I grew up in a prison town, adjacent to their corn and cattle fields. It began about 1910 as a reformatory where Wash DC convicts would be sent to rural Lorton and taught working trades, from brick making to farming.
I've been reflecting how this and similar prisons all (AFAIK) elapsed into the same dismal hellholes that 19th century sanitariums did. Eventually reformers die and are replaced by politically driven, officious beancounters.
This would be different, with a different incentive. Like if the reform is working, the instituation gets the taxes on the wages paid to a reformed prisoner after prison.
95 eurocents per hour, which can be used for the prison shop, to rent a TV or radio. You can buy a can of coke, phone cards, condoms, cigarettes or a packet of crisps.
A lot of the US prison labor is also largely voluntary they're just paid pennies and make loads of money for the state or private prison contractor running their prison.
There was a meeting about Electronics Recycling in California, long ago.. A new California law was going into effect regarding E-Waste. Many companies, media outlets, smart people and activists were gathered.
A particular guy stood up and pitched his company solution. That company was called Unicor. The spokesman was well-spoken, had clear points, and was African American. The pitch essentially was, use prison labor for E*Waste, contracted via Unicor.
A second person stood up in the audience and called it what it was, in front of everyone. Privately, the two nearly came to blows back stage out of sight, shortly afterwards.
this is not fake in the USA, and even more not fake elsewhere in the world.
yes, true story. The anti-humor follow-up is .. that same "prison labor objector" gave a rousing and heartfelt speech to Googlers in Mtn View around the same time.. more than 200 engineers and others at a meeting.. Googlers did nothing.. Apple did (almost) nothing.. it never was solved really.. much worse going on now
I wonder what those competing with the prisoner made products in the US market but subject to stricter rules and higher cost say about all that. And about Unfair Methods of Competition or Unfair Trade Practices.
This is not a 'food brand' thing. And has been going on for ages. It's awful exploitation. From Microsoft getting their packaging for Windows '95, to Victoria's Secret,Nintendo, and Starbucks.Just to name a few. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2002/mar/15/prison-coff...
“All day long they work so hard
Til the sun is going down
Mending all the highways and byways
And wearing, wearing a frown
You hear them moaning their lives away
Then you hear somebody say:
That’s the sound of the men
Working on the chain / gang.”
People always get confused when I say the US should finally get around to banning slavery.
I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.
People argue that what we currently have isn't the same or as bad, but present-day prisoners would point out that the current system is a form of eugenics: We keep a large percentage of reproductive-age black males locked up where they can't father or raise children. Back in the slave days, owners often chose who breeded with whom. Both are reprehensible, but you could argue either situation is worse than the other. At least the old policy didn't have the effect of slowly reducing / diluting out the black population.
The 1860 census counted just over 4 million enslaved African Americans in the South, out of a population of about 31.4 million.[0][1]
There are about 1.9 million people incarcerated in jail or prison in the United States today.[2]
The scale of incarceration in the US today is mind-boggling, but is itself under half the number of people enslaved at the height of the Southern slave economy.
The oddness of referring to the "slave trade" is the height of the "Atlantic Slave Trade" far predated the peak of slavery in the US and contributed directly far more to the Caribbean and Brazil than to the rest of the Americas. US chattel slavery, particularly the form that exploded post cotton-gin, was a system of directly controlling the reproductive capacity of enslaved black and native Americans.
>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade
Wikipedia says
>According to the latest available data at the World Prison Brief on May 7, 2023, the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 531 people per 100,000
531 people per 100,000 works out to about half a percent. Meanwhile during slavery in the US, wikipedia says
>The slaves of the colonial era were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31 percent of the population.
Even in low slavery areas, the slavery rate is higher than current incarceration rates by several fold.
Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.
Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.
The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.
>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.
It's explicitly talking about "percentage" at the start. It would be weird if they silently switched to absolute numbers afterwards.
i read it as percentage applied to the first half, but not the second -- perhaps only on the grounds that to distribute the word "percentage" would make the claim obviously false.
Whether false by percentage or not, I'm not sure relative percentages are of that much importance. Surely the hundreds of thousands of american soliders dying in the US civil war wouldnt be relieved to hear that perhaps more black people were enslaved today, only to feel their sacrifce justified when hearing it was a mere 0.5%
i think the post civil war era of America would be horrifying to many who died precisely to avoid it, their deaths rendered effectively pointless for at least a century
> We keep a large percentage of reproductive-age black males locked up where they can't father or raise children.
To tie this into eugenics I think you'd have to make the case that black people who aren't criminals are being unfairly targeted for imprisonment. Otherwise it's just a side effect of criminal behaviour, and criminals end up in prison regardless of ethnicity.
