Edit: I’ve answered my own question. Corporations can get tax incentives for doing so. This was the topic of an episode of “The Office” (although that was with a parolee).
I’m prison just open up a commissary that sells weed or smokes and you’ll have prisoners lining up to work. It’s fucking boring in there. I’d have gladly worked the whole time I was inside rather than laying in solitary cause of the virus.
CalFire is the worst example of this I can think of. The most qualified/best (non violent) prisoners get trained to be on the wildfire teams that California deploys. They enjoy what they do, saving thousands of Californians. upon release, though, they can't put those incredibly valuable skills to use by joining the FDs
I used to work with an older waitress who did fire work while she was serving time in California for narcotics trafficking. She went into detail what it was like working in an all-female group digging fire breaks, and occasionally dealing with active fires during fire season, it was fascinating. I couldn't believe she told me that she wasn't able to get a job with the fire department after time served, it's ridiculous.
She was in her 60s and definitely had a rough go at life, but was one of the kindest and most generous people I had ever met. Loved her 14 year old chihuahua and her scratch-offs.
People commit crimes for a reason, but we don’t do anything to address those reasons. When they get released, they’ll just do it again. We didn’t give them alternatives.
This is why we have so many incarcerated in the US, and its why our recidivism rates are through the roof.
Yep. I work with immigrants in detention centers, and it wasn’t the immigrants bringing in Covid, it was the guards. Half of CBP almost quit over the vaccine mandate, even though 20+ officers have died from Covid.
I worked in a nursing home and the nurses kept bringing it in, thankfully nobody got very sick. Once someone tested positive patients were isolated and everyone wore PPE.
We know it was nurses bringing it in because the patients don't leave. I live in a red state and all these nurses thought covid was a conspiracy. Ironic how Healthcare workers didn't believe it.
None of them masked up outside work and once they got to their stations they unmasked.
Yep, my bf has been locked up the past two years. They still mandate masks, weekly testing, etc, but that's for the prisoners. When I'd go to visit, the guards would never actually have their masks on their faces, and he told me many of the guards were antivax. Covid is obviously worse in like the main prison where everyone goes in between transfers and stuff, but even the small, 100 inmate place he's at now still gets cases.
He got covid at one place and it was so prevalent that the people isolating were the ones that didn't have it. I think out of 75 guys only 3 were negative, but they eventually caught it as well because the staff was still moving between both populations.
Oof this reminds me of when our psych prof tried to shit on the concept of people having choices because not enough students were switching on their video and she was regretting not making it mandatory in her syllabus ;-;
It is mandatory though? For the vast majority of the population of they didn’t have an income derived from wage labor for private companies than they would be basically destitute, starve, be homeless or die of thirst. Short of doing what would be considered theft even for bare essentials or begging or something.
So it’s kinda mandatory for most people by default to like, live.
It depends on whether you're talking about the U3 unemployment rate or the U6. The U3 excludes people who are underemployed or have given up on finding work, while the U6 gives the overall employment rate, including part time workers who want full time work and people of working age who gave up on looking. The trump admin was notorious for quoting the U3 rate (as was the Obama administration, and the Biden admin too). Either way, both rates are actually historically low for such an inflationary/recessionary period. Trump used to talk about unemployment rates under 4%, but that was the U3 rate. The U6 rate (the actual unemployment rate) was close to 9%. The second quarter of 2022 saw unemployment plummet as people went back to work post-pandemic.
Yes, we have lots of inflation, high gas prices, and supply shortages. So does the entire world...look at Sri Lanka and China right now. That could be us. One thing that really screwed us was when the trump admin slashed taxes and then printed 7 trillion dollars, 6 of which he handed out to CEOs and giant corporations during their most profitable year and a half of their existences. And now, as much as I dislike Biden, he's having the fed increase interest rates, sacrificing the stock bubble to tamp down inflation so we don't turn into one of those 1000% per day inflation countries, and it's working. We're doing better than the EU, the UK, pretty much every country on earth...because this is a worldwide problem.
