Partially covered mortgage means the bank will eventually foreclose. They take the house and, zero out the equity the owner may have, and take any asset value increase and pocket it all.
I meant partially covered by the rent you are able to charge. When I moved away from the house I had bought, I rented it out for a number of years. The rent I was able to charge covered about 90% of the payments, and I put the rest in from my salary. I sold the house a few years later after it had appreciated somewhat, and it was overall a good deal.
I could imagine a similar situation with Airbnb instead of traditional lease arrangements, assuming the numbers line up. My point was more that I can't see it working out that way with an asset like a car.
30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit for these prisoners as it would draw down the labor force and lead to depletion of the firefighter force.
Someone already mentioned the profit of commissaries. Some are actually run by private companies operating inside the prison
I was recently released from Las Vegas County Jail (CCDC) where all sentenced inmates, myself included, are forced, by state law, to "work" in some manner in the jail.
In this case, work consisted of 11-hour shifts, 6 days a week, of ultra back-breaking kitchen work. We were not even allowed to have water cups anywhere outside the break room.
They actually yelled faster! faster! as we ran "the line"...I never could get over that one. All that was missing were the whips and the guards with shotguns spitting tobacco.
We processed approx. 10 thousand trays per day, and were constantly harassed and threatened big time by the corporate kitchen staff in charge. It wasn't enough that we were clocking 60-70 hours a week for the grand total of 1 extra tray per meal (not every meal grant you, just the ones we were working during), but you could actually get thrown in the box and lose gain time (more days in jail) for eating a cookie or some trivial such thing.
If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.
I did the math...2 shifts of 28 workers 365 days a year...with overtime and all that, approx $50k per week($2.6mil/year) of free basically coerced slave labor for the Aero-mark Corporation that ran the kitchen.
I'm guessing you mean Aramark (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/prison-strike-protest-ar...) not Aero-Mark Corporation, an aerospace company. Though perhaps I'm cynical enough to believe that the latter's mission statement "The Aero-mark team bases its work ethic on unity, quality, and accountability. We are one company, one team, succeeding together." could be espoused by a company that abuses prison labor. These mission statements too often seem to be used as a sort of counterbalance for the actual behavior of the company: the more lofty the mission statement, the more deplorable the behavior.
It's not boorish. I only learned about this practice of new American slavery from a friend who had come out of prison recently. Not enough people are talking about it, so nobody knows this is what's going on. Please, keep talking about it!
Yes, it's slavery by another name. Assuming you committed a crime rather than being framed up, that was bad, but the you were treated was itself a crime and I am sorry that you were subjected to that. I've been advocating (not very effectively I'm afraid) for root and branch reform of our criminal justice system for years now, and I feel both angry and ashamed to be a participant in a society where incarceration is treated as an economic opportunity for exploitation rather than a tragic outcome to be remediated.
The sentence you receive from a judge is probably not anywhere close to what you will actually sit in jail for. Probation, parole, double time, triple time, good behavior, trustee status, all affect the outcome.
For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? Very commonly 366 days, though it may be as much as a year and a half. That is if you don't get into any other trouble in jail. After that point you will be released on probation.
What the previous poster is likely stating is that if you willingly agree to be a slave for the state you get all the benefits of early release. The defectors that do not want to be slave labor are not given said benefits. An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
> For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail?
You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court.
You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something.
>An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
This is an interesting observation, but here is how thats dealt with; anyone whom discusses a general purpose strike against working is charged with a serious felony "inciting to riot" and is given an "outside charge" and is probably spending years more in prison.
You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court.
Do you think it's appropriate to call out someone for using "jail" instead of "prison", when the meaning is clear, and you made the same mistake just 5 minutes prior?
Yes CCDC aka Clark County Detention Center (aka Las Vegas County Jail) is a jail in downtown Las Vegas where I did my kitchen slave labor recently on a 90-day sentence for basically jaywalking.
If I were to be sentenced for more then a year, I would have been sent to a prison somewhere in the boonies of Nevada away from Vegas.
The OP discussed a "3-year jail sentence", and I simply explained that would not be possible as jail and prison are significantly different institutions with very different implications.
I don't think I am wrong to continually express the difference between the two.
That is a rough story. I hope things improve for you.
Those who support the war on drugs should think about his point:
>...Was this the outcome society wants me to have? To wreck what small success I struggled to get over what amounted to an illegal search and seizure (that's my PD talking, not me)?
Who was the victim of my "crime"? ...
The definition between a jail and a prison is very much depends on what state you are in.
