11 ms·
Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning
by countryqt30 8y ago
Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning, construction, ...)
- zuminator 8y agoSeems a non starter. If your costs are $75K per inmate you'll never make that up in prisoner labor productivity. Even if your costs are half that. And if you do get profitable labor, regular citizens will rightly complain that good paying jobs are being taken by criminals.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agoThere will always be an activist group which will tell you that forcing people work is inhumane and violates their freedom of expression.
- minikites 8y agoBy "an activist group" do you mean "people against actual slavery"?
- leetcrew 8y agomost people rightly oppose slavery. but confining people to cages for years at a time is pretty bad too. if it's possible to justify imprisonment in the first place, are all forms of forced labor significantly worse? what if the prisoners get training as webdevs and have to spend 6-8 hours on weekdays improving the UI of government websites. they get an aeron chair, free coffee, ping pong, etc., and when they get released they have some experience to list on their resume. kind of an absurd proposal, but hopefully it illustrates the point of my question: is it immoral to have them do literally anything to defray the cost of their imprisonment?
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agoYour proposal is not absurd. They used to do it in the Soviet Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka). Not exactly aeron chairs and ping pong tables, but way better than the regular prison camp.
- conanbatt 8y agoThe thing is that then the warden sells of the inmates to make money on himself or through the state. California paid inmates fighting fires a dollar an hour.
- leetcrew 8y agothis is a non sequitur to my post. I asked a pretty specific question that you have not answered in your reply.
- conanbatt 8y agoDid you edit your post? Im pretty sure I answered something that was above the first paragraph and isn't there anymore. Otherwise it was meant for some other post, disregard.
- leetcrew 8y agonope, only edit was to correct my spelling of "aeron". no worries, I often reply to the wrong post in deep threads.
- CarlSchmitt 8y ago> is it immoral to have them do literally anything to defray the cost of their imprisonment? It depends on your definition of immoral...
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agoBy "an activist group" I mean people who confuse work with slavery. People in prison eat what they're given, sleep when they're told, have (almost) no personal property and are at mercy of the administration on many other issues. Work is one of the greatest things a human being can do. Working doesn't make an otherwise free person a slave.
- minikites 8y ago>Work is one of the greatest things a human being can do. Would you say that "work sets you free"?
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agoWell, we all know that Godwin's law works. I just didn't expect it to kick in so early in the discussion.
- lovich 8y agoMost people wouldn't consider someone to suggest slavery as the solution this early in the discussion either. Godwin's law doesn't work when you are suggesting the same actions Nazis actually took. You are like the bad guy from Thor Ragnarok. "I don't like to call them slaves, they're prisoners with jobs"
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> By "an activist group" I mean people who confuse work with slavery. You mean, people who confuse forced work with slavery.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agoI think that depends on definition of "forced". If I stop working, I'll get kicked out of my house and will probably die of hunger. Does it mean I am forced to work?
- manfredo 8y agoCalling servitude as punishment "actual slavery" is disingenuous to the point that I'm willing to call it a lie. You can't buy and sell them. You don't have them indefinitely. When they reproduce your don't own their offspring. They get sentenced to this servitude by society's justice system, not captured through conquest or purchased from foreign lands. Calling labor as punishment "actual slavery" is incredibly dismissive of actual slaves.
- eropple 8y agoHistorically slavery has certainly been term-limited in numerous jurisdictions. And private prisons certainly can, and do, trade away problem inmates. You are dimly correct in that it is not identical to every other form of slavery practiced historically. But it's close enough for me--and I can only speculate as to your motives for splitting this hair.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> You can't buy and sell them. You don't have them indefinitely. When they reproduce your don't own their offspring. They get sentenced to this servitude by society's justice system, not captured through conquest or purchased from foreign lands. All of these individually are features of historical systems uncontroversially identified as slavery. The particular form of penal slavery at issue may be unique in combining all of them, but I don't see any coherent argument why that would make it into not-slavery.
- llamataboot 8y agoAh yes, those pesky social justice warriors working to make slavery illegal. We should have a war or something.
- conanbatt 8y agoWhat is actually terrible is that they are paid a dollar an hour, even if they are fighting fires and dying from it.
- johnbatch 8y agoThis already exists for less then $1 an hour[0]. They’ll even do CAD design work[1]. [0]https://www.cio.com/article/2417888/prison-labor--outsourcing-s--best-kept-secret-.html https://www.cio.com/article/2417888/prison-labor--outsourcin... [1]https://www.unicor.gov/Category.aspx?idCategory=1691 https://www.unicor.gov/Category.aspx?idCategory=1691
- Kaiyou 8y agoThen you just undercut all your competitors who actually have to pay their workers, which leads to all sorts of other problems.
- fwip 8y agoThat's called slavery.
- mrguyorama 8y agoGood thing the 13th amendment allows slavery for inmates!