6 ms·

I personally don't have any issues with prison labor as long as its optional and safe (and done by the government. I don't know how I feel about private prisons

• crooked-v 7y ago
  Of course, that "optional" work that pays a dollar an hour or less also comes with having to pay full retail price for basics like shampoo and band-aids.
  • behringer 7y ago
    Full retail price? Must be nice. Some prisons are much more expensive: https://psmag.com/social-justice/are-prison-commissaries-fair https://psmag.com/social-justice/are-prison-commissaries-fai...
• Qwertystop 7y ago
  Being in prison is fundamentally coercive, so "optional" is not easy to get, and it's compensated as little as the prisons can get away with (because, again, the prisoners not in a position to negotiate). This produces a perverse incentive: imprison people to acquire a population that will work for peanuts in terrible condition.
• about_help 7y ago
  Institutional slavery. If there is no profit motive in any shape or form then voluntary prison labor would be OK with my conscience.
  • linuxftw 7y ago
    Sometimes it's voluntary because the alternative is sitting in high confinement most hours of the day.
    • akiselev 7y ago
      > the alternative is sitting in high confinement most hours of the day. Then it's not voluntary.
      • rmah 7y ago
        Prison is, by definition, non-voluntary.
        • ryanmercer 7y ago
          Prison, by definition, is opt-in. You do the crime and show disregard for society, you opt-in.
          • behringer 7y ago
            And of the people innocently imprisoned? https://www.innocenceproject.org/ https://www.innocenceproject.org/ Or those imprisoned for life for stupid shit? https://www.aclu.org/report/living-death-life-without-parole-nonviolent-offenses https://www.aclu.org/report/living-death-life-without-parole...
            • ryanmercer 7y ago
              >And of the people innocently imprisoned? "estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted." https://www.innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in-prison/ https://www.innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-ar... While it is unfortunate, they make up 1% of the prison population.
              • tylermw 7y ago
                All fine and good until you're in that 1%. Then you might have a slightly different opinion on forced unpaid labor for someone else's profit, otherwise known as slavery. But seriously, I see that 1% and it solidifies why prison populations should not be subject to forced labor for profit. That is not a low number.
  • ryanmercer 7y ago
    >Institutional slavery. I would rather have them working, following rules to keep their work privileges, than sitting around being bitter about being incarcerated or learning new methods of committing crime from others incarcerated with them. The unfortunate truly innocent people in prison aside, if you break the law you deserve to serve a sentence proportional to the severity of the crime. As long as you aren't using them to break rocks, do dangerous jobs that normally pay very well, etc then I'm completely fine with it. Stuff like manufacturing, basic construction, food prep, even order fulfillment I have no issue with whatasoever and if I were incarcerated I'd actually prefer to be doing something 40 hours a week instead of sitting around reading the same handful of books wondering what's going on with my friends, wondering if there's any new cool tech, wondering if I'll be able to cut it when I get out, wondering if the new guy is going to try and kill himself etc. Last year it came out California was using prisoners at 1$ an hour to fight wildfires, but it was completely voluntary and they did NOT have a shortage of volunteers. I believe there was a thread on here (possibly reddit though) where a commentor mentioned how a family member had done this sort of work and was happy to be out doing it. While those individuals were denied the ability to get firefighting licenses when released I imagine mentioning in your job interviews "look, yes I messed up and went to prison, I did my time, while there though I volunteered to fight wildfires. I risked my own life to do backbreaking work to try and limit the spread of the fires, I could have easily sat back at the prison watching tv of playing cards but..." is going to also help you considerably, as will most prison work programs to various degrees.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      Prisoners are not meant as cheap labor.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • moate 7y ago
        You say this, and I agree with you, and yet the system works the way it works for a reason. Like if I were an amoral shitbird with lots of money and familiarity with law enforcement, I'd probably start opening a chain of for-profit prisons while also lobbying for "tough on crime" laws and politicians. Then I'd use my for prisoners to produce goods which I could then sell back to someone for a profit. But I'm sure no amoral shitbirds like that exist and the 80s/90s saw this happen purely by coincidence.
• magashna 7y ago
  It gives the prison industry an incentive to keep prisons full.
  • undersuit 7y ago
    No, that incentive comes from private prisons being paid by the head.
    • cf498 7y ago
      Prison labor has a long tradition as been seen as a source of income in form of a cheap involuntary labor. To the point that you got people imprisoned on arbitrary laws to keep that workforce large enough. Many states exploited this hard after the ban of slavery, to the degree that offenses where made up, like not being allowed to change your employer as a freemen in order to keep the slave like workforce large enough. If you look at the history its hard to pin the moment where this ought to have ended. After the worst offenders of openly racist laws aimed at forcing people into slave like conditions got revoked and three wars relying on the draft happened, the war on drugs had started with another set of arbitrary prosecutions. The history of incentives to acquire more prisoners is quite a bit older then the private prison complex. edit: About the history of prison labor as a replacement for slavery, "Slavery by another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon is a great book on the topic.