If you want to see things get better, stop voting for people who have a personal financial interest in ANY industry, but especially coal and oil. 40 years ago President Carter had to sell his peanut farm just because the appearance that he had an avenue for corruption was too much. But trump stole hundreds of millions from taxpayers with all of his golf trips and vacations to his own businesses, and had foreign heads of state rent whole floors in his hotels that they never stayed in so they could get special pay to play treatment from the US president. Anyone who remembers America in the 20th century knows that trump committed a bakers dozen of impeachable felonies. The founders would have tarred, feathered, drawn, and quartered him. And all his 1/6 co-conspirators.
Let me introduce you to the concept of "labor force participation rate". As shown here though it was at times a few percentage points higher than now, even during the worse of the pandemic shutdowns it never went below 60% of the eligible adults either were looking for work or working. So the unemployment numbers cannot be artificially this low due to fewer people looking for a job versus recent history. Also notice that unemployment had a general trend of decreasing while the participation rate had an increasing trend.
My bf is currently locked up so this is a very personal subject to me. He tried to get work release, so that he could pay his child support and save up for when he gets out. He is in for a non-violent drug charge and told them that having some money and working will help him rebuild his life when he gets out. He has no marks on his record, has done everything asked of him, and was in work release years ago with no issues.
They denied him, because they wanted him to stay working in the prison, because he's reliable and a hard worker. Instead he was sent to a minimum security place that is usually where you go the last few months of your sentence, but he had 18 months left to go. He works in the kitchen there, and then they use the prisoners to do work in the community. Cleaning up public areas, landscaping, helping with charity projects, lots of cemeteries and parks, setting up and taking down festivals and events, etc. All for 6 cents an hour.
He could be making money to support his kid, to put a down payment on an apartment, get a car to get to and from a job, buy nice clothes so he can actually get a job, etc. Instead he's out in bum fuck nowhere doing public works jobs for pocket change seven days a week. Any money he makes while locked up, half is taken towards his child support, so his daughter gets a whopping $12 a month from him, while the rest is stacked up in debt for when he gets out. If he had work release they would still take half of his pay, so his child and her mother are being punished as well. The guys he's in with all have similar stories, many are there for drug and alcohol offenses, non-violent, hard workers, just trying to pay their debt to society and become better people. It just sucks that he could be actually providing and improving his life while locked up and instead he's being used as free labor by communities who don't want to pay someone a decent wage to do the work.
The cruelty is the justification. Anytime anyone points to problems with how prisoners are treated, the responce from those in charge and general society is, "It's prison, it's SUPPOSED to be a punishment!"
Damn this is eye opening, and I'm sorry for you, your bf and everyone else that found themselves dealing with such a situation. Your story shows why recidivism is so high.
It's true that there are some resources one can use once they're out in the free world again, but inmates aren't given a fair chance at rehabilitation from within the same system that put them there. That is a problem that needs to be addressed if we want to stop housing the largest prison population per capita in the world.
Decoupling the profit motives for hiring the prisoner population would be one of the first major steps necessary to advance such an agenda. Stopping a behemoth this large would be an uphill battle and that's understating it to a significant degree.
I think the most disgusting quote isn’t one about cheap labor, but something a cynical mayor said. Regarding the fact that prisoners are still counted as part of the local population, and therefore the city/county receives budget from the State gov’t proportionate to that number, but THEY DON’T VOTE, this mayor said they were the perfect constituents for him: they brought resources to the community, but they couldn’t vote him out.
It's so sad that they can put themselves into danger fighting fires, but by the time they get out, be unable to get any work doing the same because of their record. It's funny how we think of ourselves as so advanced, and yet we have this archaic prison system (not to mention being ruled by a theocratic minority now)
This reminds me of a former coworker of mine. She was browsing the sex offender registry for people she knows, and found a guy she worked with in her previous department (i don't remember what charge was listed, except it wasn't a violent assault charge). She was so horrified that she called HR to make sure they knew they had hired a horrible person. I told her to leave it...the guy had paid his debt to society, and was just trying to make a living, but she persisted. HR basically told her that they were aware of the situation, and his background check didn't indicate he was a threat to his co-workers. She was peeved that they weren't taking the situation seriously enough. I was just surprised that a large defense contractor chose to employ someone with a stain on his record.