For example in Texas, you've sat in jail for 6 month and receive a 1 year sentence, you will not be sent to prison, you will remain in the jail for the next 6 months. You can remain in 'jail' for years sometimes before being sent to a prison facility, even after sentencing.
In the USA, sentences of less than 1 year are misdemeanors and can be served in a jail. Sentences of longer than 1 year are felonies and are served in prison. Jails are operated under authority of the county in which they are located, prisons under the authority of state or federal government. This is obviously a summary rather than an exhaustive definition.
First of all, I've spent time in jails and in prisons, both state and federal. Calling it jail time or prison time is nitpicking from the inside.
Second, you do get credit for time served, whether you sat in a jail cell or a prison cell. If they don't credit you for time served, you can sue for illegal detention. It varies state-by-state as to whether you earn good-time (gain time) during your presentencing stay, but typically you get it if you didn't have any infractions.
Finally, prisons employ psychologists who actively gauge the population for "low morale" and suggest courses of action for the staff to take to keep the population under control with the least amount of effort/expense. Typically, they will improve the feed a little when the men become unruly. Also, the staff actively works with the gang structures to help keep the peace.
Let me give a concrete example here, direct from experience.
Florida DOC mandates you must do 85% of your prison (not jail...all jails have different gain time schemes just to make it really confusing) sentence, so that is roughly 5 days a month.
Lets say you score out to 22 months like I was many years ago...thats a total of 110 potential gain-time days off my sentence...great I think almost 4 months!
BUT...let's say I did 13 months in jail waiting for sentencing so I only have to do 9 more in prison.
In most prison systems, I would NOT be able to recover all my potential gain-time because the 13 months county-time did not count for my prison gain time, and perhaps I would only get 9*5 or 45 days gain-time against my sentence.
The State of Florida in 1998, in order to fight disparity in sentencing, created a "scoring system"[0] where every crime in Florida is given a number that corresponds to the number of months in prison that crime could carry.
The scoring system is byzantine as all hell and I challenge anyone to figure it out.[1]
"Scoring out" is simply a term used by Florida convicts to explain how much time they got among themselves I guess. Maybe it was inappropriate to use it here.
Gain-time is a sentence reduction scheme where people get time off their total sentence for staying out of trouble.
No, that poster doesn't know what they are talking about. That said, sentencing is very discretionary so a judge will commonly balance out your total sentence with how much time you've already spent in jail.
Man can we be a little nicer here. He said "no gain time for time spent in jail"
I am not familiar with the term "gain time" but as he uses it above seems to me additional time taken off of your sentence for playing nice. Working dancing to entertain the warden etc.
I took that to mean that while you are in jail you burn down one to one days which is not as fast as the bonus or "gain time" you would get in actual prison.
He may or may not be correct and my guess is it depends on where you at since state and local laws will be applied but...
As for knowing what he is talking about my guess is many prisoners are experts in the system of trying to reduce their stays in prison.
You're being extremely rude. It's hard to make absolutely definitive statements on an incredibly complex and often perverse system like custodial sentencing without resorting to the opaque technical language of legal journals. That is rarely appropriate for a casual discussion forum like HN.
As the other poster actually has first-hand experience of being incarcerated, your dismissive tone in response to some loose phrasing comes off as both nasty and ridiculous.
The poster is talking about post-sentencing "discounts" on prison time served. It's called Good Conduct Time or "good time" for short, in Texas. The way it works is that prison administrators offer inmates early release based upon their behavior. It's a very important and useful prison management tool, one of the only carrots that prison administrators have to offer inmates.
If you follow the link, you'll see that participating in work or educational programs can improve one's good time earning class, allowing an inmate to earn an earlier release date. In contrast to the other poster, Texas requires good time for time served in county jails. Also notable, educational opportunities have been severely curtailed in TDCJ over the last decade.
Right of course..."time served" is a very common sentence for misdemeanor offenses where you could not bond out, and I certainly have an good "idea" what it means.
Also, if you are willing to take a ungodly amount of probation, it is quite possible you will get time-served on your felony charges as well.
I am talking about serious felony offenses where people get sent for multi-year prison sentences, and in those cases, time sitting in jail waiting to get to prison is not eligible for prison gain time.
CCDC gives approx 10 days a month gain time to all sentenced inmates regardless of if you work or not.
Actually working for the jail only provides you the opportunity to LOSE gain time, not get more.
If you refuse to work, you get up to 15 days in solitary confinement (the box, or I simply call it "jail" because its actually jail inside of jail) and lose 5 days of gain time, thus adding 5 days to your sentence.