I'm not suggesting it would be difficult to make that case. But some people tend to disregard systemic bias, so it would seem that everything is fine. If you don't want to be imprisoned, all you have to do is stop acting like a criminal.
A racial discrepancy exists in the demographics of those convicted of murder. Furthermore, most of the black men in prison for murder were convicted of killing another black person (most murders are intraracial). Do you mean to suggest that the laws against murder, which put black murderers away for killing other black people, were created to systematically target black men?
nope. you would indeed need more evidence than mere racial disparity in the distribution of inmates. thankfully such evidence exists, not least in the base rates of crimes in both populations compared to their prison populations -- but even such things arent needed, we have legislators on record explaining the motivations of the drug laws (et al.)
there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves, we need not pretend we live in some world where society operates on egalitarian principles. The last slaves died in the 40s, 50s; institutional racism as an explicit policy of the state and of core economic and political institutions carried on until at least the 90s.
AFAIK, US prisons aren't making use of that 13th amendment exception and prison labor is voluntary. Prisoners choose it, despite the low wages, because it beats sitting around on their ass all day. There's a very valid argument to be made for paying them the normal minimum wage, if for no other reason than to be fair to the rest of the workforce, but doing away with the opportunity to work for prisoners would just be cruel.
As for it being eugenics, most prisoners are in for violent crimes or property crimes. Imprisoning people for stuff like failure to pay child support (modern debtors prison) is shameful, but not the sort of thing most US prisoners are in for.
There was a decent Netflix special on this - 13th amendment (I believe that was the name). Basically slavery never actually ended, it’s just hidden in the prison system now. Society is ok with it because we’ve somehow gotten this distorted view that prison is about punishment and not rehabilitation.
Then wonder why we have such a high rate of recidivism.
While I certainly would not support the abuses in the article, being required to work 5 days a week whether you want to or not is rehabilitative for many people who cannot hold down a job because they lack discipline and patience to appreciate that this is how productive citizens afford the basics of life. Along with drug addiction treatment, education, and psychological services, participation in labor is part of making them productive members of society again.
It should also not be for the profit of private companies. They are maintained by our tax dollars, and the public should reap that benefit.
> While I certainly would not support the abuses in the article, being required to work 5 days a week whether you want to or not is rehabilitative for many people who cannot hold down a job because they lack discipline and patience to appreciate that this is how productive citizens afford the basics of life.
That’s odd, because the countries with the lowest rate of recidivism don’t have forced labor. “Lack of discipline” isn’t the reason most of them are in prison, it’s lack of skills and opportunity. Nothing about the prison industrial complex is fixing either of those problems.
It is subjecting them to a dog-eat-dog culture of violence though. Not exactly surprising people generally come out even less able to productively participate in society than when they go in.
I couldn't find any studies that specifically focused on involuntary labor; presumably some of the people in the linked studies were willing to work and not forced.
Participation in prison labor significantly improved post-prison employment outcomes, but it yielded mixed results for prison misconduct and had little overall impact on recidivism. When we examined the extent to which prisoners
participated in prison labor, the best outcomes were observed for those who spent a
greater proportion of their overall confinement time working a job in prison. As the
percentage of prison time spent working increased, we found significant improvements in
prison misconduct, post-prison employment, and several measures of recidivism.
Work programs aren't magic, and they're certainly not going to cure sociopathy. They're a means to train and habituate people whose criminal behavior may have been significantly affected by their inability to maintain gainful employment. Of course we should continually try to improve them for relevancy and effectiveness.
Wow this comment reads like it was written 150 years ago. You should really both read the article and watch the documentary about which you’re replying to, you'll learn a lot.
Between racially-biased mandatory minimum sentences, forced prison labor, and the fact that felons lose their right to vote, the United States prison industrial complex is a system that truly isn’t far off from slavery.
You're confounding a lot of issues here that I made no reference to at all. But suffice it to say, you seem to have a fundamental problem with people, as determined by a court of law to have broken the social contract (courts which could be corrupt - but again, separate issue), losing any modicum of their rights as free citizens. That is a fringe opinion.
Someone referenced a documentary claiming prison system is modern day slavery. You refuted their claims pulled from said documentary with standard prison industrial complex rhetoric, which is completely unfounded and not backed by any kind of real-world data, especially in the US. Try digging in a bit. It’s irrelevant if it’s a fringe opinion.
"Slavery as a cure for NEEThood," is an interesting (read: horrifying) proposition. Assuming that people "lack discipline and patience" is begging the question; the requirement of productivity to justify one's existence, post-industrialization, is circumspect, particularly in an economic system that relies on some level of unemployment to keep prices for even basic goods down.
