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>I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and privat

by SilasX 6y ago

>I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism. That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it. >On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions As in the cousin thread, this may be your objection, but it isn't the popular objection; Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26392005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26392005

yellowapple 6y ago
> That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it. And that question was outside of the topic I was originally discussing. > Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered. Because there was no real option to provide better terms. As pointed out by myself in that very same cousin thread, prison labor compensation in the state of Oklahoma has a monthly cap of less than $30, which is pathetically low, even when deducting room and board (which would itself be coercive, given that prisoners by definition can't exactly opt out of said room and board), and especially when factoring in price markups in prison commissaries. The popular blanket objection to prison labor exists specifically because there are few (if any) prison work programs in the US that pay prisoners anywhere close to a fair wage. Indeed, if they did pay a fair wage, and weren't coercively presented to inmates as "you either work or you rot in the cell", then what reason would there be to object?

by SilasX 6y ago

yellowapple 6y ago

> That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it. And that question was outside of the topic I was originally discussing. > Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered. Because there was no real option to provide better terms. As pointed out by myself in that very same cousin thread, prison labor compensation in the state of Oklahoma has a monthly cap of less than $30, which is pathetically low, even when deducting room and board (which would itself be coercive, given that prisoners by definition can't exactly opt out of said room and board), and especially when factoring in price markups in prison commissaries. The popular blanket objection to prison labor exists specifically because there are few (if any) prison work programs in the US that pay prisoners anywhere close to a fair wage. Indeed, if they did pay a fair wage, and weren't coercively presented to inmates as "you either work or you rot in the cell", then what reason would there be to object?