>Forced labor is legal in the US in one case. Where’s the outrage?
That's like saying locking people in camps is legal in the US. Technical not a lie, but a bit misleading.
Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book. We can talk about safety conditions, perverse incentives, whether the trials were fair or the punishments were just, etc. But the fact that we make a murder work 8 hours a day isn't per se some human rights abuse, in my opinion.
> Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book.
97% of federal and 94% of state convictions are not convicted through a trial. They are convicted through plea deals. Plea deals function as the shadow justice system of the U.S. where prosecutors have overwhelming coercive advantages to shape the crime and punishment. They play judge and executioner.
Yes, that’s right, most accused do not “make a plea deal”. The prosecution offers the deal to avoid a labor intensive trial.
Also, prosecution is allowed to deceive (lie) to trick the accused to accept plea deals. There is no evidence burden once the accused pleas guilty. For example, the prosecutor can legally claim they have a mountain of evidence, and once the accused pleas, there’s no requirement for the “evidence” to be provided.
https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
Yea, they can refuse the offer. For an accused that cannot afford bail, they may have 2 options: take the plea deal and start serving the sentence right away, or refuse the deal and be incarcerated for an undetermined amount of time awaiting trial.
Either case, many accused faces incarceration whether they accept the deal or not.
>But the fact that we make a murder work 8 hours a day isn't per se some human rights abuse, in my opinion.
Eh, they don't do this with the actually dangerous criminals. Too much of a risk. Slavery usually used for nonviolent crims, think drug possession charges. Much easier captive population.
> Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book
Let’s see all of the things wrong packed in that statement:
1. Most people in jail aren’t “found guilty” of a crime by a trial at all. Most are pressured by both the DAs and the state funded Public defender to accept a plea deal. 95% take a plea deal.
It's not being used as a proportionate punishment. Many incarcerated people were never even proven to have committed a crime, and in some cases never even faced trial. There's also no small number of people who were imprisoned for a crime someone else committed thanks to misbehavior on the part of prosecutors, police, or dishonest "witnesses". Sometimes those people even get executed.
The murderer working 8 hours a day in a prison is an outlier. A huge percentage of the prison population are normal people like you or me put in a bad environment being abused inhumanely because people have decided that they deserve it for some reason.
Yes, refusal to work leads to more punishments that border on human rights violations.
> they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.
I think that a lot of people skip over the "except as a punishment for crime" part in the 13th amendment. I know I did for a long time until I saw a show where the prison warden was explaining it:
> 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.
Privatized incarceration facilities with incentives to keep people locked up, and influencing the CJ system to maintain profits is also an issue. There are numerous cases of businesses doing shady things to pocket more money.
It is possible to be outraged by all these things at the same time. No one has to pick between different types of exploitation and only be mad at one thing.
I agree in principle. However, as a piece of empirical evidence, you can peruse the comments in this HN post. Compare comments that express outrage for child labor and outrage for forced prison labor. Some HN readers are clearly picking to not be outraged at the latter.
I am a free market lover, and I absolutely reject the idea of forced, low or no pay prison labor
I think all prisoners who voluntarily choose to work should be paid a market wage for their labor. I also think some of that wage should be used as compensation to the victims of their crimes.
> Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers.
> After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated.
> Meghen Yeadon, a recruiter for Stoughton, found part of the solution: a Wisconsin Department of Corrections work-release program for minimum-security inmates.
> Work-release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison.
While those programs are easy to abuse, it is very important that someone released from prison has a path to an honest life. Few places will hire felons, so dumping someone on the street with no job ensures they turn to crime, it is the only way they can get food. If they have a job though you can arrange an apartment and other than a new place to sleep things seem normal and so they have a chance.
I will have to agree with the other commenter. While the natural response is to try ad protect the privacy of the accused or even the convicted by sealing the records, history is full of proof that governments that can act in secret rarely works out well for the people under the thumb of those governments.
Secret Police records, generally result in a system where people just "disappear". So while there are good intentions to sealing police records, the result of those good intentions would likely result in extreme abuse of power
I think the better course of action would be a path to have convictions expunged, and once expunged allowing for civil defamation against any entity or person that reports the individual was convicted once the record was expunged.
The time it takes to expunge a record should be determined by the courts with a max time set in statute
Fair competition is the ideal state for a market to be in, but a free market is about unrestricted competition and that can easily turn into monopolies or cabals.
Ok then, highlight all the times where a market has resulted in a monopoly with out underling government regulations limiting the ability of new entrants to the market.
That was the obvious rebuttable, and to be honest I have a hard time countering that however the obvious statement is search really a market since it is a "free" product. One has to ask what is the actual market, is it the search engine or the advertising that pays for the search? Google while dominate is not a monopoly for Online Ads, so while they command a 90-95% market share in "online searches" that is not the product they sell so traditional market dynamics are not at play so I am hard pressed to call online search a "free market" given nothing it being sold, what is being sold is the ad space on google search.
