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Keeping someone trapped in order to force them to do work is called “slavery” and it’s generally frowned upon in the modern era. There shouldn’t be profit assoc

• ecf 3y ago
  It’s not slavery when the human has done things that society deemed bad enough to lose their rights for however long the sentence is.
  • Loic 3y ago
    You are losing your freedom of movement, not your rights, no?
    • wang_li 3y ago
      Prisoners lose most of their rights. They have no privacy rights, they can be searched at any time without a warrant, they often don't get to vote, they don't get to own weapons, they don't have freedom of association, they don't get to choose their style of dress.
    • EasyMark 3y ago
      Nope you lose a lot of your rights as well. I don't know about European prisons, though. When you break the social contract, there are consequences.
      • hotpotamus 3y ago
        I've never seen the social contract, let alone signed it. I suppose I used to sort of believe that it existed, but that belief, like so many others I once held, has not survived the past decade or so. Certainly I believe in consequences, but they seem little better than random, though they quite rarely touch the wealthy/connected.
  • BeetleB 3y ago
    Slavery is slavery, regardless of how bad the person is.
    • programmarchy 3y ago
      And kidnapping is kidnapping. According to this logic, imprisonment is kidnapping, and serial killers should be free to roam the streets.
      • BeetleB 3y ago
        > And kidnapping is kidnapping. According to this logic, imprisonment is kidnapping, MW definition: "to seize and detain or carry away by unlawful force or fraud and often with a demand for ransom" So no: Lawful imprisonment is not kidnapping.
        • programmarchy 3y ago
          That is exactly my point. The law is the differentiator: the 13th amendment sets apart forced labor for punishment of a crime.
  • Helloyello 3y ago
    [dead]
  • sigspec 3y ago
    Are you sure? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/12/louisiana-sheriff-argues-against-releasing-prisoners-you-can-work-drawing-slavery-comparisons/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/1...
  • uicompat 3y ago
    If you truly hold this position you’d be well served to familiarize yourself with Scandinavian prison system which focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment and various American atrocities such as the war on drugs and the private prison pipeline such as “kids for cash”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
    • wang_li 3y ago
      Kids for cash was a crime. It doesn't reinforce the idea that the system is designed to ship people into private prisons. It shows the opposite.
      • uicompat 3y ago
        This comment makes me incredibly sad. It’s hard to put into words how destructive your line of reasoning is, and the confidence with which you express it frightens me that others might even share it with you. I would argue that the private prison system is in fact designed to do exactly this, namely to put people in prison and keep them there for profit. You could argue that my claim that their intent is nefarious is speculation and I’ll grant you that, because I am unfamiliar with any private prison owners or the people who came up with the idea, but by that token you’d have to grant your opinion about the intent behind private prisons is also purely speculative, and I would add more damaging than my speculation. > The charges outlined in the information[23] described actions between 2000 and 2007 by both judges to assist in the construction and population of private juvenile facilities operated by the two Pennsylvania Child Care companies, acting in an official capacity in favor of the private facilities over the facility operated by Luzerne County. Your attempt at logic somehow leads you to tell the victims over a 7 year period ~“look, you won, now stop bringing attention to this issue, the system is designed to do something else, who cares that it is capable of being exploited in this manner”. If everyone had your perspective those prisons would still be doing this, but thankfully in that 7 year period of “the system working as designed” activists speculated that something nefarious was happening and brought attention to how it actually works. > It shows the opposite. This is incredibly naive. When has one entity getting caught ever been a legitimate excuse for everyone else similarly situated to be free from scrutiny? What is “the opposite” in this context anyway? Do you believe private prisons exist to empty themselves and “give cash to kids”? How does a private prison sustain itself with a population of 0?
  • rolph 3y ago
    why punish twice for one crime ?
• BurningFrog 3y ago
  They're not imprisoned in order to force them to do work.
  • Larrikin 3y ago
    Except when they are https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
    • rrdharan 3y ago
      That case was about the (private) prison system itself profiting from the number of inmates increasing, not from labor the inmates were forced to provide.
  • spywaregorilla 3y ago
    You don't think the fact that the prison's economically depend on slave labor to function has any side effects on how the justice system works for those slaves?
    • BurningFrog 3y ago
      It's certainly possible. But the courts doing the sentencing and the prison owners are typically completely separate entities. It's not just one "justice system" run by one group of people.
• 5555624 3y ago
  >Keeping someone trapped in order to force them to do work is called “slavery” and it’s generally frowned upon in the modern era. It may be frowned upon; but, it's legal. Even in 1865, prison labor was scene as "acceptable" slavery. It's the exemption in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "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."
  • giraffe_lady 3y ago
    "This atrocity is legal" is really not a very strong argument I don't think. Chattel slavery was legal until it wasn't, marital rape was legal until it wasn't, etc etc. The fact that our constitution explicitly allows slavery is a stain on all of our souls. But it is completely irrelevant in a discussion about the ethics of allowing slavery.
    • gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Putting a person in a prison, de-facto is a forcible, long-term restraint on their right to free movement. Also known as slavery. If we want to "fully" abolish slavery, it's hard to see how prisons can even exist. Or maybe we can acknowledge "slavery" is a loaded term designed to cause reactionary thinking.
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        1) I support prison abolition, yes. 2) What is or isn't de facto slavery is worth discussing but we should certainly move towards removing de jure slavery. 3) I don't know the intention of framers of the constitution in choosing the word slavery, but it is the word they chose. So unless you mean "reactionary" very very literally, using it to describe advocates for a progressive cause interpreting a word well within its historically normative meaning is at best slick rhetorical judo. At worst an indication of bad faith.
        • 3y ago
• EasyMark 3y ago
  People aren't "trapped", they are there because they broke the law. The work should be voluntary though. Also Portland is showing exactly how well allowing hard drugs to flourish works. The voluntary uptake of drug rehabilitation offers has been terrible as most skeptics suggested. I'm glad they are doubling down on it for the forseeable future so the rest of the country will be slow to enact "shoot up heroin on the corner lolz" laws. Weed is fine but fenty, crack, meth, etc will destroy people and kill any will they have to recover from it. Imprisoning addicts is ridiculous. Imprisoning drug dealers and other 1 step removed killers? I have zero problems with that.
  • MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    There's entire thinktanks dedicated to harassing companies for sourcing materials anywhere near Xiajiang, while there's mountains of proof the US has a for-profit prison industry with incentives to keep it around by providing companies with dirt cheap slave labor and this site just goes "well they broke the law so they deserve it". Neat
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • FireBeyond 3y ago
    Portland screwed up. Circumstances were beyond their control, but they botched the "reaction". Essentially, with the decriminalization was meant to come a whole host of support network and rehab and other programs (regardless of what you may feel about the viability of the same). Then COVID happened, everything was decriminalized, and all of the other stuff did not, or barely, got off the ground, and is playing catch up now. And the result has been entirely predictable. > voluntary uptake of drug rehabilitation offers has been terrible as most skeptics suggested As a paramedic who administers Narcan multiple times a week, I get this. But the rationale is "if someone is using drugs, is even a 2% (arbitrary number) entry into rehab a success? Certainly if compared to 0%". Let's also be real, it's not the legality of harder drugs that determine whether people do them or not. I'm entirely in agreement. Dealers and suppliers? Those are, and should (and in PDX are) be illegal still. Portland Police have to shoulder their share of the blame, too, here, not (just) the social constructs - Portland Police were some of the worst in the country when it came to things like BLM, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys and similar (and behind Seattle were one of the top per capita when it came to "number of officers who attended 1/6") and have been happy to "quiet quit" (worse, really) the last few years.