However, it does not end there...one of the CO's that worked security in the kitchen often threatened to contact your sentencing judge and ask for extra time for screwing up in the kitchen.
It's called 'good time', which you earn as credits for early release. If you refuse to work you get written up and subtracted good time which means time added to expected release date. These disciplinary writeups affect parole potential as well.
The kitchen is also considered one of the better jobs, a bad job would be Hoe Squad, which means a chain gang led out into 35C heat to work the fields while guys on horseback yell at you to work faster.
The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
>The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
Is there any documented evidence of this happening?
I worked for TDCJ for a couple years, there were plenty of strange and sometimes salacious scandals. They often failed to make the news. That being said, no CO that I knew wanted inmates to know where they live. I only know of one case of a prison officer taking an inmate to their own home, and that was rumored to have been for sex. That doesn't mean a thing didn't happen though. CO's and other prison folks are very insular, and don't usually discuss things outside their tribe (well, not current affairs anyway).
There is limited on-unit housing for officers, and inmates are responsible for maintenance of those.
It is not unheard of for inmate work-crew supervisors (officers) to buy their workers a hamburger or take-out meal; this is usually during or after a shift of unusual duration or a situation that deserves a little recognition.
There are special cases. My grandfather, a county sheriff, was granted custody of a TDCJ inmate by the director. The inmate worked as a porter in the county jail, and occasionally was my babysitter for short periods of time. This was in the '70's.
They aren't actually adding anything to your sentence, but are just taking away 'gain time' that has been earned for good behavior. You can accrue gain time and eventually earn early release. However, they can also take this away for bad behavior.
Obviously some sentences are not eligible to earn gain time.
It might be that your actual sentence is 10 years, but the state may expect to send you to prison for the first 5 and have you live on probation or parole restrictions for the last 5. So the judge might tell you to serve 8 years in prison. That gives the state some years of leeway to both add time to your prison sentence for being difficult and to knock some off for being cooperative.
No matter which way you slice it, the sentence is still 10 years, and the state can decide how much of that is spent in prison, and how much outside as a less-than-entirely-free person.
If you can manage to serve your entire sentence in prison without actually committing additional crimes, you might be able to walk out the front gates and never have a single day of probation, but I put the likelihood of that ever happening at just above infinitesimal. People in prison would mostly rather be outside and on parole/probation.
You only need a judge's help to keep someone in prison past the actual length of their sentence.
IANAL and IHNBAP, so I may be up to 100% wrong about this.
Prisons have a certain amount of gaintime (small reductions in sentencing) that's there to be withheld at the prison's discretion, specifically in order to motivate work and good behavior.
You can easily verify the existence of such conditions in the penal system without needing to know the specific facts of an individual person's situation.
Private prison contracts are structured to basically provide taxpayer-subsidized slave labor.[1][2] It is just another Reagan-Thatcher era privatization scam.
At some point blaming administrations 30 years ago for practices continued by subsequent administrations becomes deeply dishonest.
California for instance (referenced multiple times here) has had many governors since the Reagan days and could have ended the practice on a state level, and at a federal level the pendulum has swung to both sides on multiple occasions. Any of these administrations could have made it a priority, but did not.
I think I need to one up your boorishness. I don't think you are likely to break the law again right? That sounds like an effective correctional system. Sure it sucked. But jail/prison should suck.
Wow. Someone, whom you've never spoken to before, shares a personal story about their treatment in prison, and your reaction is "well you deserved it, treats you right". That's a fairly uncouth attitude to have towards one of your hacker peers.
Well no that's not my reaction. You shouldn't jump to conclusions that you want to exist. He had a bad time in jail. He is now unlikely to break the law again, right?
But maybe I'm wrong. Given his other comments it sounds like he's been in jail/prison more than once.
People are also unlikely to break the law again if they have an ok time in jail (it's never going to be good) while learning productive skills and being reintegrated into society without prejudice.
I wouldn't be glad someone had a bad time in their life.
Following that example, people would then break the law in a serious way every time they want to make a career change. Heck you get free training, room, and board! And a brand new set of skills and a job when you get out.
Some people need to have a bad time in order to get them to behave. If you know without a doubt, that breaking the law will lead to having a very bad time, you are going to avoid breaking the law. If you see it as a viable career move, wouldn't you be more likely than ever to break the law?
That sounds like a bit of straw man arg here. Jails shouldn't be a pleasant experiences doesn't meant implies that every experience in jail is okay or productive.It certainly doesn't justify us the tax payers subsiding slave wages...