Noted this in a comment above, but restating it here: If someone has wronged me or my family or society at large in some kind of serious manner, rehabilitating is not really a concern for me. I think they should be punished. Plain and simple.
Yes, we know, thank you. As the moral and spiritual arguments against bloodthirsty retribution are well established in most of the world's belief systems I won't try to rehash them here. Yours isn't a fringe view, we're all aware of it and it has been taken into account, in fact is the basis of the current system. Please allow us to discuss other approaches. Don't stress too much, I'm sure we will continue to torture the slaves.
I hope you or your family are never hurt by a criminal. However, if that does happen, I assume you will be okay with the criminal going to a summer camp where they sing songs, play games, and eat bonbons. ;)
Incomprehensible to you that this a sincerely held belief? In fact I have been the victim of violent crimes, and I have given statements advocating for maximum leniency. I want what is best for my community, and retribution is not.
> Incomprehensible to you that this a sincerely held belief? In fact I have been the victim of violent crimes, and I have given statements advocating for maximum leniency.
Well, I won't call you a liar. I've seen people do this before, and I've always been just... confused.
> I want what is best for my community, and retribution is not.
I think this is the crux of the disagreement.
My belief is that retribution is the immune system of civilization.
> My belief is that retribution is the immune system of civilization.
Have you engaged with any justice system that isn't based on retribution? Have you seen the results they achieve? Norway is the classic example. They give more lenient punishment for crimes, their prisons are vastly more comfortable, and actively try to educate their prison population. All things Americans (as a general point) would scoff at.
The result? Norway has a vastly lower recidivism rate. 20% vs 75+% in the US. Norway is a uniquely good example, but similar results play out across Northern Europe.
> Have you engaged with any justice system that isn't based on retribution?
Most people here who live in SF have done just that, not by their own choice - and the results are not pretty. "Restorative" justice might or might not work in places like Norway, but let's just say other implementations have been quite bad.
So again, yes, thank you for stating the mainstream position on retribution. Please allow those of us who are interested to at least discuss other possibilities for our selves and our world.
I haven’t been, but I’ve been close with multiple people who have been wronged personally (near-deadly assault, unprovoked, all cases unrelate) and they all came around quickly to not wanting any vengeance on the assailant, legal or not. I was surprised, frankly.
In all cases survivors just wanted to move on, and simply not hear about the perps.
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 associated with prisoners, that’s how you get wrongful arrests and draconian drug laws.
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.
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?
>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."
"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.
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.
The point of limiting people's freedom of movement is to prevent them from being a danger to others (what's sometimes called 'incapacitation'). It's pretty much the same logic as what used to be called "shelter in place", except a lot more extreme because the level of risk is correspondingly higher. Of course once you're going to keep prisoners, it makes sense to try and offer them some kind of rehabilitation. The punishment, deterrence and retaliation aspect is not totally absent but is pretty much incidental; prison is never going to be somewhere people want to be, regardless of whether we happen to think of it as some sort of punishment.
If you kill 20 people with a car into a parade, you have no chance at rehabilitation. Punishment is perfectly acceptable - especially when it is hardly brutal, we aren’t even sending the perp to an oil rig.
The sooner we stop playing games about prisons being rehab facilities, the better. I have yet to hear a successful prison rehab story, and the statistics show that doesn’t work. When punishment is the focus - look at the 80s crime wave. It worked.
I think it’s because I know that there is no way, whatsoever, to build a society without prisons, because there will always be crime.
The relevant question is how many people exist who would have likewise killed 20 people, but didn't because the prospect of rotting in a "punishment" focused prison scared them straight. I'm not saying that such people don't exist, I just think they're a whole lot rarer than the alternative, i.e. those who can be meaningfully rehabilitated and induced to not reoffend.
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.
1) And just like that, you’ve never been a victim of a violent assault. I don’t wish anything on anyone, but your worldview completely changes when it happens to you.
2) Isn’t being forced to literally be in a cage for years de jure slavery by itself?
IDK what it is about this subject that makes people think they know me. You don't know anything about me, about what kind of life I've lived. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39275721
I think there is a difference between keeping people confined against their will and coercing them to labor for your own economic benefit. Neither thing should be permitted, but I'm not trying to solve all problems overnight. We were talking about the laboring thing, let's stick to that.
I see elsewhere that you have complete confidence in your view about this, with no room for doubt or curiosity. If you can't entertain the possibility of being anything but an adversary, then I can't justify spending more time or effort on this subject with you.
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”.
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?
You are reading a lot into my three sentences. I didn't say any of the things you are refuting. I'm not going to defend them, not simply because I never espoused those opinions, but also because lots of them are completely irrational anyway.
Communication is a two way street: what is said and how it’s received.
