8 ms·

How convict labour increased inequality

71 points by edward 9y ago

moate 9y ago
Wait a minute...you're telling me using slave labor is bad? BUT IT'S SO CHEAP! The idea that we allow FOR PROFIT prisons to "employ" prisoners for less than minimum wage while they make money is an embarrassment. This is not justice. This is not "repaying your debt to society". The fact that all criminals get stigmatized and penalized during and well after their incarceration is punishment. The use of them as a labor force to perform tasks to create additional revenue for the prisons is just gross. And don't get get me started about how this leads to a potential conflict of interest when you allow the prison companies to hire lobbyists who could lobby for harsher sentencing in an effort to create more slaves.
- 13of40 9y ago
  Would you feel better about it if the prisoners' situations were identical, but the profits went to the government or to reparations for victims of crime?
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    No. It's still an incentive to create crime and enslave people.
  - moate 9y ago
    God no. That just incentives the government (who create the laws) to put people in prison. And who is the "victim" if someone goes to jail for say, possession of drugs/paraphernalia? The only correct answer is "if you employ people, you pay them." This includes people currently serving jail sentences. Going to jail is meant to be a punishment. You're losing months/years of your normal life. If people wish to offer convicts a way to help mitigate this by offering them employment, then they shouldn't get the ability to employ them at a discounted rate, because that's punitive to people who are not in jail.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    Absolutely not.
  - Falling3 9y ago
    No, especially since such a huge percentage of US prisoners are non-violent offenders. What would make me feel better is if we made serious efforts at rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sincerely 9y ago
    No no no. Money should go to the people doing the work.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > ...or to reparations for victims of crime? The courts already have a way of doing this that doesn't involve slavery.
    - moate 9y ago
      To that end: if there was a civil suit against someone and you wanted to allow convicts to work in prison while paying them a fair wage in order to pay off this debt, that is a logical and even noble choice. I think the biggest issue everyone seems to have is the idea of below market wages being paid to the workers.
- leeter 9y ago
  Forced labor is slavery, no matter how you put it. The fact of the matter is the 13th amendment needs to be fixed.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Slavery was much worst, realistically. Forced labor is bad, but the comparison is whitewashing conditions under which slaves lived.
  - ben509 9y ago
    Yes, it's slavery, that's the point, just as prison itself is imprisonment. We have a retributive system of justice, the point of a sentence is to punish you by harming you. You do a bad thing, society exacts retribution by doing a bad thing to you. Fines, prison, forced labor, the death penalty are all punishments, and if you don't want those to happen to you, don't commit crimes.
    - mjevans 9y ago
      The problem is those punitive actions are not considered from a more enlightened position of causing a net positive to society. A better approach retrains the individual and helps society by enforcing a mutually beneficial result rather than administering some measured form of torture.
      - ben509 9y ago
        Retraining the individual requires that the individual wants to be retrained. That's certainly something to offer, but a sentence is something you're forcing on a person.
        mjevans 9y ago
        For it to be effective, yes. You seem to be arguing the details of the implementation rather than the goal of what the implementation should solve. Individuals (and circumstances) are different, there should be plenty of discretion and possibly review to ensure that solutions are measurably effective.
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling, and correlates with low-information rants. We're trying for the opposite here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - gumby 9y ago
