the focus of their stay should 100% be rehabilitation
That would be nice, but our current justice system is not even remotely close to being anything like this. That will take generations of change. You're trying to say we should be at step Z when we haven't even gotten to A yet.
That kind of argument is used to justify a lack of action towards progress though. Similar arguments were made by many about slavery at the time:
"It would be nice to abolish slavery but our current economic system isn't even remotely close to being anything like this. It would take generations of change..."
So we should prefer generations more people be subjected to these horrors than take a risk and make an effort to do better?
You misunderstand. I'm not saying you can't try and change things, that's exactly what I am saying. You can't demand everything has to perfect right now, you need to actually start the change somewhere.
>"It would be nice to abolish slavery but our current economic system isn't even remotely close to being anything like this. It would take generations of change..."
This is more like you saying we need to have equal rights for everyone in 1800 before you start working on abolishing slavery in the first place.
You should read up the history of Thaddeus Stevens if you haven't yet already.
There comes to a point where you need to make strong demands if you want to make any progress at all for certain things. Demanding incremental progress for things like slavery in the 1800s leads to half-baked compromise that ultimately led to even more issues later down the line.
Well, for one, we can rename the "Department of Corrections" to reflect what it really is since 'corrections' is not part of their charter. Step A should be "stop lying to ourselves and face the truth".
> Well, for one, we can rename the "Department of Corrections" to reflect what it really is
Well, we could, but no one wants to sponsor the bill to replace that name with “Department of Vengeance, Torture, Slavery, and Maintenance of th Permanent Underclass”.
> Nobody should be in prison longer than their rehabilitation takes and the focus of their stay should 100% be rehabilitation.
1. "Rehabilitation" -- the actual implementation, not the abstract idea -- is insidious. How can anyone ever know for sure whether someone is truly rehabilitated? Especially given that prisons don't typically attract that best and brightest of the medical profession.
If you've ever talked to someone who spent time in prison, you'll realize that "rehabilitation" in US prisons mostly means "parrot what they tell you to say and don't be stupid enough to seriously engage. Just. Repeat. Your. Lines."
E.g., claiming you have no spiritual belief can result in denied parole [1]. Too often, "rehabilitation" is just short-hand for "brainwashing". In those cases, bodily punishment without the pretense of "rehabilitation" is actually a far kinder and just system.
Far from truly fixing the underlying problem, modern rehabilitation often amounts to an exercise in honing one's inner psychopath: lie without remorse or guilt, and lie well enough that you don't get caught, or be denied parole on the basis of your lack of religious faith.
2. What do we do with people who cannot be rehabilitated, but whose crimes do not justify a lifetime prison sentence?
3. what do we do about criminals who are very unlikely to re-offend but are not rehabilitated? I.e., what is the purpose of rehabilitation? A common answer is "limiting future damage to society". But this justification fails to explain why we should jail a bank robber who managed to hide $1 billion on a remote island and who we honestly believe will be happy living off of that $1 billion on some remote island in peace for the rest of his life.
4. What about people who commit heinous crimes but are easy to rehabilitate (e.g., due to a treatable mental illness)? How do we deal with vindictive families of victims who might want to take justice into their own hands?
Prison sentences serve many purposes: rehabilitation, protection of society, punishment, and a disincentive for criminal activity.
Rehabilitation is certainly the most in-line with enlightenment values (but can become draconian in the case where the crime is relatively small but rehabilitation proves impossible, or in the case where rehabilitation means "learn how to lie about your inner self").
And I will certainly agree that the US prison system does not come even remotely close to striking a good balance between these multiple purposes. But the other roles are also important, and "rehabilitation" isn't always all it's cracked up to be.
The work often offsets costs for private companies so it doesn't even go back to taxpayers.
But yes, imprisoning people is ridiculously expensive and that cost is borne by the taxpayer while offering almost no benefit. We should not be imprisoning them to give private companies a cheaper labour source.
Actually, this is not correct, if I am reading that right. In this case, the "punishment for a crime" is the prison sentence. Adding additional provisions to that, which were not part of sentencing at the time, I would argue is extraneous. Involuntary servitude is not part of the definition of a prison sentence.
