11 ms·

Inmates forced to farm gold online in Chinese prisons

118 points by arb99 15y ago

ignifero 15y ago
I m trying to imagine a serial killer killing goblins... That's why it's torture.
ck2 15y ago
How about the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the US forced to work for pennies per hour? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_complex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl... If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc. Makes many millions in profit for the states and federal government, even some judges own stock. Ironically it's the only labor in the US that can compete with offshoring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_America http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Amer... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/prisoners-help-build-patriot-missiles/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/prisoners-help-build... http://articles.cnn.com/1999-11-06/us/9911_06_prison.labor_1_prison-labor-prisonindustry-prison-population http://articles.cnn.com/1999-11-06/us/9911_06_prison.labor_1... http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml
- teyc 15y ago
  So true. In US, it is the chain gang.
  - ck2 15y ago
    Actually, Arizona still has real chain gangs and other states had them as recently as the mid-90's.
    - w1ntermute 15y ago
      > Arizona still has real chain gangs It's only in one county (Maricopa), and it's voluntary.
      - vyrotek 15y ago
        I grew up in Maricopa County (Peoria). I think Joe Arpaio had the right idea.
        teyc 15y ago
        I've seen a show about him. He is famous even in Australia. Is there any pressure on prisoners to volunteer into the chain gang?
    - hugh3 15y ago
      I've seen prisoners, or perhaps folks sentenced to community service, picking up trash along country roads in orange vests under supervision. Is there any difference between that and a chain gang apart from the chain?
- tseabrooks 15y ago
  Seriously? We should give a damn about this? You've got to be kidding me. Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S. Is your complaint that you think people are being incarcerated when they've committed no crimes in order to have cheap labor? I find this notion pretty ridiculous considering you need a trial and jurors to convict someone. Is your complaint that you think the laws are being created to specifically target people so that they can be incarcerated? In that case stop whining about it and stop voting for the people making these laws. But I digress, you are right.. It's disgusting that the federal government makes any money on the people they pay to care for whom society has deemed should be incarcerated.
  - ck2 15y ago
    At some point in this decade they will hit 1 out of every 100 people are in prison in the US. If you don't think there is something seriously wrong with that percentage and how two decades ago it was a fraction of that number, then you are far too trusting, isolated or innocent to the world. Felony laws and prison sentences are made much harsher based on heavy lobbying.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      You realize that the number of people in jail and prison labor are orthogonal issues, right? One can both oppose our war on drug users (near as I can tell, the main source of our excess prisoners) and China's war on the Falun Gong, but also have no objection to forcing robbers/rapists/murderers to work for their keep.
      - barrkel 15y ago
        They are most certainly not. Presumably the base rate of bad people in the human population does not vary greatly from country to country, yet the rate of jailed people does. It follows that many people in jail in countries with a high rate of incarceration arguably ought not be there; and making life harder for them is wrong. Or to put it another way, arguing from justice, along the lines of Rawls' original position and veil of ignorance[1]. If you didn't know whether or not you were to end up a prisoner, you ought to have some concern about how they are treated; and your concern should logically follow in direct proportion to how many of them are imprisoned. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
