The photo shows them walking in a line next to a guard that doesn't have to walk? I don't get it.
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.
Yes, but it's not nearly as big of a gap as the above comment suggests.
Being in prison sucks. If there's forced labor that approaches the same magnitude of unpleasantness, or even worse exceeds it, then that's a huge problem. But if it makes prison mildly worse than zero labor, that's not a tremendous issue.
> I think the sacrifice comparison wasn't to labor, but to the fact that capital punishment is still practiced in the US.
I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way, unless they rewrote part of it and totally messed up the phrasing.
Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
> I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way
? The comment literally says:
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
They're talking about the state putting people to death. Human sacrifice is when it was done to placate the gods. Modern day capital punishment is when the state puts people to death to placate the retributive demands of the people.
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
But read the two sentences before that. They're making a complete comparison without mentioning death penalties at all, and without any placeholders that could be filled in by a later sentence. The third sentence mentioning death penalties does not retroactively change what the first two sentences were talking about.
The comment very clearly says that slavery in the prison system is next to sacrifice, not just the death penalty.
If it wasn't supposed to say that, then the original commenter needs to come here and clarify.
> Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
So there's a much bigger and connected moral hazard, that the people that are paid to run prisons want there to be more inmates, whether or not they do any labor. That's especially bad when it's third party for-profit companies running things. And they'll use prison labor to make extra money on top of what they're already paid.
We should fight against that situation very strongly.
But if we have all the money controlled by the state, and the labor merely reduces the cost of keeping prisoners, then there's not a huge moral hazard to the criminal justice system.
If prisoners actually start making enough money to offset the entire cost of the prison system, then we should intervene. But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Read it in context again, it is commentary on the US prison system as a whole.
> But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
The critical sentence is "The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind."
I can see your argument that the thing being called barbaric is the prison system in general, but I'm still pretty sure the thing being called barbaric by that wording is specifically the slavery part.
> Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
That might be best but I'm not sure if it's obviously the best option.
The labor could actually make prison mildly less worse, as it breaks up the monotony of doing nothing. There is also often some comp, although way below minimum wage, and you can opt out (most don’t).
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.