> Some people need to have a bad time in order to get them to behave. If you know without a doubt, that breaking the law will lead to having a very bad time, you are going to avoid breaking the law. If you see it as a viable career move, wouldn't you be more likely than ever to break the law?
People probably need both, "proportionate" consequences to their action and mean and method to avoid the following the same path...
Prison should be run by the state to accomplish its aims (whether rehabilitative or retributive). Outsourcing it and attaching financial gain to it just encourages abuse.
Certainly they could have whipped him daily and that too would have discouraged future lawbreaking but at some point we have to ask "is this justice or abusive?"
That is arguably a violation of the 13th admentment:
>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.
Unless the work was part of the sentence (which I think is totally fair, as a term of restitution) I don't see how what they did was legal. You might want to talk to the ACLU.
>...Also, "The Thirteenth Amendment has also been interpreted to permit the government to require certain forms of public service, presumably extending to military service and jury duty.”
That’s a handy excuse to use to justify involuntary servitude. I guess they feel the part about "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,“ wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
"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."
Legally speaking seems like in the US that prisoners are slaves.
Arguably also very liberal biased (speaking as a liberal-leaning individual).
Much of this theory is based on The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander which first popularized the idea of how we utilized the prison system to intentionally discriminate and keep locked up (for free labor) the african-american populations.
There recently was a book discussing a different explanation. In this book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff, Pfaff argues it's the perverse incentives of prosecutors and judges that are pushing up the prison population.
I don't know enough to say which is true, just wanted to get awareness of the competing ideas on the topic.
But definitely there's some really perverse incentives to lock people up for free labor. And, as the documentary accurately points out, it's all built in to the Constitution.
Just because they're different doesn't mean they're incompatible. How do you think those perverse incentives came to exist in the first place? I'm amazed at the mental gymnastics some people will go through to avoid engaging with the fact that some other people are bigoted, selfish, and outright evil.
Nor does the existence of perverse incentives mean that those presented with them are helpless to do otherwise than go along with them. That is an abdication of moral responsibility. If you are presented with a perverse incentive that you feel is incompatible with your personal moral calculus, then it is your duty to reject it. To go along with it and then say you had no other choice is no different from the behavior of the 'good Germans' described by Hannah Arendt in The Banality of Evil. It's literally the exercise of privilege.
Liberalism only works so long as people are invested in the integrity of the institutions which underpin it. When those institutions are corrupted, liberalism becomes complicit in oppression. This is how democracies devolve into autocracies.
From my strict reading of the amendment, persons convicted of crimes are not automatically slaves, but could become such if the judge saw fit to include that in sentencing.
That's why the Hollywood version sometimes has the judge say, "I sentence you to ten years hard labor at Camp Rockcrusher." If they just said "ten years confinement in Oubliette Prison," then the prisoner would not be compelled to do anything against their will.
Instead, we oversentence criminals, and use the low-wage prison jobs as a carrot to reduce their prison time. You can work for peanuts and get out early, or you can serve your entire sentence.
The net effect is the same. The rent-seeking profit motive makes the criminal justice system more cruel and exploitative.
If hard labor is the punishment, and the punishment is commensurate with the crime, then no, it's not slavery. Slavery obtains under different conditions.
It is involuntary (all punishment is!), but it's not servitude in the same sense that slavery is. If you want to call that "slavery" nonetheless, that's up to you, but you'd be equivocating. There is a difference between slavery as an institution of unjust forced submission and "slavery" as just punishment for crimes committed.
The fundamental issue is that the majority (or the oligarchy) decide what is "wrong".
I seriously doubt (and see no evidence for the idea) that the US is so lawless that we can have almost a quarter of all prisoners in the entire world while only having a fraction of its population.
This speaks strongly to the idea that huge amounts of wrongful imprisonment occurs and (as a logical consequence) these people are slaves against their will without their having done anything worthy of punishment.
> There is a difference between slavery as an institution of unjust forced submission and "slavery" as just punishment for crimes committed.
The difference is solely the standing law. During the nazi regimen (godwin's law, but really) many of the appalling things they did were legal. It was legal to execute, and it was legal to do forced labor.
Slavery was always legal, that was the problem all along! A slave could not physically escape without the fear of unpunished retribution.
Slavery doesn't mean "unjust forced submission", it means "forced submission". There was slavery before 16th C Atlantic triangular slave trading, there's legal and illegal slavery, and maybe there's ethical slavery too (or maybe not).
Redefining the word so that prison slavery doesn't qualify seems obtuse, counterproductive, and doesn't even have the defense of being historical.
Profiting from uncompensated coerced labor walks and talks like the slavery duck. The 13th amendment talked about it because it was and still is slavery.