- rdtsc 15y ago
  > If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc. Very interesting, I did not know about that aspect and in the back of my mind always wondered why do all these prisoners even work when it pays that little. Why not just do nothing? Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do, be a part of something, but I guess a system that punishes the slaves (erm...I mean prisoners...) for not working is obviously a lot more effective.
  - ugh 15y ago
    You’ve got that slavery part right. Here is the Thirteenth Amendment, 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.” This led, for example, courts to conclude that prisoners have no right to be payed minimum wage. (I honestly don’t really know what to think about that. I’m not sure whether I have a problem with that.)
    - barrkel 15y ago
      Consider your position if you were mistakenly convicted of a crime and incarcerated yourself. Would you have a problem with it then?
      - ugh 15y ago
        I accidentally sounded tough on crime. Who would have thought! I want good conditions and adequate payment, no jobs that keep prisoners where they are. Well, scratch that, I want what works. I care about reducing the crime rate and keeping prisons quite empty, not punishment. I don’t know what role forced prison labor plays there and would be willing to accept it, should it be beneficial. I just don’t know. There isn’t such a big difference between forcing someone to work and taking away someone’s freedom, it’s really hard to justify why one can’t, for example, exchange one with the other. It’s both about taking away human rights.
        15y ago
- hugh3 15y ago
  Is anyone else tired of the fact that on the internet you can't say "Hey, look at this sucky thing in Random Country X" without having someone pipe up and say "Yeah, but what about this vaguely-similar thing in the USA? Huh? Huh?"
  - Mz 15y ago
    An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.
    - ez77 15y ago
      As a foreigner who studied in the US, I used to find myself attacking some US actions with some American friends, while attacking senseless knee-jerk anti-Americanism back in my country... A sad, and also tiring state of affairs, without much (even partial) support on either place.
      - VB6_Foreverr 15y ago
        I may give out about something in my country and say how it's so much better in that other country but if someone from there is here and does the same I feel like saying it's a wonder they didn't stay there so if it's so bloody good.
        ez77 15y ago
        So it is quite possible that you may indeed agree with that foreigner on the issue being discussed and yet wonder why s/he didn't stay home... So much for open, frank dialogues!
        Mz 15y ago
        In my case, I have plenty of criticisms of my own of the US and tend to have foreign friends (in part because I grew up in a bicultural home). So I have certainly had conversations with foreigners where I agreed with some of their criticisms. And I have also had friends who lived in a country where the country as a whole had a negative view of the US and where the US had a negative view of their country and it wasn't some big personal issue between us. In some cases, it was treated more like an in-joke. In this particular case, my friend was so consistently critical in a very ugly way and so rabid about it that I did often feel like "If you think all Americans are pure evil simply for being born here, why on earth are you friends with me? How sick is that?" This was an extremely good friend. I still miss them. One of the things that stops me from trying to reach out to them is that I don't know how to get past these issues. And I'm not interested in being someone's "whipping boy" for their personal bugaboo. I don't think there is anything healthy or constructive about something like that.
hessenwolf 15y ago
Meh. Worse ways to be tortured.
- code_duck 15y ago
  Of course, but incarceration is supposed to be the punishment itself, not extra abuse from the guards. The article does note "the inmates were kept playing until they could barely see things and missing the daily quota would result in physical punishment and abuse."