It's the very definition of a free market concept. The price the market determines for something is the fair price, to charge more or less would be unfair to someone else
You know this was common in the States too until very recently, right? That's the origin of summer break in schools. I'm guessing there are plenty of places today that will absolutely close school to support agriculture both in the States and many capitalist countries.
Source: I spend a lot of time on wheat, barley, and lentil farms in the US.
I’m saying I’m fine with forced labor being part of the consequences.
Like if you steal a car, six months working a shitty job while locked in prison seems appropriate. The money shouldn’t go to you, it should go to defer the cost of catching, prosecuting, and housing you.
We even have “community service” which is literally forced labor for zero compensation, are people unhappy with that?
Community service typically doesn't also come with loss of liberty. As someone who has been sentenced to community service but got to stay out of incarceration because of a stupid teenager move, it's effectively a different punishment.
I think charging the same rate for labor makes sense so it’s not anti competitive business. But why should the prisoners pocket all the money when our tax dollars are housing them?
Prisoners did not choose to go to prison, therefore we can't ask them to pay for the costs of putting them in prison. Society decides that it is best to lock some people up; therefore it's also the society that should to pay the cost of keeping them locked up.
Prisons are expensive, which is one reason why we should really only lock up people when there is no other way. If someone is not a danger to society, we shouldn't lock them up.
Um, you make it sound like prisoners are just helpless beings that have no agency and are fully passively pushed into a situation. Society didn't ask the prisoners to commit crimes either, but they (mostly) did anyway. Society has no choice but to impose a very unproductive form of punishment, and needs to find a way to get something out of it.
The main reason to be against prison labor is that it creates perverse incentives to not rehabilitate prisoners (even though participation in labor may help with the rehabilitation process). There's also a risk that cheap prison labor undercuts legitimate businesses. Prisoners also can't be entrusted with anything outside menial and low-impact labor, and as a result the amount of productivity they can offer is really limited.
But requiring prisoners to work partially for their own food and shelter in itself shouldn't be that controversial, especially when they are convicted of serious crime.
Incarceration is not necessarily effective but what alternative can you propose, as a scalable form of punishment? How do you define "totally rubbish"?
We could start by not prosecuting done crimes. Why do you go to jail for possessing marijuana, prostitution, crossed a border without permission, or because you are awaiting trial? (Which is why most people are in jail.)
We start by taking these hundreds of thousands of people who really shouldn't be in jail or prison at all and ask, "what programs would help them from not doing this again? What's the root cause we can address?" And we start implementing social programs that will help support, educate, and reform folks.
Some combination of:
1) Remove a lot of drug crimes from the books and clear convictions. Many of these shouldn't be punishable at all.
2) invest in housing, food, and mental health support to catch folks before they turn to low level theft. Give them to people convicted as well. If you change their situations, many will never need to commit crimes again.
3) Levy fines, garnish wages while providing support. Restrict movement if needed by requiring folks stay in contact with a parole officer or mental health support professional.
Etc
Most "criminals" are folks who are in positions where we left them few choices as a society.
Most of what you're saying is that we should select prisoners better and avoid creating more criminals as a society. The principle I agree. However this part is completely non-sequitur, as the point of contention is whether there's something better than prison to deal with after-the-fact criminals. The only alternative you give is a very soft form of restricting movement, which is devoid of reality for many forms of crime from petty theft and embezzlement to rape and murder.
So which society are you living in? Every statistic shows that minorities get much harsher sentences, are represented by an underfunded public defenders office, are coerced to plea bargain (95%) are harassed more by police etc. The entire criminal Justice system is corrupt to the core.
Let’s not even talk about the “War on drugs” that becomes “treat drug abuse as a medical condition” when it happens in “rural communities”
Inmates are one of the largest workforce of CalFire when they need to deal with large forest fires. I don’t CalFire would be able to scale up to the task if they didn’t have this resource. Allegedly it is volunteer-based and you need to meet certain requirements and take training to participate. I’d say this kind of work is above low-impact.
This is great though ironically one of the less humane ways to utilize prison labor. To be entrusted with work like that you'd have to have a decent record for a criminal, for example serving for a less serious crime or have made good progress in rehabilitation. But the work is more grueling and dangerous than most other kinds of prison labor.
I see your point. Seems pretty subjective either way. For example, “I didn’t choose for my car to be towed so the cost should be paid by the tower.”
But to some extent maybe it’s moot because most prisoners would never be able to cover the full cost of their stay. I wonder though if there was a sort of coding-bootcamp-like profit sharing model with inmates where the gov tried to maximize their economic productivity they might end up getting trained for better and more humane jobs, trades, nursing, coding, winwin.
Sure, as long as it’s a reasonable rate for what they’re getting. I wouldn’t pay more than $300/mo to live in a tiny concrete room with shitty cafeteria food and no visitors. Maybe less.