      • crooked-v 7y ago
        A good article on the subject: http://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-abolition-of-slavery-72482 http://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-... > Here’s how it worked. Black men – and sometimes women and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay. > Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.
• deogeo 7y ago
  > Are there any reasons against using prison labor? It incentivizes making more prisoners.
  • wil421 7y ago
    Easy create 2 factories one inside the prison and one outside. When someone from the work program gets out and there’s an opening they can get a job right away in the outside factory. By factory I mean a building with workspaces they could build themselves. Preferably not in the remote vicinity. Also you need to separate the inmates from the released people to prevent smuggling. Set a cap on the inside or outside whatever you think will reduce recidivism. Call exprisoners back if there’s a new project where you need more people.
    • britch 7y ago
      Why would anyone use the outside factory? This comes up in the article. The school board had the choice between prison labor and a group hiring former prisoners. They chose prison labor. Why? It was cheaper.
      • wil421 7y ago
        The second company is just a private company that happens to hire former prisoners. Having 2 factories owned by the state would mean they can offer one price using both types of labor. Pay the prisoners minimum wage but withhold 75% of it until they are released. Allow the 25% to be added to commissary and legally abolish chargebacks to prisoners.
        • Vraxx 7y ago
          Why does any percentage need to be withheld?
          • wil421 7y ago
            It’s not a good idea to let inmates have access to more money than they need. I can see situations where their family might need it but it will certainly be exploited by inmates and their family. There’s a lot of inmates that claim it’s easier to get drugs on the inside than the outside. Whatever you want is available for a price.
• AWildC182 7y ago
  IMO, nothing wrong as long as they're paid competitive market wages for their work and none of it is taken by the prison system for things like visitation or necessities (or anything else really, just let them have the money when they get out). At the end of the day, work is work and should be rewarded fairly regardless of the context. Otherwise, yea, it's slave labor.
• scarecrowbob 7y ago
  "Are there any reasons against using prison labor? It gives inmates something to do and the ability to learn a new skill. " There are lots of reasons that I find compelling-- I'm generally in favor of the abolition of prisons. I'm also aware that there are plenty of people who think I am a wingnut because I think that. But even if you think prisons are a "good" thing, here is a reason that you could find compelling for preventing prison labor from interacting with the larger market: it lowers the pay for other non-prison workers by throwing unpaid labor into the labor pool. If you have a chair factory and the local prison starts using very low paid labor to produce chairs, how could you compete with that?
  • mc32 7y ago
    This effect is dwarfed by irregular immigrants who don’t have working papers. But yes, I agree they should be paid prevailing wages and escrow that for when they leave or use it to pay any debts they might have outstanding if they have judgements against them.
  • homonculus1 7y ago
    Okay, I'll bite-- what would you propose as an alternative to prisons? I'm intrigued, and frankly amused, at the idea that there aren't individuals who must be sequestered from society due to past behavior.
    • scarecrowbob 7y ago
      since you're actively laughing, I'll just tell you to google the wiki page for prison abolition. Surely you're creative enough to think of at least 3 or 4 other modes where we sequester people "from society due to past behavior"... there are a lot of other modalities than, say throwing people in an oubliette or conscripting them into an army. Some are actually ethical (in my opinion, which is far from the only legitiamte one), unlike prison in the US (also,, I do understand that this is my opinion as well).
      • ryanmercer 7y ago
        So we should just let child rapists and murderers roam free to offend again, with no consequences?
• papln 7y ago
  There's no distinction between government and private prisons in this regard. Money is fungible. Even public prisons are partly privately run. Government-enforced slavery isn't better than privately-enforced slavery.
  • fiter 7y ago
    "Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property." Is this system in fact slavery?
    • jakelazaroff 7y ago
      Yes. A few sentences after your quote [1]: > Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
      • fiter 7y ago
        Ah, I suppose I would have less concern with this more broad definition of slavery. A child being forced to do chores would qualify as slavery in this case, right?
        • jakelazaroff 7y ago
          Human language and human behavior are both very squishy, so it's unlikely we'll come up with an objective definition that everyone can agree upon in all cases. I wouldn't define slavery strictly in terms of the law because then things like human trafficking are excluded. Cast your net wide enough and sure, children being forced to do chores would qualify. At some point you just have to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say "this is slavery, that is not".
• jakelazaroff 7y ago
  > It gives inmates something to do and the ability to learn a new skill. This is more or less the "we'll pay you in exposure!" cliché.