That really is simply disgusting. Keeping people imprisoned mainly so that they can be used as a source of cheap (borderline free) labour is pure exploitation. It really doesn't seem very many steps above slavery. I know that at least in theory people are in prison because they have done something wrong so that them working to in part pay for the cost of their incarceration seems justified but if they should be released but are only being kept as cheap labour then I think that that argument goes completely out the window.
I don't think it is any steps above slavery. In Norway, partly for this reason, prisoners have the legal right to choose education instead of work.
If part of their punishment is meant to be financial restitution, then I believe that should be spelled out in the judgement, and they should be paid market wages for whatever work they do, and that should be garnished accordingly and kept out of the prison system entirely so there is no profit motive to keep people in, and so that the amounts are transparent.
Hell, the European system (rehabilitative instead of punitive) works so well our prisons in The Netherlands are so empty Norway sends us some of their prisoners, presumably because you guys don't want to 'anticipate' by building more jails. We even used some jails as temporary refugee shelter (for those horrified: prisons in The Netherlands are a lot less stark than America).
It was somewhat amusing that one of the rented prisons is called Norgerhaven. Norge is the Norwegian name for Norway, and in old/conservative Norwegian, "have" is garden (in modern Norwegian it'd be "hage". In Norwegian it halfway sounds like someone who doesn't know Norwegian is trying to say "garden for Norwegians".
On a more serious note: The Norwegian prisoners in question actually have to volunteer, and the department of justice have made a "marketing" video to entice prisoners, which led to complaints from prisoners when it turned out they'd exaggerated a bit (some stuff was not ready when the first prisoners arrived).
Overall the attitude is very different to the US one.
> We even used some jails as temporary refugee shelter (for those horrified: prisons in The Netherlands are a lot less stark than America).
Same in Norway. Low security Norwegian prisons have fences no more than normal garden fences for example - they're there to show the prisoners how far they are allowed to go, not to physically stop them, as the type of prisoners sent to those places are more concerned about getting it over and done with than escaping. I think that is an essential element: To give people a chance wherever possible to show they can take responsibility.
More serious prisoners too can demonstrate they can be trusted and are serious about rehabilitation and get moved to prisoners without barriers that will actually hold them.
After all, if we can't trust them the day before their release, there's no reason why we should suddenly trust them the day after... I'm happy we let these prisoners gradually prove that they are likely to have reformed.
And the rehabilitation rates thankfully reflect that people respond to being treated humanely.
Maybe one day America gets over its mentality of vengeance.
Ever had a traffic ticket? Stolen something when you were young? Yes? Technically, you are a criminal then. You just didn't get caught or were a minor criminal, according to law.
Besides. Anyone in prison/jail is still human and I truly believe this gives you some rights, including the right not to be used as slave labor. After all, we've already taken away their freedom.
Traffic tickets are not crimes, they're not even misdemeanors. For example, the Virginia code says:
> "Traffic infraction" means a violation of law punishable as provided in § 46.2-113, which is neither a felony nor a misdemeanor.
§ 46.2-113:
> [ ... ] Unless otherwise stated, these violations shall constitute traffic infractions punishable by a fine of not more than that provided for a Class 4 misdemeanor under § 18.2-11.
Traffic tickets are crimes in some places. OCGA 40-6-1(a):
> unless otherwise declared in this chapter with respect to particular offenses, it is a misdemeanor for any person to do any act forbidden or fail to perform any act required in this chapter.
Slavery was the capturing of innocent human beings and then forcing them and their progeny to do labor in perpetuity. It was utterly dehumanizing and undeserved treatment. We do a disservice to the meaning of slavery in the USA by calling everything slavery: taxation, prison work, marriage, etc.
So other than the progeny part, how is prison labor not exactly what you said? People are literally captured, and based on overturned convictions at least some percentage are innocent. These people are then forced to work and can have their sentence extended arbitrarily by bureaucrats and not the court system. Based on the California example the system even tries to keep people working when given a court order to release people. The only thing preventing the in perpetuity part is basically the good graces of the bureacracy.
I do agree about the overuse of the term in other situations however
You're confusing things. There is a difference between forced hard labor as just (and thus commensurate) punishment for a crime and actual, particular abuses committed by the justice system. There is nothing wrong with forced hard labor as a punishment for a crime to the degree required by justice (and frankly, many crimes deserve far worse). There IS something wrong with inflicting pain on someone who is innocent, esp. when those inflicting the pain do so without authority, without sufficient justification or in excess.