Involuntary servitude is part of the legally-defined condition of imprisonment, and is consequently part of a sentence to prison as much as “confinement to a cell” and “being subjected to a prison dress code” and “being subject to prison lockdown procedures”. The individual elements that are associated with prison aren't enumerated in the sentence, but they are not separated from it and therefore illegal as not specifically included in the sentence.
The 13th Amendment doesn't prohibit it, the way it prohibits (most forms of) chattel slavery. But there's nothing preventing Congress (or state legislatures) from passing laws prohibiting it.
IANAL but the wording seems pretty straightforward. I feel relatively confident that laws outlawing prison slavery would be challenged by for-profit prisons instantly and easily be declared unconstitutional.
> IANAL but the wording seems pretty straightforward. I feel relatively confident that laws outlawing prison slavery would be challenged by for-profit prisons instantly and easily be declared unconstitutional.
It'd be pretty hard to extract from the 13th amendment a constitutional right to put prisoners to unpaid work.
Furthermore, it's a myth that only for-profit prisons that profit from it - state-owned prisons also profit off the system to the same extent.
> Also fair, but I'd expect the private prisons to be the ones to sue states.
Maybe, but at the moment the LEO/correctional officer unions are the ones actively lobbying to prevent laws like these from passing in the first place.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
- 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
Whenever anyone says slavery no longer exists in America, I point them to this. The foundational document of our system of government expressly allows slavery.
We house 25% of the world's prisoners in part because it's how we are still legally producing slaves.
Can any lawyer comment? A reading of the 13th amendment seems to justify involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime, does this mean prison labor that isn't included in a sentence a violation of the 13th amendment? Just reading of this seems to allow one to make an legal argument along those lines, so I imagine there must have been some case that lead to a clarification of the 13th in the intervening century or so.
I have a law degree and used to work for a federal judge (am a developer now, though).
The 13th Amendment says that you can enslave someone as part of their post-conviction sentencing. This is very broad language and allows for the general slavery of anyone who has been convicted of a crime.
Except there is over a century of precedent, and no court is going to overturn that now. The 13th amendment is not some new discovery that the courts are waiting for someone to make an argument based on
Paying prisoners absurdly low wages teaches them that honest labor doesn't pay. Isn't this exactly the opposite of what we want them to learn?
I readily that my emotional side wants to prison to be as punitive as possible. But my rational side just wants to live in a society with less crime. And teaching prisoners that honest labor pays is an important lesson in getting them to behave themselves when they get out.
On the one hand, you don't really want there to be much of an economy in prison. The more money inmates make the more they have to bribe corrections workers and create an unsafe environment.
On the other hand, we can't keep wages so low in these institutions that basic hygiene items require a hours on hours of work. How do you expect someone to go from incarcerated to living in the world with no money? I swear we just love to create problems in this country and then wonder out loud how those problems came to be.
There are definitely ways to restrict what folks spend on and who they send money to.
One of the easiest ways would be to set up a normal, non-interest earnings savings account with no cash on site. For personal use items, simply require they all come from the prison roster of stuff, and have a selection. Allow folks to send to limited family members: Parents, spouses, and domestic partners would get it if they lived together and had help from the person before the crime. Underage children could get it automatically (and probably should get it if the person had parental rights or child support to pay). Again, there would be no cash and reasonable limits on things from the commissary.
Everything else can be saved so that folks have a good start when they get out.
As far as bribing corrections officers: I'd honestly say part of the answer to this would be to train folks well (more than 2 months of training), pay them well enough to get good candidates, and make sure to keep the prison's well-staffed without relying on overtime. This is a hurdle, though, as most of the places will say they can't afford it.
Adding income equality to prison would make the problems way worse. Basic hygiene stuff should just be provided by the prison (probably something a contract company like Aramark could easily and cheaply provide).
I suppose the main returns of value to a prisoner are time or money. It seems fair to offer a choice of getting a reduced sentence vs. getting paid (probably max. minimum wage). Making someone in prison understand choices and consequences of choices seems like a key thing to understand while there. It's like living with a concrete bench - you'll survive, but you won't enjoy it.
Of course, this stuff might only apply to a certain group of prisoners.