    I really appreciate the role the site guidelines play in making HN a useful place to read comments (often more than the actual articles). However FWIW I appreciated this particular usage as I read it as a form of parody which i might not have caught had simple emphasis been used. It may be that there's a slippery slope problem so maybe objecting to it is still a good idea, but I thought I'd simply mention my feeling for this particular case.
    - dang 9y ago
      That's a good point and I partly agree. This might not have been the best hill to plant that flag on!
  - evanlivingston 9y ago
    Man, your comment comes across as pretty classist. Would you extend the same argument against the use of italics? If not, why? Can you statistically demonstrate a disparity between information density of comments using all caps versus using italics?
    - dang 9y ago
      If that's classist then the guidelines as a whole must be classist.
      - evanlivingston 9y ago
        Yes, that's a real possibility.
tabeth 9y ago
I recommend the book The New Jim Crow if you'd like to read more about this, particularly on how it relates to extending pseudo-slavery.
- forgotmysn 9y ago
  I'd suggest the documentary 13th as well.
jaclaz 9y ago
If - for a moment - we can abstract from the actual conditions of the "lodging" and from the quality of the food (that I understand can be terrible in some US prisons), if we take a single "free" man or woman that is working the same hours (possibly not full-time because there is not such a job offering) at minimum wage BUT has to pay rent, utilities and food, plus medical care, etc., I don't thing that the net (i.e. what remains after having paid all "basic" bills) is very different from a few cents per hour. This hypothetical single low-pay worker has not done anything "bad", and there is no reason why society should "punish" him/her, but I doubt that he/she can save more than 50 US$ per month.
- c22 9y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but I think it's a little disingenuous to abstract away living conditions. For all those 'basic' bills your minimum wage laborer is likely getting a comfortable bed in their own room with only a few housemates, much better nutrition, a cell phone, private showers, etc. If they wanted to live in a storage unit, shower at the YMCA, and eat for 2 dollars a day they likely could save much more.
  - marsrover 9y ago
    > If they wanted to live in a storage unit Which is illegal. And even if it wasn't, it's sad that someone working minimum wage has to live like a prisoner if they want to save anything significant.
    - c22 9y ago
      I totally agree. I'm using a reduction to absurdity to make my point that prisoners experience abysmal living conditions, not arguing that the state of minimum wage workers is just.
- watwut 9y ago
  Then again, a single phone call in or out of prison is super expensive and so are various fees. And it is not like medical care in prison counted much. And more importantly, it skews incentives and market.
squozzer 9y ago
Regardless of who goes to jail and why, I can only figure on three possible activities for convicts - 1) Rot in their cells. 2) "Busywork" i.e. stuff that resembles work but has no value other than occupying convicts' time. 3) Economically useful work. The economic / social case against option 3 is pretty strong - I remember analyses of the economic collapse of the USSR blamed convict labor among other things - except that options 1 and 2 have strong downsides as well. Not just for convicts, but the COs and prison staff as well.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  Or option 4, don't maintain a massive prison population. This combined with policies that encourage (demand even) spending the time focused on rehabilitation (so that's job training etc) and keeping convicts inside for as little time as possible. No slave underclass eating your economy, far less stress on staffs, more skilled laborers in general. Everyone wins when society distances itself from the archaic punitive system of justice.
  - nn3 9y ago
    Everyone wins except for the prison industrial complex. And they got the big lobbyists.
    - baud147258 9y ago
      And the prison warden syndicates.
- vorotato 9y ago
  If you're going to give them economically useful work you need to pay them a fair wage or it drives down wages for everyone.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Rehabilitation or education?
  - 9y ago

