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It's not obvious to me that prison labor is immoral or equivalent to slavery. As long as the working conditions are humane and the garnished wages are principal

It's not obvious to me that prison labor is immoral or equivalent to slavery. As long as the working conditions are humane and the garnished wages are principally used to subsidize the cost of their incarceration, I see no issue. Personally, I think prison policy improvements should start with common ground (e.g., guards shouldn't beat prisoners, prisoners should get prompt medical attention, etc) before we start worrying about issues that boil down to prisoner comfort.

redorb 9y ago
I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. If you are to lose that right via prison perhaps that's okay. It's not okay to then force that labor out of a person who is non-willing / force labor is slavery. My mother when leaving prison was given a bill for her stay - as if she were staying at a motel. So not only was she then a felon with little hope for a 'good job' but also was laden with debt, which fortunately had very tolerant pay back policies.
- weberc2 9y ago
  > I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. Within this model, you could make provisions for prisoners to elect to pay a sum after release (thereby making it optional labor as a means of repaying the debt they entered into), but this isn't without its own moral quandaries. The crux of the issue in my mind is that someone needs to pay for incarceration, and while tax payers are going to have to pay a large portion regardless, the incarcerated should contribute what they can. Of course there are likely many injustices in the justice system which would cause this policy to impact some groups more than others (males vs females, for instance), but those issues are orthogonal to this, and consequently they should be addressed separately, insofar as they exist.
  - vkou 9y ago
    > No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. This is morally bankrupt. You are locking people up, against their will, taking away years of their productive working life - and then sending them a bill for it. This is a debtor's prison by another name. (Which are, by the way, widely recognized among the Western world, including in the US, to be immoral, and illegal - in theory.)
    - weberc2 9y ago
      You misread my comment. I was explicit that the debt is canceled at the end of their term. You're also neglecting that imprisonment is a consequence of committing a crime (the accuracy of our legal system being an orthogonal matter), and criminals are accepting that risk in committing the crime, so it's not exactly involuntary.
kbenson 9y ago
Regardless of whether it's immoral or not, it creates perverse incentives as if institutes a captive workforce with less rights than normal workers, which can be extremely lucrative to businesses and the state. That last thing we need on top of the other problems we have with the prison industry in this country are businesses lobbying for harsher sentencing because it gets them cheaper labor. We already have prison guard unions lobbying for harsher sentencing, and that has not gone well. In the end I don't think having prisoners work is in itself a bad thing either. I do think most the systems we have in place that allow for that cause major problems through externalities, and I'm not sure how to allow one while effectively preventing the other.
maxerickson 9y ago
Regardless of what you want to call it, it is forced labor, which is still a definition of slavery, even if it is a more expansive one.
- weberc2 9y ago
  Fine, call it what you like, my point is that it's not the moral equivalent of conventional slavery.
  - vkou 9y ago
    It's not chattel slavery, but 'conventional slavery' doesn't have to be chattel slavery to be slavery. Across history, there have been many forms of slavery that were not chattel slavery. This is one of them. They have all been morally repugnant.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Prison work has never been widely regarded as morally repugnant (don't conflate with debtors' prisons, which are fundamentally different), so this necessarily is not one of your aforementioned forms of slavery. At the end of the day, incarceration costs money, and the people responsible for the incarceration would ideally foot the bill. Obviously the incarcerated rarely have such means, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them to pay a little bit more than the average law-abiding citizen. I don't have a strong opinion about how they repay their debts--whether it's garnished wages while in prison or after their release, but it should be one or the other. Actions have consequences, and a fundamental purpose of prison is to remind people of that. Moreover, work is a rehabilitating endeavor--it build skills, confidence, and character. It's mutually beneficial.
- DrScump 9y ago
  Where in this article does it saying anything about any labor being "forced" or even compelled (such that any necessity of life is denied any who choose not to participate in these activities)? You are stretching a definition of "slavery" to encompass simple incarceration. That cheapens the word. Is there actually forced labor in present-day civilian prisons? (Courts-martial have traditionally been allowed to impose sentences "at labor", but I have not observed this in the civilian case).
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
It's literally slavery: you're compelled to labor while being unfree to leave. We call lots of other things in history slavery that meet those criteria. It's slavery as the punishment for a crime, but it's slavery without qualification.
- ashark 9y ago
  There's even an exception for it in the 13th amendment. Some slavery is still legal under the US constitution, as amended, which is probably a fun/easy bar bet to win. Not sure how the wider legal landscape treats this, especially whether other laws narrow the exemption to apply only to the "involuntary servitude" portion of the amendment, but if a state wanted to try to actually enslave people as punishments for crimes in the US they'd probably at least have a lively court case on their hands, and they might even win it, depending on how the rest of the laws are structured—the constitution alone wouldn't be enough to guarantee defeat.
Mz 9y ago
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slaves https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slav... 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. Technically, it is apparently legal. But it is still slavery.