With imprecise communication there is always the danger of misunderstanding, and that can lead to devastating consequences.
You say I misunderstood your comment, that’s fair, but I have read and reread it many times and am unable to interpret it elsewise.
Please elaborate.
It will be best for both of us.
I will know what you truly meant, and perhaps feel better about your position, and you will be assured that your true intent is clear and fully received by your audience.
A crime was identified as proof that the system was organized in a particular way. The fact that it was a crime explicitly tells us the system is not that way. The Green River Killer murdered lots of people and wasn't arrested for 20 years. This doesn't mean that the laws and criminal justice system are designed to advance murder. The fact that they were able to identify him as the murderer and arrested him proves the system is against murder.
Things I didn't say:
- any value judgment about private prisons
- no statement about shutting up or stop bringing up the crimes
- didn't justify or attempt to justify excluding oversight of government
- anything about the business model of private prisons
> The Green River Killer murdered lots of people and wasn't arrested for 20 years. This doesn't mean that the laws and criminal justice system are designed to advance murder. The fact that they were able to identify him as the murderer and arrested him proves the system is against murder.
I think your analogy is flawed.
For it to apply there would have to have been an institution that can only exist in the presence of mass murder similarly as private prisons only exist in the presence of incarceration.
A better analogy would be Civil Asset Forfeiture. A perfectly legal act by police, but also clearly heinous. The fact that these "forfeitures" are written into the police budgets means "the system" is designed to require it, but still stops short of "advancing" the infractions where that procedure is then abused.
For instance, if I get pulled over for a broken tail light, and happen to have $10k in cash on me and the police seize the money, it would be ridiculous to then say that "tail light awareness is designed to advance civil asset forfeiture".
> Things I didn't say:
> - any value judgment about private prisons
I can accept that, but you were objecting to a example provided in a comment that was critical of private prisons. It suggests you are in support of them.
> - no statement about shutting up or stop bringing up the crimes
> - didn't justify or attempt to justify excluding oversight of government
I certainly read your comment's dismissive "It shows the opposite." to be a pithy way of trying to stop the conversation about private prisons and specifically kids for cash.
It also suggests that you think my bringing it up is superfluous anyway, and everything is as it should be, so why then would there be any need for oversight? Conversely, if you support oversight then you must admit there is a flaw in the system capable of being exploited.
If I write a strongly typed function (the system) then it would be unnecessary for me to write another function that checks the types of the inputs before running the previous function (oversight) because the types are already a part of "the system".
> - anything about the business model of private prisons
Okay, but you did say: "It doesn't reinforce the idea that the system is designed to ship people into private prisons. It shows the opposite." By these bullet points you seem to be implying that private prisons are somehow "other than" in regards to "the system". What is your definition of the system?
Because kids for cash was organised by judges and prison owners who I would say are precisely "the system".
This is the point I was making about communication. The exact words you use is only a piece of what you communicate.
And hey, if you feel I put words into your mouth then this is an opportunity for you to set me straight on how you do in fact feel about these things.
What is you value judgement on private prisons?
What is your opinion on the business model of private prisons?
Do you think that exploitation like "kids for cash" implies flaws in "the system"?
You're rationalizing reading all your anti-opinions into what I wrote so you can argue against them. I never said any of the things you're objecting to.
Scandinavian system is completely incompatible with US population numbers and economic realities for the US. Their total population is less than 39 million, while the US has 10x that.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
I specifically said “draconian drug laws” and didn’t go into which ones I believed were bad, because that’s not the point of the discussion. The point is that those laws continue to exist to fill prisons and keep the prison industrial complex moving.
If prisoners at least got paid minimum wage then maybe when they left prison they'd have a pool of funds to get their life put back together rather than resorting to crime in order to survive, repeating a cycle that gets them put back in there.
Wouldn't in many of those cases those funds be more needed by their victims to help restore a little of what was lost. Direct things like paying medical bills or supporting someone who can no longer work or less direct things like paying for therapy for someone who is now traumatized?
As for victimless crimes, do they really deserve prison to begin with and wouldn't we do better with alternatives, or perhaps even removing some of those laws entirely?
Having a percentage of their pay going to reparations for any identified victims of their crimes seems like it would be a fair system, and much better than what currently goes on where these companies are pocketing all of the profits from their labor.
That sounds like a feel-good system that would be very difficult to implement in practice. It's very different for different kinds of crimes, and nitpicking over level of victimhood is not something the law seems very concerned about. It could open up a whole cottage industry of "Victimhood Optimization" where people get very good at claiming they were the victim of some nebulous crime, and deserve a payout.