Find a way to sell a service the prisoners can learn to do through apprenticing with experienced prisoners (b2b sales, data analysis, ect), find a way to get companies to contract your inmates, find a way to proof it from bad inmates making politicians look embarassed by limiting the scope of the service to something they can't use for crime, find a way to get prisoners to agree by paying them the state min wage,find a way to get prison workers and public to agree by making it as non disruptive to set up as possible, hire former inmates who worked for you to manage the on site operations, counter 'this is slavery' criticism by hiring prisoners themselves to be your company PR. Prisoners can pay off their conviction fines and at the same time save money for release to land soft. Pitch this to YC and get funding to conduct some kind of data gathering to guage what politicians and public would be comfortable with (types of offenses permitted to work, industries that are least adversarial to this model so willing to work with your prisoners, ect).
I'm very impressed that we don't actually bill prisoners for rent, food, etc and if they can't pay, loan them money through a high interest loan that they can never pay off. Maybe they could do this and reduce interest on the loan if you work in prison. Whatever story works to keep people blind to the fact that the state abuses the shit out of its people.
A common argument against offering minimum wage work or advanced technical training to prisoners is that this reduces the disincentive of prison time. From a purely logical standpoint I can see how that makes some amount of sense, but in reality I don't think anybody committing petty or significant crimes would be swayed one way or the other over the opportunity for $7/hour in prison. The lack of freedom - to see family, friends, live an actual life - that's the disincentive. Not to mention the employment and housing prospects of a convicted felon, which are terrible.
As much as I wish for incremental reform of prison conditions for prisoners, it's important never to forget the fundamentally unethical premise of prisons and state punishment, which derives from religious fantasies about good and evil.
Human beings behave according to the combination of their neurology and their conditions. We should do what we can to prevent dangerous behavior and do our best to treat the people who do dangerous things.
Deciding that some people, mostly people who come from historically oppressed groups and from poverty, are bad and deserve to suffer has a toxic effect on the core of our society.
I worked with a guy who was on a state fire crew (not California). The pay was super low, but he didn't care. Being outdoors in the smoke was way better than being in a cell and the time off for being good was worth quite a bit to him. He was totally happy with the arrangement and it sounded like many others were too. The state had lots of similar programs, roofing government buildings, etc.
I thought I'd share how he felt because it wasn't all all what I expected to hear. I expected he'd rip on it and all I heard was good.
I think the inhabitants of the white collar prisons should be put to work fighting the fires and get paid nothing in return. Most of them are serving hard time for fraud anyway.
Has everyone forgotten that these people are all convicted of a crime and serving their sentences?
For all the issues that exist (gouging for common services, violence, the judicial process, etc.) complaining about the terms of their punishment is absurd.
To be sure there should be rehabilitation, and a component of that is incentives. There should be no expectation, though, that those incentives should correlate to what they may receive in the free market.
You cannot visit slate unless you accept the privacy policy. Which third partners they share the data with, and how to opt out? You never know, as you have to accept the privacy policy first before accessing the Third Party Partners page.
One thing they are demanding is to get rid of the ability to sentence someone to life without parole. For some reason, I don't think the public is going to get behind that one.
If they’re not being paid and the work they’re doing is not helping them to get a job afterwards, then they have every right to protest. In theory at least, they are supposed to be working towards rehabilitation, but it’s turning out to be slave labor in practice.
I have always felt that not paying prison guards enough would encourage corruption. If you’re a prison guard and are barely scraping buy, would you be tempted to smuggle in drugs for the inmates if that meant lining your wallet with a few hundred bucks? This must happen at some level. How else do people get access to drugs in prison?
“California inmates were sent off to fight what has become the largest wildfire in the state’s history for just $1 an hour. These firefighters, who volunteered for a vocational training program offered by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, are often disqualified from the work after release because a required credential is denied to anyone with a criminal record.
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners are also employed in jobs outside and inside the prisons, most commonly doing work to maintain the prisons. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the average prison worker makes around 85 cents an hour. In 2017, inmates in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas were not paid for most of their work. Proponents of these low-paying jobs have argued that inmates benefit from the work experience and that prisons, which are already often cash-strapped, cannot afford to pay more; opponents have argued that prisoners do need real wages to be able to buy basic necessities other than food in the prisons.”
Arguing that it’s good for them is paternalistic bullshit. The same argument could justify slavery. If prisons are cash strapped, whose responsibility is that? I believe society put these people away and we should pay for it. Either it’s worth it to us or it’s not.