  - hessenwolf 15y ago
    True. I am just being somewhat defeatest with respect to the inevitability of torture in such a jail. I'd rather be farming gold until my ass hurt than some alternatives.
flexd 15y ago
Grinding for gold all day but you never get to keep any of it? That is pure torture. Not only do they force you to play that game for so long all day but they also take away the only 'reward' you get for playing. I would go crazy for sure.
- kennu 15y ago
  But you could still grind rep!
dstein 15y ago
I would've thought something like Mechanical Turk would be more valuable. Mining WoW gold sounds like something that could be fuuly automated. Why not have them do things that require human insight instead?
- VladRussian 15y ago
  Stalin invented it before you :) The main problem with your idea is that people capable of valuable insight are notoriously rare in the prison population. Stalin though was able to work such problem around. Google for Soviet Union "sharashka", in particular "sharashka Korolev USSR space program" :)
- rmc 15y ago
  Blizzard (the company that owns & operates WoW) doesn't want people to automatically do gold mining, so they try to stop it. A lot of 'gold mining' is "move you character around, click on this pig 10 times to kill it, collect the little bit of money/goods it drops". In order to automate it well you'd have to solve a lot of computer vision problems. Probably cheaper to just use cheap labour.
  - duck 15y ago
    In this case it would be free labor.
  - kahawe 15y ago
    From my own experience with gold farmers, they have gotten much smarter and efficient which at the same time means it is much harder to automate than the regular WoW "farm bots" that will run around and kill pigs. Also, blizzard actively monitors your PC with the infamous "Warden" cheat prevention. Back in the "Burning Crusade" days I got an in game whisper (message) with an obvious spam for Chinese gold. I whipped out google and found a few phrases in Chinese and began chatting back, asking where they are from, how are they doing etc. Sure enough after a couple of tries, they would reply and tell me they were from Wuhan, I believe. Next they invited me into their group, told me to come with them. They were two Frost Mages and went into the "Underbog" dungeon and proceded to clear the first room with nothing but "Frost Nova", "Blizzard" and "Arcane Explosion" spells - so they kept an absolutely deadly group of 6 hostiles completely immobilized and killed them more or less slowly with "area of effect" spells. But ultimately it yielded them a better result than killing regular monsters would have. It was absolutely hilarious to watch and help them and it is a very fond memory of an otherwise actually quite boring and repetitive, non-extraordinary game. And my point being: with blizzard constantly working on making it harder for the gold farmers, they have to constantly come up with new tricks; with the introduction of the "diminishing returns" on root effects, this would not have worked anymore, for example.
arctangent 15y ago
In the 22nd century, when everyone has supercomputers embedded in their heads, prisoners will be forced to mine bitcoins...
hornokplease 15y ago
Original story discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586469
riobard 15y ago
Somehow I was thinking about those game-addicted kids…
olalonde 15y ago
I bet my little cousin would turn himself in! :)
joshu 15y ago
Well, that's it. I no longer have to read science fiction.
cliq 15y ago
"A former prison guard turned inmate" wait what.
- hugh3 15y ago
  What's the problem? A dude was a prison guard. Then he (presumably) committed a crime. Now he's an inmate.
Jd 15y ago
Original article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-...
DougWebb 15y ago
About $800 for 300 inmates playing 12 hours each? That's about $0.25/hr for each of them. Is gold farming in these games really that unproductive? Who would do that voluntarily?
- nicpottier 15y ago
  Lots of places have daily incomes below $2 a day. That said, there isn't a huge overlap between those places and cheap electricity, internet and computers. But I guess China is one of them..
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