There are "victimless crimes" that are only victimless because everyone was lucky: a 3rd DUI, firing a gun in a crowded area but not hitting anyone, etc. Then there are crimes that have millions of potential victims: dumping toxic waste in a river, etc. It'd be an entire extra enigma the courts would have to figure out with every case. (I do think a big percentage of the "victimless crimes", like personal drug possession, should not even be crimes at all, but that's beside this point.)
Obviously the for-profit prisons would absolutely hate this kind of reform and will spend millions lobbying against it if it ever garnered serious consideration. All the more reason to push for it.
Correctional Officer unions are among the hardest lobbiers against ANY decriminalization of marijuana, or any general "reform" to our criminal statutes.
That blows my mind. "Keep more things illegal so we have a job".
Prison is supposed to keep people who are harmful to society away from their victims. Anything else is secondary and should not impinge on prison's functionality of segregating convicts from society.
Give them something to do that normally doesn't get done. I could think of them building trails and huts in national parks like the CCC did in the 30s. Or other charitable things. Them working for cheap for profitable corporations is a massive market distortion which costs other non-imprisoned people their jobs.
Working is fine but they should get paid normally so it doesn't ruin the labor market for all the non-slaves. They should start getting the paychecks they earned when they get out. If they mess up and re-offend, that's when we take that money away. The incentives now are all aligned with going back to crime, which works well for the slavers but not for anyone else.
A slave that isn't given tasks to do is still a slave.
We can discuss the negative incentives of having them do labor and how that might pervert our legal system (companies that benefit lobbying for harsher penalties on victimless crimes), but they are still denied their freedom regardless of which way that discussion goes.
I don't want to have a semantic argument about the definition of "slave", maybe we can agree on the term "involuntary servant".
Prisoners should be denied as much freedom as is necessary to protect the rest of society and no more. Forcing people to work against their will does not protect anybody. It is not legitimate to say that if we deny one freedom we might as well deny all of them, they aren't free regardless.
>Prisoners should be denied as much freedom as is necessary to protect the rest of society and no more.
I think many of those prisoners are already denied far more freedoms that necessary to keep them safe, so would that mean they are already worse off? The added labor is even worse, but I don't find that as the tipping point of good to bad yet a lot of the past discussion I've seen on if prison is slavery or not does seem to treat it as the tipping point. Getting past how we are naming things, my disagreement is that forced labor isn't what tips us from having a just prison system to an unjust one, and instead that we are mostly already over that tipping point even without forced labor being included.
I agree that forced labor is not a tipping point, I haven't seen it described that way but I wouldn't agree with someone who said that everything we do up to forced labor is fine.
I feel like the addition of being forced to work to benefit the man, while being paid little to nothing, while being physically abused, while losing the little free time they had, might just make those two things not the same.
Oxford dictionary's definition requires ownership, so if the prisons/corporations do not actually legally own the person, then technically it doesn't qualify as slavery regardless of what sort of forced labor is required.
But is such a distinction really helpful to the discussion? If someone owns another person and forces them to work but doesn't force them to obey them, does it technically count as not a slave because it doesn't meet all three requirements of Oxford dictionary's definition. Will it really help if we then start comparing dictionary definitions of "forced" or "owned"? Or even what counts as work. A prisoner required to clean their cells and return their trays after lunch are forms of labor that could be done by janitor... is that work?
I don't think these matter once you have locked someone in a cage, even if it is a slightly gilded. Metaphorically speaking, no actual gold leaf or gold paint in use.
Something can be bad and not an "holocaust", someone can be abused an not a "slave", someone can be racist and not "literally hitler", this modern perversion of language doesn't do anything besides discrediting the person who uses it.
We already have very specific words for very specific situations, we don't have to reuse loaded terms
So are you seriously advocating that there be no consequences at all for those who would hurt others, and even kill them, just because you personally define it as "slavery"?
It's not that they're working it's that they're paid basically nothing for their labor which is bad for them and also the people in surrounding areas who have to compete with the absolute pittance the prison labor forces are paid.
Education and Socializing activities for starters. Slavery isn't exactly going to rehabilitate anyone. At best they'll be indifferent and at worst it will just make them more angry and resentful at "the system". Hard to integrate back into society with that kind of head on your shoulders.
If someone has wronged me or my family or society at large in some kind of severe manner by committing a crime, I don't really care if they are rehabilitated. I want them punished. Why complicate things?
Also, I recognize that there are a lot of people in prison in the U.S. who shouldn't be there. I think our the way people end up in prison needs reform, of course. However, once there, the point is to punish people for doing something wrong, IMHO. "Rehabilitation" is not the point of prison.
Should we just lock prisoners up for life? Or perhaps we should skip that and murder them behind the courthouse after they've been convicted, saving some taxpayer dollars in the process?