In other words, you think there exist situations in which it is just to enslave people. You're trying to make a distinction that literally no one else makes because you want to separate forced labor as punishment for a crime from the connotations attached to the word slavery. It's just a sleight of hand.
As long as you allow that society has the right to force people to be locked up without their consent because they broke a law, I don't think it's a stretch to say that society has the right to force people to do work.
I don't see why that follows, considering they're two different things. In any case I do think prisons themselves are one of the blights of modern society.
While I'm not certain that society doesn't have the authority to force people to work (though, if it is ambiguous/uncertain, I would advise "don't", and I am not confident it does, so I advise "don't"), but I do agree that it doesn't really seem to follow, at least not without assuming some other premises.
If other entities were not profiting off of the labor I might agree that its a just punishment. However, if they are now cheap labor for companies, and can get extra punishments for not working, that is no longer a punishment in of itself. Its just slavery under the guise of justice
You've described chattel slavery, the most prominent form of slavery in USAmerican history, but not the only nor to my knowledge, most prominent form of slavery in world history.
Prison labor so sufficiently meets the definition of slavery that the authors of the 13th Amendment, ending chattel slavery, excluded prison labor as still allowed.
If you're a member of a society and you break the law, then you aren't innocent. If the laws of the society are unjust then that's a different argument entirely. Africans who were not even members of the American colonies were kidnapped and forced into labor. They were completely innocent but regarded as sub-human and not deserving of rights. To equate their plight with the plight of those who knowingly break the law in the USA and are forced to do labor is to demean the situation of Africans who were enslaved. IMO, that's not the argument we want to make regarding US prison problems.
Enforced prison labor is slavery
Then I guess we can't fine people either. People perform labor to make money. Fining people forces them to provide labor.
Enforced prison labor is just a fine to be paid through labor. Like any penalty, it can be punitive or it can be recompensatory. It is not "slavery".
A punishment in of itself is one thing, but these people are being forced to work for a third party(the other companies) at below minimum wage which is solely for the profit of the third party. Its not a punishment, the punishment is just whats used to keep these people in a situation where they are creating value for the company owners
Enslavement was always mostly done to prisoners. Being it military prisoners, caught fighting for the wrong side, or civilian prisoners caught disobeying some law, that could be just or not. Also, slavery wasn't always hereditary.
The point about the treatment being dehumanizing and undeserved is that this is a completely orthogonal issue. It mostly was, but then, most current prisoners aren't treated that well either.
Words can mean whatever the speaker and the listener agree upon. I'm not arguing with the dictionary definition.
I'm arguing that here in the US, which is a very relevant context for a HN discussion on US/CA prisons, the term slavery has special meaning and we shouldn't water it down by using it to describe every perceived slight.
Section 1. 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.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 13th amendment specifically calls it slavery and specifically allows that kind of slavery. The abolitionists who pushed through the 13th knew the meaning of slavery when it was more than a distant memory and still decided that it was the correct term.
How many laws on the books does the average citizen break every day? Are all crimes equal? If they are not equal, does every lawbreaker deserve to be painted with the same brush?
I would suggest this line of reasoning - "they are all criminals" - is not productive. We all are criminals. Should we all be treated as such?
It essentially is, by exception. The text of the Thriteenth Amendment states:
"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."
> 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.
The 13th amendment specifically permits "slavery" as a punishment for those convicted of a crime.
Is slavery enumerated as one of the punishments levied by the Court?
It is not. It may be allowed by the Constitution but it is a significant extra punishment levied on offenders that should be part of their actual punitive phase, if that is what society wants.
However, if criminal punishment actually scared people away from committing crimes, why are our incarceration rates are so high?
You'd think a country with mandatory minimum sentences and capital punishment to deter a lot of crime, but it appears it simply doesn't work. One theory I read (I can't find the source ATM) posited deterrence tends not work against people who tend to go to prison because people who go to prison statistically have a poorer sense of risk/reward.
So what do you do?
Personally, I think it depends on the type of crime. First, we need to recognize that some of our policies incentivize crime, especially the illicit drug market. People with a poor sense of risk/reward will naturally gravitate to this line of work because they probably respond a lot more to the reward than the risk.
There may be a population that is deterred by criminal punishments and one could argue it makes sense to keep criminal punishments to simply deter that population. I don't disagree with that, but I do think we really need to reassess whether criminal punishment is the universal deterrence some people make it out to be. Our best crime prevention policy may simply be removing or poisoning incentive.
>> but isn't it part of the purpose of criminal punishments to scare away people from committing crimes?