118 points by arb99 15y ago

I m trying to imagine a serial killer killing goblins... That's why it's torture.

ck2 15y ago

How about the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the US forced to work for pennies per hour? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_complex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl... If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc. Makes many millions in profit for the states and federal government, even some judges own stock. Ironically it's the only labor in the US that can compete with offshoring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_America http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Amer... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/prisoners-help-build-patriot-missiles/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/prisoners-help-build... http://articles.cnn.com/1999-11-06/us/9911_06_prison.labor_1_prison-labor-prisonindustry-prison-population http://articles.cnn.com/1999-11-06/us/9911_06_prison.labor_1... http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml

teyc 15y ago
So true. In US, it is the chain gang.
- ck2 15y ago
  Actually, Arizona still has real chain gangs and other states had them as recently as the mid-90's.
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    > Arizona still has real chain gangs It's only in one county (Maricopa), and it's voluntary.
    - vyrotek 15y ago
      I grew up in Maricopa County (Peoria). I think Joe Arpaio had the right idea.
      - teyc 15y ago
        I've seen a show about him. He is famous even in Australia. Is there any pressure on prisoners to volunteer into the chain gang?
  - hugh3 15y ago
    I've seen prisoners, or perhaps folks sentenced to community service, picking up trash along country roads in orange vests under supervision. Is there any difference between that and a chain gang apart from the chain?
tseabrooks 15y ago
Seriously? We should give a damn about this? You've got to be kidding me. Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S. Is your complaint that you think people are being incarcerated when they've committed no crimes in order to have cheap labor? I find this notion pretty ridiculous considering you need a trial and jurors to convict someone. Is your complaint that you think the laws are being created to specifically target people so that they can be incarcerated? In that case stop whining about it and stop voting for the people making these laws. But I digress, you are right.. It's disgusting that the federal government makes any money on the people they pay to care for whom society has deemed should be incarcerated.
- ck2 15y ago
  At some point in this decade they will hit 1 out of every 100 people are in prison in the US. If you don't think there is something seriously wrong with that percentage and how two decades ago it was a fraction of that number, then you are far too trusting, isolated or innocent to the world. Felony laws and prison sentences are made much harsher based on heavy lobbying.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    You realize that the number of people in jail and prison labor are orthogonal issues, right? One can both oppose our war on drug users (near as I can tell, the main source of our excess prisoners) and China's war on the Falun Gong, but also have no objection to forcing robbers/rapists/murderers to work for their keep.
    - barrkel 15y ago
      They are most certainly not. Presumably the base rate of bad people in the human population does not vary greatly from country to country, yet the rate of jailed people does. It follows that many people in jail in countries with a high rate of incarceration arguably ought not be there; and making life harder for them is wrong. Or to put it another way, arguing from justice, along the lines of Rawls' original position and veil of ignorance[1]. If you didn't know whether or not you were to end up a prisoner, you ought to have some concern about how they are treated; and your concern should logically follow in direct proportion to how many of them are imprisoned. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
rdtsc 15y ago
> If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc. Very interesting, I did not know about that aspect and in the back of my mind always wondered why do all these prisoners even work when it pays that little. Why not just do nothing? Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do, be a part of something, but I guess a system that punishes the slaves (erm...I mean prisoners...) for not working is obviously a lot more effective.
- ugh 15y ago
  You’ve got that slavery part right. Here is the Thirteenth Amendment, 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.” This led, for example, courts to conclude that prisoners have no right to be payed minimum wage. (I honestly don’t really know what to think about that. I’m not sure whether I have a problem with that.)
  - barrkel 15y ago
    Consider your position if you were mistakenly convicted of a crime and incarcerated yourself. Would you have a problem with it then?
    - ugh 15y ago
      I accidentally sounded tough on crime. Who would have thought! I want good conditions and adequate payment, no jobs that keep prisoners where they are. Well, scratch that, I want what works. I care about reducing the crime rate and keeping prisons quite empty, not punishment. I don’t know what role forced prison labor plays there and would be willing to accept it, should it be beneficial. I just don’t know. There isn’t such a big difference between forcing someone to work and taking away someone’s freedom, it’s really hard to justify why one can’t, for example, exchange one with the other. It’s both about taking away human rights.
      - 15y ago
hugh3 15y ago
Is anyone else tired of the fact that on the internet you can't say "Hey, look at this sucky thing in Random Country X" without having someone pipe up and say "Yeah, but what about this vaguely-similar thing in the USA? Huh? Huh?"
- Mz 15y ago
  An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.
  - ez77 15y ago
    As a foreigner who studied in the US, I used to find myself attacking some US actions with some American friends, while attacking senseless knee-jerk anti-Americanism back in my country... A sad, and also tiring state of affairs, without much (even partial) support on either place.
    - VB6_Foreverr 15y ago
      I may give out about something in my country and say how it's so much better in that other country but if someone from there is here and does the same I feel like saying it's a wonder they didn't stay there so if it's so bloody good.
      - ez77 15y ago
        So it is quite possible that you may indeed agree with that foreigner on the issue being discussed and yet wonder why s/he didn't stay home... So much for open, frank dialogues!
        Mz 15y ago
        In my case, I have plenty of criticisms of my own of the US and tend to have foreign friends (in part because I grew up in a bicultural home). So I have certainly had conversations with foreigners where I agreed with some of their criticisms. And I have also had friends who lived in a country where the country as a whole had a negative view of the US and where the US had a negative view of their country and it wasn't some big personal issue between us. In some cases, it was treated more like an in-joke. In this particular case, my friend was so consistently critical in a very ugly way and so rabid about it that I did often feel like "If you think all Americans are pure evil simply for being born here, why on earth are you friends with me? How sick is that?" This was an extremely good friend. I still miss them. One of the things that stops me from trying to reach out to them is that I don't know how to get past these issues. And I'm not interested in being someone's "whipping boy" for their personal bugaboo. I don't think there is anything healthy or constructive about something like that.