redorb 9y ago

I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. If you are to lose that right via prison perhaps that's okay. It's not okay to then force that labor out of a person who is non-willing / force labor is slavery. My mother when leaving prison was given a bill for her stay - as if she were staying at a motel. So not only was she then a felon with little hope for a 'good job' but also was laden with debt, which fortunately had very tolerant pay back policies.

weberc2 9y ago
> I don't think the right to your own work and it's profits are an issue of comfort. No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. Within this model, you could make provisions for prisoners to elect to pay a sum after release (thereby making it optional labor as a means of repaying the debt they entered into), but this isn't without its own moral quandaries. The crux of the issue in my mind is that someone needs to pay for incarceration, and while tax payers are going to have to pay a large portion regardless, the incarcerated should contribute what they can. Of course there are likely many injustices in the justice system which would cause this policy to impact some groups more than others (males vs females, for instance), but those issues are orthogonal to this, and consequently they should be addressed separately, insofar as they exist.
- vkou 9y ago
  > No person with a debt is entitled to the profits of their work, free or otherwise. The debt here is the cost of their incarceration. I don't propose they pay back the entire portion of their incarceration, but I think they should be responsible for paying back what they can while they're in prison. This is morally bankrupt. You are locking people up, against their will, taking away years of their productive working life - and then sending them a bill for it. This is a debtor's prison by another name. (Which are, by the way, widely recognized among the Western world, including in the US, to be immoral, and illegal - in theory.)
  - weberc2 9y ago
    You misread my comment. I was explicit that the debt is canceled at the end of their term. You're also neglecting that imprisonment is a consequence of committing a crime (the accuracy of our legal system being an orthogonal matter), and criminals are accepting that risk in committing the crime, so it's not exactly involuntary.

kbenson 9y ago

Regardless of whether it's immoral or not, it creates perverse incentives as if institutes a captive workforce with less rights than normal workers, which can be extremely lucrative to businesses and the state. That last thing we need on top of the other problems we have with the prison industry in this country are businesses lobbying for harsher sentencing because it gets them cheaper labor. We already have prison guard unions lobbying for harsher sentencing, and that has not gone well. In the end I don't think having prisoners work is in itself a bad thing either. I do think most the systems we have in place that allow for that cause major problems through externalities, and I'm not sure how to allow one while effectively preventing the other.

maxerickson 9y ago

Regardless of what you want to call it, it is forced labor, which is still a definition of slavery, even if it is a more expansive one.

weberc2 9y ago
Fine, call it what you like, my point is that it's not the moral equivalent of conventional slavery.
- vkou 9y ago
  It's not chattel slavery, but 'conventional slavery' doesn't have to be chattel slavery to be slavery. Across history, there have been many forms of slavery that were not chattel slavery. This is one of them. They have all been morally repugnant.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Prison work has never been widely regarded as morally repugnant (don't conflate with debtors' prisons, which are fundamentally different), so this necessarily is not one of your aforementioned forms of slavery. At the end of the day, incarceration costs money, and the people responsible for the incarceration would ideally foot the bill. Obviously the incarcerated rarely have such means, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them to pay a little bit more than the average law-abiding citizen. I don't have a strong opinion about how they repay their debts--whether it's garnished wages while in prison or after their release, but it should be one or the other. Actions have consequences, and a fundamental purpose of prison is to remind people of that. Moreover, work is a rehabilitating endeavor--it build skills, confidence, and character. It's mutually beneficial.
DrScump 9y ago
Where in this article does it saying anything about any labor being "forced" or even compelled (such that any necessity of life is denied any who choose not to participate in these activities)? You are stretching a definition of "slavery" to encompass simple incarceration. That cheapens the word. Is there actually forced labor in present-day civilian prisons? (Courts-martial have traditionally been allowed to impose sentences "at labor", but I have not observed this in the civilian case).

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

It's literally slavery: you're compelled to labor while being unfree to leave. We call lots of other things in history slavery that meet those criteria. It's slavery as the punishment for a crime, but it's slavery without qualification.

ashark 9y ago
There's even an exception for it in the 13th amendment. Some slavery is still legal under the US constitution, as amended, which is probably a fun/easy bar bet to win. Not sure how the wider legal landscape treats this, especially whether other laws narrow the exemption to apply only to the "involuntary servitude" portion of the amendment, but if a state wanted to try to actually enslave people as punishments for crimes in the US they'd probably at least have a lively court case on their hands, and they might even win it, depending on how the rest of the laws are structured—the constitution alone wouldn't be enough to guarantee defeat.

Mz 9y ago

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slaves https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slav... 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. Technically, it is apparently legal. But it is still slavery.