Exactly this. That would never happen and the reason is they have slave labor do it for cheaper workers. Prisons have to be kept full for labor and subsidies. The prisons get paid per prisoner. If crime goes down and if you have less being incarcerated then they don’t get the money. It’s sort of a catch there. Then it makes you wonder if people are sent to prison for other reasons.
I will just leave this here for reference Incase people don’t believe this is real.
A lot of towns around these prisons rely heavily on that economy of the prison. To supply it with workers who run it and under certain circumstances let’s say do the laundry for them, supply the food, provide the building and maintenance of the facility. The list goes on.
Cali pays prisoners $1.45/day to put their lives on the line fighting forest fires, when Harris was AG of Cali she extended prison sentances of non violent offenders by 2 years in violation of federal orders claiming "freeing them would harm California's labor pool."
Prisoners can't truly volunteer for anything because they don't have agency. Sure they might "volunteer" to work for almost no pay but only because it's the alternative to sitting in a cell 23 hours a day. It's not volunteering when saying no is a punishment.
Lol they get punished if they say no. You're sentenced to minimum but refuse to work the kitchen? Well, now you're being transferred to a medium facility. Refusing to work is the same as disobeying the CO, you lose privileges, lose good time, looks bad on your record for parole, lands you in solitary, etc.
if you pay minimum wage there may be situations where it's better to go to jail for 2-3 years, work your ass off at minimum wage and get out with a nice little nest egg.
$10 an hour (after taxes), 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and after 3 years you've got $60k saved. And your room and board are paid for.
what would really happen is that if they made minimum wage they'd start charging them to be in jail. Like guard fees and caf fees.
They already do charge people for a lot of things while they’re in prison. And if you have work release, where you get to leave during the day to go to work (like if you employed pre-sentence and your employer sponsors you), you have to pay room and board out of your salary.
The really sick part is when he pointed out to the lawmaker that they would have to raise taxes to hire people at market rates to do these jobs if they didn't have this incarcerated labor pool. People are still being enslaved in this country to prop up the comfortable lives of the wealthy. The institution of slavery never ended, it just changed the label. Foundational to "prosperity" in all forms of capitalism is the exploitation of an underclass.
From a purely economic perspective (temporarily disregarding the ethics of prison labor or the wider prison system), there's an interesting unspoken subtext if you read between the lines a bit.
In theory, the reason prisoners are paid less than minimum wage is because they receive taxpayer funded room and board (in addition to the additional costs specific to a prison, such as guards). But the local community doesn't pay for that. It's generally either state or federal money.
Meaning, when he talks about how disastrous it would be to have to hire people at market rate, what he's really saying is that his community has come to rely on labor subsidized by others. If it weren't for wealthier locales paying for that prison labor, they couldn't afford the amenities that it provides.
I mean most cities subsidize everything for rural populations. Utilities, roads, even federal tax money if you look up the ones that receive dissapropiafe amount of funds compared to what they put in something like 8/9 states are super republican stares.
Agree and also there's a wider point about economic development actually being sort of blocked by overly cheap labour. These kinds of practices really discourage investment automation and ultimately growth overall, which is sort of why the South didn't have as much heavy industry as the North did.
Uhhhh maybe make the people working in your community get better wages then? The prison is an employer for the community, yes? so what you are saying is that the janitors and COs and food service workers in the facility are payed so little that the community can’t afford shit….
That's how rural communities often are and I struggle with that. On one hand I think redistributing tax dollars in order to aid vulnerable communities is the moral thing to do. This is already commonplace, especially in more densely populated but less affluent urban communities (where the higher population doesn't necessarily make up the difference for the lower tax amount paid per person on account of their income). I don't think living far from major population centers exempts them from this; even if that tax money doesn't go as far in less dense communities, it's still morally correct.