The premise: "Harsh punishments are scaring criminals from commiting crime" must be questioned. I highly doubt it is a valid premise. Just look at crime rates in regions where you have harsh criminal laws up to capital punishment. There is not even a correlation much less a causal relation between "Harsh on Crime" vs. "Low crime rate".
The working while in prison part or the not being released early part?
I personally don't mind inmates working while in prison. What I disagree with is the inmates not being allowed to be released early because the state wants them to keep working.
I don't think having to work while in prison is going to scare any would-be offender straight. And thinking about inmates not being released early is only going to piss off everyone.
Given recidivism rates, no. A week or a month might wake someone up. A few years is just going to get them comfortable, so figure out other ways to attempt to cure them of their desire to transgress.
Even those classes of people include people who don't deserve it, given the extent of crimes that fall under those labels. Consider a parent being charged with child abuse for letting their child play alone outside, much like parents of old. Or consider cases that fall right outside the limits of Romeo and Juliet clauses.
I don't think the comment meant "child [abusers or rapists]" but rather "[child abusers] or rapists". i.e. those who either are [abusers of children], or are [any kind of rapist].
"Keeping people imprisoned mainly so that they can be used as a source of cheap (borderline free) labour is pure exploitation"
California is well-known for this, and Riverside County is one of the primary counties responsible. When you walk into the courtroom, there's a sign that says "Attention CUSTOMERS" instead of "Attention Citizens." Lets you know right off the bat that these people are after nothing but money and should be charged under RICO statutes.
> It really doesn't seem very many steps above slavery.
If I ever go through that system there is no way in hell I am coming out of the prison "reformed". Today when I look at a young kid I feel compassion and I will help the kid in need. After coming out of an US Prison I am likely to see everyone else as "these people were responsible for putting me through hell". That lack of compassion is way more worse.
I am not surprised that so many people turn out to be repeat offenders.
Before there was strong for-profit bit in the mix (but it was always there) but the main idea was that rehabilitation is too complicated and doesn't work. Something to the effect of "Oh look we tried, half-hardheartedly, it failed, there is no point wasting time, these people never learn so just lock them up away from the society for as long as possible". That was always going hand in hand with tough-on-crime politics and a general sadistic undercurrent in the American culture that celebrates punishment for punishment's sake.
But once the for profit element was added into the mix there is an actual disincentive to rehabilitate people as it would mean a direct reduction in profits. So before it was bad but this is like adding some gasoline into the fire.
There was for example, the case of a judge in PA who had a deal with the local prison/juvenile center of sorts where he was sending teenagers in for minor infractions and was getting kickbacks.
Prison industrial complex also lobbies the government to keep the War on Drugs going because a reform there also would directly cut profits for them.
There even a whole ecosystem of predators exploiting every single angle possible to milk the prisoners and their families' money and labor. Down to telecom companies with ridiculously expensive charges when prisoners talk to their loved ones, to companies selling food (the commissary) and so on.
It surprises me that US government has not yet started harvesting organs of the prisoners. Why does someone who has been sentenced for 20 years in prison need his extra kidney for ?
> 30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit for these prisoners as it would draw down the labor force and lead to depletion of the firefighter force.
I guess if some of them die fighting fire we as a society are told to think "good riddance".
Lack of compassion for those wronged by the state is a Achilles heel of US civilization. It is going to cause a damage down further as people's respect for law erodes over time.
I can totally see them doing it. It would be the same as the GP described. It wouldn't be compulsory but those that don't agree get their good time reduced, get written up, marked for non-cooperation and so on. In other words there enough mechanisms for this to happen.
Any OSHA or safety regulations don't apply to inmate working conditions. They are literally beyond the reach of the protection of the government in the "workplace."
The cheapest kind of cheap is the one where you reap the benefits but make someone else pay the bill. And make that bill extra expensive, to add insult to injury.
Corruption 101 - As a government official, run an effective bu ineficcient operation, then position your friends and family to benefit indirectly from it: easy and secure jobs, contracts to provide supplies at overprice, real state appreciation, etc.
Let's call it what it is - slave labor. Text of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
"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."
I'd like to hope the US is just better at catching criminals than the rest of the world. Sadly these conflicts of interest make that the less likely explanation.
The commissary right for a prison should probably be a public auction, although that would put more money into the states coffers, not give much lower prices.
Well we have laws and plenty of dangerous people who belong in these prisons. Another thing to consider is other countries will execute their prisoners over drug dealing where we put them in prison. There is also the fact that we are the third most populated country and a melting pot combined with plenty of terrible neighborhoods of all ethnicity's.