Neither is a practical or morally justifiable answer, of course. Other than cases where defendants are sentenced to life without parole, most of the people incarcerated in the United States will eventually be released from prison (whether it be through parole or because their sentence has been completed).
A purely punitive prison system does nothing to prepare prisoners for their eventual release back into society. Which, again, will happen for most prisoners. Even setting aside the moral questions with that approach, you merely increase the odds of re-offending. How is that better for society?
> satisfying your want for revenge isn't a good enough reason to have the big expensive system that is prison
Retribution is an important component of justice [1]. Its utilitarian purpose is to prevent out-of-the-law reprisal.
You see it on HN, where certain topics attract someone who will be “sickened” or “disgusted” by some thing or other, and reflexively want something horrible to happen to everyone involved. (If you’re honest, you’ve done this too. It’s a childish impulse inherent to being human.)
Retribution is deserved punishment. Revenge is the infliction of harm or hurt on someone, and to me is "above and beyond" justice retribution, remediation, and rehabilitation.
I concur, but I think my point still stands: on its own, that's not enough to justify the existence of the whole machine. There are far cheaper ways to mete out punishment.
You don't want punishment to be cheap, it leads to very bad incentives. Expensive punishment means that it's in everyone's self interest to actually make sure that they're punishing the right guy. If effective rehabilitation turns out to be costly, that's not a bad thing either.
Most crimes don't result in life imprisonment or death, which means we have to consider the chances of them victimizing someone else once they get out. The punitive systems tend to do dramatically worse on this metric than the rehabilitative ones; they are crime and victimization generators.
Funnily enough, studies of families of murder victims where the murdered was sentenced to death show that they tend to disagree with you.
It "satisfies" for some very brief moment, but the loss is still there, and it doesn't make anyone's life better. It doesn't improve anything for anyone.
I'm reminded of American History X. A character is raging against everyone and anyone he has perceived has hurt him, his family, his home, his country. Immigrants, POC, whatever. He has responded with hate crimes, destroying grocery stores, forming groups of likeminded (or white) people.
His efforts end him in jail, and he's still raging.
And then a teacher asks him, says: "There was a moment, when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me, that I saw happen to my people. Used to blame everybody. Blamed White people, blamed society, blamed God. I didn't get no answers 'cause I was asking the wrong questions. You have to ask the right questions."
Like what?
"Have any of the things you've done made your life better?"
They give voice to anger, rage, revenge (that's honestly a more honest word, in your case - you don't just want them punished, you want revenge on them). But none of those feelings improves anything.
No, I think there is some learning occurring. Only, the lesson is that society isn't worth integrating into. This is a beneficial lesson for the slavers.
To avoid two bad things, the following should be true when a company uses prison labor:
- The prisoner should be able to freely choose to work or not to work.
- The prisoner should be able to choose whom to work for and be able to quit.
- The prisoner should be making the same wage as someone not in prison. This wage may be garnished by the jail to pay for prison (separate topic), but it should still cost the company the same as a non-prisoner laborer.
The bad things that are avoided are:
- being unethical
- making sure corporations don't lobby to expand prison labor - which could have the side of effect of criminializing things that most people don't consider crimes.
Working as a firefighter, inmate firefighters are among the hardest workers on the fire line, and do so despite often getting the worst work to do (hoeing and clearing fire breaks in 100F+ windy days with smoke and fire).
I'm very much appreciative of the fact that, though not mentioned, a growing number of fire departments are willing to overlook (certain) criminal history for hiring ex-inmate firefighters.
if industry can capture labor at the lower price point, there is a lot of incentive not to hire civilians with health care and worker rights, instead get more prison labor. This is older than Egypt.
its not about them working or not, its about what companies benefit from using such labor as opposed to employing people who need to support self/family.
Yeah, I don't understand why prison labor should be controversial as long as they're not being treated terribly. Give them minimum wage if weighs on your conscience, and pay it out in a lump sum when they get out.
Because it sets up incentives for whoever benefits from the labor to lobby for stricter crime laws regardless of whether those stricter laws lead to less crime in the long term.
Because we tend not to like slave labor in the modern world. Using prisoners for slave labor creates perverse incentives to enslave more people, and keep them enslaved longer.
That's a pretty important detail, don't you think? I don't think gulags would have a much better reputation if they merely kept their political prisoners interned rather than working.
As it concerns prisoner abuse I don't really care so much who is being locked up as how they're treated.
Like a hypothetical prison system that is hell incarnate with all manners of torture and grueling labor that destroys your body isn't made any better for having a magic oracle so that only objectively bad people go there.
I believe prison serves one essential function and that is removing people from society that are an active danger to others* and all attempts other than physical constraint have failed. And prisons would serve their essential function equally as a gulag or a 5 star hotel california and given the cost per prisoner interned there's really no excuse for it to not be the latter.