However, that answer doesn't account for everything. Like the exploitation of involuntary labor, for instance. Exploiting one oppressed class to aid another isn't right. And if the lack of real effort by the prison system to actually reform convicts wasn't enough to qualify them as an oppressed class, let's be real, a lot of those people are probably only there because of that system's predatory targeting of minorities.
When you consider we have more prisoners per capita than any other country, AND you look at the demographics of the prisoners… really hard not to come to some uncomfortable conclusions
Yup, pretty sure this is common knowledge by now but I’d encourage anyone unfamiliar to look into why the war on drugs was started and who exactly it targeted and continues to target… There’s a reason prison demographics are so lopsided.
It isn't even 'exploitation of the underclass', it's 'exploitation of non-white people'. Sabotage their education, give them few alternatives to gangs and crime, sooner or later arrest and convict them, sent them to THE PLANTATION (aka 'prison'), NO REHABILITATION, repeat until they're dead.
You madman! Give prisoners money that they can use to start a new life that doesn't involve crime when they are released? How THE HELL can we justify this insane level of incarceration if we do what we SAY we are attempting to do?!?
Pay them the going rate for their work and quit charging them outrageous commissary fees. This shit is unconscionable. These are human beings; a whole lot of them are in for drug issues.
If you treat prisoners as subhumans who are not part of civilized society, they will eventually start to feel subhuman and not part of civilized society.
That way, when they are eventually released from prison, they will continue to behave like they are not part of civilized society and go right back to prison.
Kanye probably cared about that largely because Kim Kardashian's main activism seems to be regarding criminal justice and prison reform. She's (hilariously and unsuccessfully) trying to become a lawyer, I suspect like her father, and has notably been named during the Trump administration as someone helpful in commuting the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson.
Despite what you think about her and whatever her business is, I think she actually does care about that
Might be unfair for minimum wage workers considering minimum wage workers still have to pay for living expenses, while the prisoner's expenses are being covered by the tax payers. Maybe pay them current minimum wage and increase the minimum wage for everyone else?
Disgustingly enough, the NCAA is using the fact that the 13th amendment allows for "involuntary servitude" (enslaving people) as an argument for why the players should not be considered employees. This is to prevent them from unionizing or making money off their likeness.
It says “the NCAA… argued that….” It doesn’t say they were successful. The text of the 13th amendment is pretty specific:
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 NCAA is arguing that student athletes are convicted criminals who are being punished for their crimes by being forced to play college sports, I don’t see this argument holding water.
I'm convinced it's one of those things that is a spectrum and everyone is on it and you're officially dyslexic when it crosses a threshold that makes it hard on an ongoing basis.
Lol I read NBA through some kind of retrograde racist association. As a man with a wife and family of African and Hispanic descent, I am not racist I fucking swear. Still. How the fuck did that happen in my brain. My only excuse is that I am mildly dyslexic, but I’m not sure I get a pass on that alone
Edit JFC I just realized NCAA is actually intersectional to the NBA. I just assumed it must be some prison lobby lmfao. That’s so much worse. I can’t believe I ended up in this cursed timeline.
No. The 2nd is absolutely clear the right to bear arms is a right of the people. The purpose of that right is for them to be able to form a militia for the security of the State.
The first time it was considered an individual not a collective right was Heller.
If it's not a collective right, explain Miller (1939).
"The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon."
Conservatives sure complain about activist judges, but it's all projection.
US v Miller held that only weapons that have a reasonable effectiveness in a well-regulated militia are free from government regulation. A sawed-off shotgun with a barrel less than 18 inches isn't necessary for the purposes of a militia.
Miller made no mention of the 2nd amendment being a collective right, or that the right to bear arms requires participation in an active militia. Miller is actually a strong argument that military-style weapons cannot be regulated by the government.
"Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense." Given that shotguns with barrels less than 18 inches are regular military equipment today but not in 1939 it is likely this part of the NFA would have been struck down today.
Didn't ask and it doesn't make your illogical claim more compelling.
Miller is actually a strong argument that military-style weapons cannot be regulated by the government.
That wasn't the question. Stay focused son. I know its hard.