71 points by edward 9y ago

Wait a minute...you're telling me using slave labor is bad? BUT IT'S SO CHEAP! The idea that we allow FOR PROFIT prisons to "employ" prisoners for less than minimum wage while they make money is an embarrassment. This is not justice. This is not "repaying your debt to society". The fact that all criminals get stigmatized and penalized during and well after their incarceration is punishment. The use of them as a labor force to perform tasks to create additional revenue for the prisons is just gross. And don't get get me started about how this leads to a potential conflict of interest when you allow the prison companies to hire lobbyists who could lobby for harsher sentencing in an effort to create more slaves.

13of40 9y ago
Would you feel better about it if the prisoners' situations were identical, but the profits went to the government or to reparations for victims of crime?
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  No. It's still an incentive to create crime and enslave people.
- moate 9y ago
  God no. That just incentives the government (who create the laws) to put people in prison. And who is the "victim" if someone goes to jail for say, possession of drugs/paraphernalia? The only correct answer is "if you employ people, you pay them." This includes people currently serving jail sentences. Going to jail is meant to be a punishment. You're losing months/years of your normal life. If people wish to offer convicts a way to help mitigate this by offering them employment, then they shouldn't get the ability to employ them at a discounted rate, because that's punitive to people who are not in jail.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Absolutely not.
- Falling3 9y ago
  No, especially since such a huge percentage of US prisoners are non-violent offenders. What would make me feel better is if we made serious efforts at rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sincerely 9y ago
  No no no. Money should go to the people doing the work.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > ...or to reparations for victims of crime? The courts already have a way of doing this that doesn't involve slavery.
  - moate 9y ago
    To that end: if there was a civil suit against someone and you wanted to allow convicts to work in prison while paying them a fair wage in order to pay off this debt, that is a logical and even noble choice. I think the biggest issue everyone seems to have is the idea of below market wages being paid to the workers.
leeter 9y ago
Forced labor is slavery, no matter how you put it. The fact of the matter is the 13th amendment needs to be fixed.
- watwut 9y ago
  Slavery was much worst, realistically. Forced labor is bad, but the comparison is whitewashing conditions under which slaves lived.
- ben509 9y ago
  Yes, it's slavery, that's the point, just as prison itself is imprisonment. We have a retributive system of justice, the point of a sentence is to punish you by harming you. You do a bad thing, society exacts retribution by doing a bad thing to you. Fines, prison, forced labor, the death penalty are all punishments, and if you don't want those to happen to you, don't commit crimes.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    The problem is those punitive actions are not considered from a more enlightened position of causing a net positive to society. A better approach retrains the individual and helps society by enforcing a mutually beneficial result rather than administering some measured form of torture.
    - ben509 9y ago
      Retraining the individual requires that the individual wants to be retrained. That's certainly something to offer, but a sentence is something you're forcing on a person.
      - mjevans 9y ago
        For it to be effective, yes. You seem to be arguing the details of the implementation rather than the goal of what the implementation should solve. Individuals (and circumstances) are different, there should be plenty of discretion and possibly review to ensure that solutions are measurably effective.
dang 9y ago
Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling, and correlates with low-information rants. We're trying for the opposite here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- gumby 9y ago
  I really appreciate the role the site guidelines play in making HN a useful place to read comments (often more than the actual articles). However FWIW I appreciated this particular usage as I read it as a form of parody which i might not have caught had simple emphasis been used. It may be that there's a slippery slope problem so maybe objecting to it is still a good idea, but I thought I'd simply mention my feeling for this particular case.
  - dang 9y ago
    That's a good point and I partly agree. This might not have been the best hill to plant that flag on!
- evanlivingston 9y ago
  Man, your comment comes across as pretty classist. Would you extend the same argument against the use of italics? If not, why? Can you statistically demonstrate a disparity between information density of comments using all caps versus using italics?
  - dang 9y ago
    If that's classist then the guidelines as a whole must be classist.
    - evanlivingston 9y ago
      Yes, that's a real possibility.

tabeth 9y ago

I recommend the book The New Jim Crow if you'd like to read more about this, particularly on how it relates to extending pseudo-slavery.

forgotmysn 9y ago
I'd suggest the documentary 13th as well.

jaclaz 9y ago

If - for a moment - we can abstract from the actual conditions of the "lodging" and from the quality of the food (that I understand can be terrible in some US prisons), if we take a single "free" man or woman that is working the same hours (possibly not full-time because there is not such a job offering) at minimum wage BUT has to pay rent, utilities and food, plus medical care, etc., I don't thing that the net (i.e. what remains after having paid all "basic" bills) is very different from a few cents per hour. This hypothetical single low-pay worker has not done anything "bad", and there is no reason why society should "punish" him/her, but I doubt that he/she can save more than 50 US$ per month.

c22 9y ago
I get where you're coming from, but I think it's a little disingenuous to abstract away living conditions. For all those 'basic' bills your minimum wage laborer is likely getting a comfortable bed in their own room with only a few housemates, much better nutrition, a cell phone, private showers, etc. If they wanted to live in a storage unit, shower at the YMCA, and eat for 2 dollars a day they likely could save much more.
- marsrover 9y ago
  > If they wanted to live in a storage unit Which is illegal. And even if it wasn't, it's sad that someone working minimum wage has to live like a prisoner if they want to save anything significant.
  - c22 9y ago
    I totally agree. I'm using a reduction to absurdity to make my point that prisoners experience abysmal living conditions, not arguing that the state of minimum wage workers is just.
watwut 9y ago
Then again, a single phone call in or out of prison is super expensive and so are various fees. And it is not like medical care in prison counted much. And more importantly, it skews incentives and market.

squozzer 9y ago

Regardless of who goes to jail and why, I can only figure on three possible activities for convicts - 1) Rot in their cells. 2) "Busywork" i.e. stuff that resembles work but has no value other than occupying convicts' time. 3) Economically useful work. The economic / social case against option 3 is pretty strong - I remember analyses of the economic collapse of the USSR blamed convict labor among other things - except that options 1 and 2 have strong downsides as well. Not just for convicts, but the COs and prison staff as well.

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
Or option 4, don't maintain a massive prison population. This combined with policies that encourage (demand even) spending the time focused on rehabilitation (so that's job training etc) and keeping convicts inside for as little time as possible. No slave underclass eating your economy, far less stress on staffs, more skilled laborers in general. Everyone wins when society distances itself from the archaic punitive system of justice.
- nn3 9y ago
  Everyone wins except for the prison industrial complex. And they got the big lobbyists.
  - baud147258 9y ago
    And the prison warden syndicates.
vorotato 9y ago
If you're going to give them economically useful work you need to pay them a fair wage or it drives down wages for everyone.
mikeash 9y ago
Rehabilitation or education?
- 9y ago