hessenwolf 15y ago

Meh. Worse ways to be tortured.

code_duck 15y ago
Of course, but incarceration is supposed to be the punishment itself, not extra abuse from the guards. The article does note "the inmates were kept playing until they could barely see things and missing the daily quota would result in physical punishment and abuse."
- hessenwolf 15y ago
  True. I am just being somewhat defeatest with respect to the inevitability of torture in such a jail. I'd rather be farming gold until my ass hurt than some alternatives.

flexd 15y ago

Grinding for gold all day but you never get to keep any of it? That is pure torture. Not only do they force you to play that game for so long all day but they also take away the only 'reward' you get for playing. I would go crazy for sure.

kennu 15y ago
But you could still grind rep!

dstein 15y ago

I would've thought something like Mechanical Turk would be more valuable. Mining WoW gold sounds like something that could be fuuly automated. Why not have them do things that require human insight instead?

VladRussian 15y ago
Stalin invented it before you :) The main problem with your idea is that people capable of valuable insight are notoriously rare in the prison population. Stalin though was able to work such problem around. Google for Soviet Union "sharashka", in particular "sharashka Korolev USSR space program" :)
rmc 15y ago
Blizzard (the company that owns & operates WoW) doesn't want people to automatically do gold mining, so they try to stop it. A lot of 'gold mining' is "move you character around, click on this pig 10 times to kill it, collect the little bit of money/goods it drops". In order to automate it well you'd have to solve a lot of computer vision problems. Probably cheaper to just use cheap labour.
- duck 15y ago
  In this case it would be free labor.
- kahawe 15y ago
  From my own experience with gold farmers, they have gotten much smarter and efficient which at the same time means it is much harder to automate than the regular WoW "farm bots" that will run around and kill pigs. Also, blizzard actively monitors your PC with the infamous "Warden" cheat prevention. Back in the "Burning Crusade" days I got an in game whisper (message) with an obvious spam for Chinese gold. I whipped out google and found a few phrases in Chinese and began chatting back, asking where they are from, how are they doing etc. Sure enough after a couple of tries, they would reply and tell me they were from Wuhan, I believe. Next they invited me into their group, told me to come with them. They were two Frost Mages and went into the "Underbog" dungeon and proceded to clear the first room with nothing but "Frost Nova", "Blizzard" and "Arcane Explosion" spells - so they kept an absolutely deadly group of 6 hostiles completely immobilized and killed them more or less slowly with "area of effect" spells. But ultimately it yielded them a better result than killing regular monsters would have. It was absolutely hilarious to watch and help them and it is a very fond memory of an otherwise actually quite boring and repetitive, non-extraordinary game. And my point being: with blizzard constantly working on making it harder for the gold farmers, they have to constantly come up with new tricks; with the introduction of the "diminishing returns" on root effects, this would not have worked anymore, for example.

arctangent 15y ago

In the 22nd century, when everyone has supercomputers embedded in their heads, prisoners will be forced to mine bitcoins...

hornokplease 15y ago

Original story discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586469

riobard 15y ago

Somehow I was thinking about those game-addicted kids…

olalonde 15y ago

I bet my little cousin would turn himself in! :)

joshu 15y ago

Well, that's it. I no longer have to read science fiction.

cliq 15y ago

"A former prison guard turned inmate" wait what.

hugh3 15y ago
What's the problem? A dude was a prison guard. Then he (presumably) committed a crime. Now he's an inmate.

Jd 15y ago

Original article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-...

DougWebb 15y ago

About $800 for 300 inmates playing 12 hours each? That's about $0.25/hr for each of them. Is gold farming in these games really that unproductive? Who would do that voluntarily?

nicpottier 15y ago
Lots of places have daily incomes below $2 a day. That said, there isn't a huge overlap between those places and cheap electricity, internet and computers. But I guess China is one of them..

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]