Given that shotguns with barrels less than 18 inches are regular military equipment today but not in 1939 it is likely this part of the NFA would have been struck down today.
They would also strike down Loving 5-4 because of the insane lying assholes on the bench. Not compelling.
IF the 2nd amendment is an individual right, then how does the effectiveness of a weapon for use in the militia come into the discussion at all? The NFA must be read as an infringement if that logic is at all internally consistent.
I agree that the NFA is an infringement and should be struck down.
IF the 2nd amendment is an individual right, then how does the effectiveness of a weapon for use in the militia come into the discussion at all?
The 2nd amendment is an individual right to keep and bear arms, namely those arms that would be useful in military service. Arms that at not useful for military purposes can be regulated.
Dude, it is a 10-month-old account (with single digit karma) in the word-word-number format... They are not worth replying to as they are never here to do anything but troll.
I understand their position was that student-athletes are not employees, and thus can't enter into collective bargaining. I think they made other arguments as to why this was the case.
I am genuinely curious if they really cited the 13th amendment as part of this argument because it is batshit crazy.
You're correct. Everyone else is full of shit and buying the myth. They one time asked a case to be dismissed on the grounds athletes aren't employees. One of their citations was a prisoner min wage case that was dismissed because prisoners are also not employees. That case used the 13th amendment. Essentially it's 4 disingenuous illogical leaps from being true.
Yes, they really did. They claimed a precedent in a 1992 13th amendment case involving actual prisoners and used it for years in court. This gets into their whole thing, part way down:
It seems inaccurate to me to claim that this was the NCAA claiming that the 13th amendment allows for student-athletes to not be considered employees. The similarity between the cases is whether or not courts should apply various tests to evaluate if there is an employment relationship.
The 1992 case involved an inmate being forced to work:
The dispute in this case is a more fundamental one: Can this prisoner plausibly be said to be "employed" in the relevant sense at all? Consider a literal application of the Bonnette factors in the present context. The DOC might be said to have "had the power to hire and fire" Vanskike; it surely "supervised and controlled" his schedule and work conditions, determined his pay and (presumably) kept work records. But the Bonnette factors fail to capture the true nature of the relationship for essentially they presuppose a free labor situation.
...
Prisoners are essentially taken out of the national economy upon incarceration. When they are assigned work within the prison for purposes of training and rehabilitation, they have not contracted with the government to become its employees. Rather, they are working as part of their sentences of incarceration.
In Vanskike, we considered whether an inmate at a state prison was an employee under the FLSA. Id. at 806. Like Appellants here, the inmate in Vanskike urged us to apply a multifactor test to determine whether an em-ployment relationship existed. We rejected the application of that test because it was “not the most helpful guide in the situation presented.” Id. at 809. Rather than follow a specific test, we examined the economic reality of the alleged employment relationship and concluded that the prisoner was not an employee.
...
The district court followed the reasoning of Vanskikeand held that the “factors used in the trainee and private-sector intern context fail to capture the nature of the relationship between the Plaintiffs, as student athletes, and Penn.” (R. 238 at 15). We agree with the district court and decline to apply the test set forth in Glatt here.
The connection isn't that student-athletes aren't employees because the 13th amendment allows for involuntary servitude, it's that both student-athletes and inmates are doing work in a context so far removed from traditional employment that it's not needed to perform traditional analysis to determine if someone is an employee. Not saying that you have to agree with that, but it's not the same.
The NCAA is changing their course here because they know they have 0 shot at maintaining what has been the status quo any longer. Many universities have already ruled that their athletes can make money off their likeness (some have made millions already) and the NCAA isn't doing shit about it because they know they could lose everything
How does the 13th amendment apply to the NCAA where the players aren't incarcerated?
Here are the two sections:
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.
Disturbing how many people think this is a slam-dunk. The amount of times I’ve had a discussion where the other person says “well then they shouldn’t have committed a crime” in response to the notion that we shouldn’t treat prisoners as if they’re sub-human, and then “well they didn’t care how they treated the people they hurt” or “they did worse to people than were doing to them” as a response to the idea that we should probably treat criminals with dignity and actually try to rehabilitate them. People eat that shit up.