* And should be released immediately when that stops being the case.
The “we’ve made no progress!” narrative is ridiculously counterproductive. Slavery was orders of magnitude more atrocious than the modern judicial system.
The US was certainly “gentle” in how it reunited, which I am not sure was the correct move. Doesn’t mean progress wasn’t made and it doesn’t mean prison == slavery.
The gentle strategy was the only way to make things work, at all. Otherwise you would have seen an insurgency worse than the Klansman.
Similarly, Japan and Germany post Second World War.
For contrast, look at how well our De-Ba’athification policy went in Iraq, disenfranchising a largely uninvolved military trained, fighting aged male population for the crimes of few at the top of the pyramid.
For the life of me I don’t understand the fools intent on retrying a 150 year old conflict they no party to.
The south was truly demobilized, and Lincoln, not with his own faults, was trying to make some amends. Unfortunately, he was assassinated. And due to how the rules were written then the VP, his successor, was his political opponent. Who rolled back almost every law he passed. In hindsight the US election system saw the bug in their system, but it was still too late.
> Otherwise you would have seen an insurgency worse than the Klansman.
Klansmen didn't gain much influence until 50 years later when they had captured the imagination of a certain US President.
> crimes of few at the top of the pyramid.
Okay, we're going to have to debunk this again. Slavery was bad and a lot of southern white people were involved to keep that system in place. A majority owned, controlled, or rented the enslaved. So it was not a few who benefitted slavery, there weren't a few Germans in the Nazi party, and there weren't a couple of French who supported the Vichy regime while everyone else was in the resistance.
>Klansmen didn't gain much influence until 50 years later when they had captured the imagination of a certain US President.
While the klan itself didn't gain influence until later, it was one of a litany of paramilitary groups engaged in similar acts. Those groups were very influential, using intimidation to secure Democratic control of the South for decades.
Calling them all the KKK is technically incorrect, but basically right
>And due to how the rules were written then the VP, his successor, was his political opponent. Who rolled back almost every law he passed. In hindsight the US election system saw the bug in their system, but it was still too late.
The "second place in the presidential election becomes VP" system ended with the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.
Johnson was VP because Lincoln and the Republicans picked him as a compromise candidate to show solidarity with the South. Something that somewhat backfired after Lincoln's assassination.
Eh, enough similarities and differences can be drawn between all of those analogs to arrive back at “not sure” what would’ve been optimal. And of course what was optimal in the near term could be so highly suboptimal in the long terms that a different decision could’ve been warranted.
Well… it’s pretty simple: lots of people are racist fucking losers who think it was the war and not their own moral failures that kicked their “glorious lineage” into the mud.
Private for-profit prisons are pretty much the same from a structural POV. The incentive is to maximize profits per inmate, and rehabilitation is totally disregarded.
I'm not sure how this even needs to be said, but someone convicted of felonies is always subject to having their rights forfeited for the duration of their sentence. And I'm ok with that. You can't even put them in prison, were this not true.
Those who whine about how putting them to work amounts to slavery seem to do so out of pure reflex, and it's just tiresome. You're ok with locking them in a dungeon, but god forbid that they be put to work. You realize that most actually earn wages, and that none of them are doing it for free, right? There's just no point, the assholes usually sabotage products if forced.
It was a shock to me to learn that refusing to work in prison is grounds for being put into solitary confinement. You act as if they are given a choice but it is made under duress.
Yeh, it's probably torture. When the cops twist someone's arms behind their back, that's torture too, if milder and shorter in duration. When they shoot someone with a taser, and repeatedly shock them with high voltage, torture too.
What are authorities to do when they demand compliance, and the criminal says "oh, no thank you, I kindly refuse to submit to your authority"? When the convict says "no, I don't think I will accept this punishment"?
So sure. Threat of torture. I'm feeling ok about it. Glad we cleared that up.
PS You make a good case for suspending executions. Imagine 40 or 50 years of solitary. Could even use robots to deliver meals, so that they can't even pretend that there's another human being on the other side of the vault door once a day or so. Really, what do you think prisons are?
Putting someone alone in a box for 23h/day because they refuse to work for $.30/hr is unconscionable. The comparisons to legitimate uses of force are non sequitors—no one is claiming torture when cops twist someone's arm behind their back.
> The average prison wage is less than $1 per hour.
We could make up an infographic about how convicts in most states can't even afford a 3 bedroom, 1 car garage apartment on their prison wages just to show everyone how evil it is.
There are abuses in prison that decent people should be offended by and work to prevent, but the idea that they are offered work for wages and the dollar amount's not up to the standards of the "let's unionize Starbucks" crowd just isn't one of them.