European countries are often similarly diverse and don't have the same prison population. Also, when you are talking about numbers in percents of population the amount of executions to make a real difference in population would be staggering and border on genocide, which, outside of a few exceptions, isn't the case.
Actually, European countries are not nearly as diverse as the USA with the exception of the UK. The best analysis I can find on the subject is [1]. I disagree with the point I think chrshawkes is making but the diversity claim is valid.
I graduated college back when there were still a few summer jobs that earned enough to pay for the following 2 semesters of college. I was in the biological and chemistry sciences.
The CLA+ is the test discussed in the article which measures critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing. (thanks to jakob223 for the link) A sample "spreadsheets and news articles" example asked students to decide and backup your recommendation for a product campaign given numerous sources.
Looking back the biggest change in college was how fast I could absorb information and mentally outline a document's contents to come back to it. Critical thinking and analytical reasoning came from my background in computers and an amazing high school instructor. Is being faster the same as improving a skill?
The example mentioned above focused on the ability to interpret charts, tables, and graphs and write a plan of action based on and backed up by the information. Being able to work with numbers and charts usually ties into one's chosen area of study. Those who are not comfortable with numbers are not going to learn it in college because they're going to avoid exposure to it as much as possible.
Certain majors put an emphasis on critical thinking skills. If the school or the selection of seniors to sit for this exam represented this group it would definitely skew the results.
Things (I think) I did right:
Always take the majors intro course versus the general. It's better taught, not everyone is clueless, and you'll probably hate the subject less. Physics 213 E&M test Average: 43% Range - 23%-63% & an 84% "outlier" by me. Won't ever forget that one!
I took a 300 level History of the Civil War rather than Western Civ. Criminal Justice and Differential equations even though I didn't need either. There were a few others but it's been too long. This was before prices exploded so taking a course out of curiosity wasn't a major financial burden. I thought my Criminal Justice instructor in insufferable liberal at the time. Four years later in a completely different environment what he said was happening all around me day and night. Without it I would have no context and completely missed what was a prelude to current day Baltimore. I continuously learn more about the Civil War. One course and I've given tours to friends of Gettysburg, Antidem, Harper's Ferry, and the Bloody Angle. Seeing why things were done a certain way after reading about it in a book is a treat. Seeing the bend in the Missouri River at Vicksburg was amazing! Look up Grant landing south of Vicksburg.
What would I suggest taking? Never stop asking "Why?" Philosophy involves questions and critical thought and discussion to a rational argument to an answer or at least something close to it. In a society of systems for stamps of certification or education asking why is increasingly infrequent. TBTAW "Too Big to Ask(or Answer) Why?" There's an art to doing it so as to not offend or insult. Putting down the brush for a mallet does have a time and place. But it's not just asking the question, it's having a system to deduce an answer. When it comes to identifying stressors asking and then answering questions is part of the process. It's part of a process.
The real fun is when the compiler has no issues but things just are not working right. It's this type of situation "Stupid Computer Shit we all know" in these situations can ruffle-up classroom CS students. SCSWAK uses his skills to solve and try and add a bit or byte to the pile of shit.
Taking Calculus I in college most of the class had taken the course in high school. The most advanced math course in my HS had been Algebra II/advanced geometry. So they were ahead but it wasn't insurmountable, it was still math.
A classroom CS student trying to get an application to work asks a SCSWAK repository for assistance. One notepad app is suddenly 2 terminal windows with EMACKS? (at least it wasn't vim) on one and the other lots of lists go bye and quick commands are being entered while asking where the file is saved. "Nevermind, found it." The file contents show up but no editor was opened. Then there's all kinds of key combinations that no sense on the EMAKS just to move around! (add in more to the story).
One is still getting used to the operating system while the other has logged thousands of hours plugging away at the CLI. (Remember MUDS?) How the heck are the next 2.5-4 years going to be if the classroom CS couldn't follow anything he just saw?
Being around a bunch of SCSWAK who seem to naturally grasp everything can scare off students. IMHO the instructors for the low level CS courses should talk about this and get the classroom CS students to realize they can do just fine in the courses and SCSWAK are great resources if you can't find your answer on google. Also, the best way to actually learn something is to teach it. Thus, there's an opportunity for the SCSWAK group.
Don't forget a minimum of 3 years in residency making 30K-45K/year.
You're right about the AMA limiting the number of medical school students. DO schools are not regulated by the AMA. Unfortunately, there are not enough residency spots for all the DO and MD students that graduate each year and they compete with foreign students. Increasing the number, which the AMA is doing without increasing the residency programs is just going to leave more students with 100,000s of thousands of student loans and no income.