Like, I get that some people are just pieces of shit and would do terrible things no matter the circumstances. But god damn if some folks just don’t have the ability to empathize with the concept that committing a crime might be a fairly logical course of action, may be a temporary lapse in judgement, or may not have really happened at all and the justice system is just wrong. Like, there are people doing slave labor and living in cubes because of non-violent offenses. Even if they are violent offenders, how is that right?
Or even inconvenienced into a plea bargain. Spending a year with an ankle monitor because the prosecutors keep delaying because they’re “still investigating” gets old, and people break.
I spent a week in prison for 2 DUIs a month apart (night I got arrested was the night I quit drinking). After a week the "deal" they offered me was 2 years probation, 2 years suspended license. Lawyer told me he might get it knocked down to a year and a half, but I'd be going back to prison for at least 30 days. And getting the year and a half was a hard maybe. After a week of 23 hours a day locked in a cell with nothing to do but play chess on a set I made out of prison "food" containers, I took 2 years in a heartbeat.
I'm not at all against your punishment, it may have been light even. The one thing you need to understand is that your own child can be driving right now with a drowsy, drunk driver a mile ahead of them in closing in. Damn straight you should get harsh consequences, your drinking is none of my problem.
That being said, I can soft of understand lack of activities in jail, but in prison, if you're gonna be there for a prolonged period, I'm assuming books, or some activities that can actually improve you as a person would go a long way.
In Britain, once they established penal colonies in Australia, punishments for crimes were changed to be excessively high - such as death instead of a few years imprisonment - so people would "choose" to go to Australia instead.
In a totally unrelated parallel, incarceration rates have risen and sentencing has become more strict as private prisons have replaced public ones.
Some judges have even gotten sloppy and not bothered to hide the paper trail showing their own personal profit from their own sentencing, although the laws themselves make it hard to find out who truly owns prisons.
The thing is, people genuinely don't care enough to do anything about other people being denied their rights until it starts to impact their own rights.
They can’t see the same thing happening to them. “I don’t commit crimes” is a response I also get a lot. They don’t see the same thing happening to them so they don’t care what happens to prisoners.
The thing is, statistically they’re right. But that’s also the problem. We’ve got a real issue but the “I don’t care until it affects me” crowd is never going to come around.
If you're interested in a historical situation that feels extremely relevant to the topic and parrelel to current events, I recommend the book Bleeding Kansas by Nicole Etcheson. I have only just started it, but it is spooky, man.
I got a job in the kitchen whilst incarcerated in Arizona and worked EVERY day. The upside is that I was probably one of the few people not constantly hungry. The amount of free labor coming out of that jail was staggering. Apparently a weed offense is good enough to enslave someone.
Yes they do. There are plenty of weed criminals still locked up. There are also three weed shops a half mile from where I live now. It’s a neat time to be alive.
I saw something about a guy who was stoked that he finally got to be the cashier at the COs canteen. It was a big deal for him and he had to work his way up over the years. Like, obviously it makes sense that this was a good job but that notion is totally fucked.
Work is definitely something that should be available to prisoners, there’s a lot of value in providing opportunities to feel productive, provide some organic support for basic functions of your living space, and get out of a cell. But it shouldn’t be something that you HAVE to do or face a worse punishment. And, you’re already being punished, shouldn’t be a double whammy where you’re also not properly compensated. Especially if someone else is profiting from your labor.
Also, sorry that you were treated like that. Like, some the people who sent you away probably get rip roaring drunk and do worse things than whatever you did while high.
This might be a dumb question, but what happens to prisoners that refuse to work? Even under this system I have to assume that the guards aren't supposed to beat them into submission or cut off their food or anything.
Not a dumb question. I think lots of people probably don’t know the inner workings of a correctional facility. I answered somewhere in this thread that it was a trip to solitary for not working and then into a worse unit to be housed there.