If you're incarcerated, you've forfeited a lot of other rights too. That's by design, and I happen to have the "extreme" opinion that incarceration should be punishment[1] rather than a cushy lifestyle. I 100% support forced labor (not cruel treatment or abuse) of the incarcerated.
[1] To clarify: there should be an element of punishment (in the form of forgone rights), but there's obviously more to it.
I would generally agree. Just as some people characterize prison labor as "slavery", with all of the connotations that word holds when unqualified, I have also seen incarceration described as "kidnapping". Rather than get bogged down in the minutia of arguing about words I'd simply posit that there are moral forms of "kidnapping" and "slavery".
Locking a murderer in a jail cell is moral, I also see no issue requiring them to work.
Where I do see a massive issue is when incarceration is used by private corporations to enrich themselves rather than enriching the public or individuals whose harm is what caused the incarceration in the first place.
I don't in principle oppose private prisons, though I am wary of them in practice. I think there could exist a model where private prisons would be rewarded based on recitivism, but unfortunately such a system would be hard to create for a variety of practical considerations.
In other times it was said that a woman takes away a job a man might to, or a black man the job a white. You may want to google the "lump of labor fallacy".
Well I might be out of the loop but wasn’t “punishment” proven to be ineffective in preventing (or correcting) unwanted behavior.
No matter how harsh is the punishment there appears to always be crime. What seems to work is rehabilitation as well as inevitability of capture.
So even if it sounds unjust to try to help offenders (even murderers) If we want them to not offend and not murder _more_ we need norway style prisons rather than US ones.
Regardless of what’s effective and what is just though, having prison companies benefit from forced labor is just all ways of crazy regarding incentives and screws the market soo much, normal people now need to compete against slaves, the state / companies now have incentives to there to be _more_ prisoners which would lead to actually _more_ crime in and off itself.
And to top it off, you have big entities that can lobby (bribe) the government to change laws to the detriment of society at large. It just sooo messed up.
And its not some crazy tinfoil hat thing - we can see that “experiment” play out before our eyes - the US penal system is so proven to be so ineffective its silly.
Believe it or not, a huge number of incarcerated people would rather work (without pay) than sit around doing nothing. For the few that don't, you can certainly incentivize it without resorting to torture.
And in fact, one of the common punishments available to prison staff is to bar the prisoner from working if they are getting in fights, etc.
The prisoners wouldn’t mind working for more pay, but most of them do like it considering the options.
Another part is just accounting - if the federal government paid its employees tax free (no fed income tax) it would work out the same (salaries would drop) but the accounting would be different and people would complain.
But why not pay them? Perhaps you cannot pay market wages without a being a competitive capitalist enterprise, but surely there is a point where access to subsidized labor allows you to break even, paying them, say $3 or $5 an hour.
And perhaps you cannot pay them in cash, but why not invest the money for the duration of their incarceration, or pay a stipend to some dependent on the outside, like a wife/child? A $10k/year rate of savings is above what many people achieve outside, and a massive boost to get one's life in order once they get out.
Is it torture when you force kids to do their chores? Surely there are ways. But regardless don’t a lot of inmates volunteer for work? How much is forced?
Your supposedly “extreme” opinion sounds like a very mainstream American opinion. If you’re implying that many people really think your opinion is extreme, I think you’re making a straw man argument.
Unless you’re handing out life sentences for every little crime, the point of incarceration must be rehabilitation. If you fail in that goal, then you’re just putting the burden on future society, when they get back out in some years. Part of rehabilitation might include punishment, but when you start with that, rather than rehabilitation, you’ve already screwed up your national moral compass.
Probably the best way to get a prisoner ready for life after prison is to let them work, pay them a normal salary, and let them put it in a savings account.
That way they have enough money for a deposit to rent a place to live and can cover their expenses for some time until they find a job.
If you force them to work, and don't give them money, then they have no way to start a normal life after prison, will depend on money from the government in the best case, and get back to crime in the worst case.
We need to treat prisoners well. Not just because it's the morally right thing to do, but also because it's the best thing we can do if we want a society with low crime rates, where you can walk through the city at night without being scared that an ex-convict mugs you because they don't have any other options.
You can debate the relative merits of each, but rehabilitation is not the only possible goal. If you lock up a repeat violent offender for X years without rehabilitation, the other factors are still relevant.
> Unless you’re handing out life sentences for every little crime, the point of incarceration must be rehabilitation
I would take issue with the usage of the words "the point". There can in fact be multiple ends or goals of incarceration. Whether you think retributive justice or rehabilitation should be primary or secondary would be up for debate, but I primarily mean to say that you don't necessarily have to pick one or the other in the grand scheme of things (I'd say you'd also have a sliding scale of which is more important).
Working without monetary compensation is the punishment part. But work itself is rehabilitating. I can't think of a better way to help people feel empowered and able, preparing them to be positive members of society when they're released.
Like many things, there's substantial evidence on both sides of the argument. The devil is usually in the details, and this is a case where success or failure seems to be greatly affected by the quality of the programs themselves and the people who administer them.