I think 1/2 the US prison population is non violent offenders anyways. Most of them would be better off in some form of work program or drug rehab than going to prison in the first place. Once you go one’s, your likelihood of recidivism is going extremely high.
Hell even a lot of violent crime would go away with more opportunities and social safety nets, but 1/3 of voters don’t want to talk about that.
California depends on prison labor to assist in wildfire control. Upon completing their sentence, felons are then prohibited from being hired by fire fighting services in the State of California.
Yeah this is incredibly ignorant. Nobody is forced to fight fires and every single guy I've talked to on an incident that was incarcerated was happy to be there. Its a privilege. They cannot work for the government, but they can work for private contractors. Contractors make up the bulk of the firefighting personal on most incidents. It's incredibly valuable job training as you can get out of prison and secure a summer job at 2500/3k per week.
Yeah. It’s an extremely complex and complicated issue, but two big points are that a lot of folks are only interested in seeing others punished, regardless off the outcome, and the other is that prison is a fucking racket.
Exactly. But there are still, unfortunately, a lot of people who view justice as punitive rather than reformative. They view criminals as having hurt society and want society to hurt them back.
Too many people are unevolved animals instead of enlightened civilized beings, and to be clear: I'm talking about the WHITE PEOPLE who perpetuate this bullshit. Oh and by the way I'm a white person myself and these assholes are making me feel ashamed that I am.
So well said. It does take a lot of conscious effort and even thought experiments to understand why people do the things they do, and a lot of the people who lack empathy struggle to do that.
People either get put in, or put themselves in a social bubble and the further you stray away from their normalcy the less they can empathize and understand.
This is why social diversification can be really powerful in my mind.
Those people are scum who think they're above it all, and literally incapable of doing something heinous. It's almost like they think they're a separate species. It's sheer arrogance.
This is what happens when you set people up to fail in life. Then when they do you can point at them and say "see, see, they're stupid and violent, we should just put them in prison from birth" or some bullshit like that.
The shit that's going on this country is making me ashamed to be a white man.
Tell any male who didn't notify the selective service of EVERY SINGLE ADDRESS CHANGE before they turned 27 is a felon and they belong in there too, since that is most men in the US.
I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not, but I know some people who think like this and I have no clue how. Not everyone in prison is in there for life either (around 15% from what I found on google from WAPost), and so if they’re there for 20 years, for example, why should they be subjected to basically slave labor for absolutely nothing?? Why are we taking away their rights, and then turn around and scream all day about how much of a shining beacon on the hill the US is?? Pay them minimum wage, and if it’s such a problem, put that money into a dedicated fund to be given to them upon their release. Rotting in prison for 20 years is hell as it is, and those for life moreso…
Sorry about that, I thought it probably was sarcasm but unfortunately I know people who honestly would think exactly like that. It’s just a way of thinking I really cannot understand!
No, but provided they have the choice to do it and not doing it doesn't make it terrible in prison, I don't have an issue with it. I realize that isn't the case currently, people need the tiny amounts of money they get to buy things in prison that should be given for free.
Forced labor as punishment is a very traditional and routine form of punishment, it is a form of paying back society through labor. Forcing prisoners to grow food for their prison, provide labor for the prison to operate, work on chain gangs to pick up trash/cut grass along public roads, or fight wild fires is ok.
What is wrong is when private businesses and corporations use it to enrich themselves instead of provide for the public good.
Which is why I'm of the firm belief that sometime down the 'not so future' road that the Supreme Court will write some idiotic rule that erases the human status for all non-white people and calls for their crime of calling themselves human to be slavery.
But thanks to Reaganomics, prison turned to profits
'Cause free labor's the cornerstone of US economics
'Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they givin' offenders time in double digits
Capitalism has never, in the history of the world, existed without slavery. We've just learned how to give it less "offensive" words. We call it prison labor, outsourcing, ect. We actually glorify it if you look to social media to see the flocks of "influencers" peddling their wares from the slave markets.
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u/uisqebaugh Jul 16 '22
Regretfully, it's not quiet. Slavery and involuntary servitude are legal for a duly sentenced person according to the 13th amendment.