I’m sure those prisoners who protested for better conditions and the end of forced labor and were thrown in solitary confinement as punishment agree this whole thing is childish.
> Those who whine about how putting them to work amounts to slavery seems to do so out of pure reflex, and it's just tiresome.
The problem with specifically stating in the Constitution that slavery is abolished EXCEPT as punishment for a crime is that in today's day and age, it incentivizes punishment.
Can you or I say with any certainty that fish suppliers will be able to survive if they don't utilize legalized slave labor to farm their fish? We've just created an incentive for "Slave Fish Co." to lobby their local government to not fund rehabilitation services, or community outreach programs, and reduce investment in social programs. Create a local community that doesn't offer affordable rehab facilities and now the only option is going to prison.
Work as a form of rehabilitation makes sense when utilized correctly. But this is work as a form of punishment and we tied it in with economic factors. As I said, this just incentivizes local governments and lobbyists to ensure a growing supply of dirt-cheap labor.
> Work as a form of rehabilitation makes sense when utilized correctly.
It can't ever work correctly as rehabilitation. In the early 20th century, maybe those reformers had an excuse to believe that criminals just didn't have any honest options. But we know better today. Too many counter-examples of those who do have honest options, but commit crimes anyway. Why? They get a thrill out of it. Criminality becomes its own culture, one in which they can achieve a high status. It's simply a better career path to participate in that culture than to try to become adopted by another that you'd be a "foreigner" in for decades before you could ever find a path in that new one?
And in the meantime, it must be so thrilling. Lots of adrenaline. Lots of cash. Being chased, but feeling like you're too clever to be found or too strong to being taken down.
There's no rehabilitating that, not with work programs or anything else.
> Create a local community that doesn't offer affordable rehab facilities and now the only option is going to prison.
Haha. I know there's alot of shit being posted on reddit and other places like it about the poor guy who got caught with a joint and is sent to prison for 20 years, but do you really believe that? The junkie doesn't want rehab, and if he does (it must happen once in awhile, I suppose), rehab's not the difference between him quitting and falling down further into the spiral.
Most of the people there are guilty of violent crimes, the rest are guilty of selling large quantities of heroin and making things worse for that poor junkie you're so concerned about. The numbers bear this out, if you care to check.
There are a few borderline instances here and there, but prison labor isn't incentivizing any sort of corruption of the sort you're claiming to any degree we should be worried about. At least in this country. Who knows about China.
As it sits, do the prisoners have the right to refuse this work = sit in a cell or yard doing nothing? I might well choose the activity of the work.
The world's prison systems are, as we all know, systems that promote the wide dissemination of DIY crime instruction from 'old boys' as well as 'tech boys' and it works very well at that!!
With the rise of AI, and the application of AI to detailed instruction (AKA teaching) where each prisoner would have 3-4 hours of instruction, followed by 3-4 hours of AI supervised homework/surfing make a valuable day where they learn various new skills and are taught STEM matter as well as history/arts - as their intellect and interest allows. Prisoners could gain from this, as would we all.
No they do not have the right to refuse, and can be punished if they do. The text is pretty clear: "involuntary servitude" is permitted as punishment for a crime.
> More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.
It’s a bit more complex than that and has a bunch of edge cases.
For example, in most of the states, there are prisons that are pay-to-stay, so prisoners basically go in debt while they’re incarcerated. This further troubles their debts, putting more pressure on them to take on work. Part of this debt can be written off by working on specific jobs that are sourced by local employers. There was a case of a woman I read about, how she’s paying off her pay-to-stay prison debt working at a wings place part time, while serving her sentence.
Since every state has its own laws and complexities, you get a bunch of scenarios that add up, which, in my opinion, are highly immoral.
I'm genuinely not kidding, as a non-American who has some family living in US, some of that just sounds absolutely bizarre. However I'm not that sure about its intricacies. But keep in mind, going to prison for having debt is also a thing in the states. So not paying up your dues can eventually roll you back into the system.
I did very quick Googling, and my memory was based on reading these two [1] [2], I'm not entirely sure how are these correlated to criminal activities. Obviously, it's all nuanced and depends on each state, but don't mind being corrected:
Annita Husband was imprisoned for embezzlement and placed under the supervision of a restitution center until she completed that. Her debt, as it were, was to the State of Mississippi.
Similar with the other example. These are people who are required to have a job so they can pay restitution, and if they refuse to get a job they can be imprisoned as one possible punishment.
Regular people who are in debt do not face debtor's prison in the US, this is not a feature of the bankruptcy courts. Debtors prisons were more common in the distant past, and especially a thing in Europe.
I’m sorry, but if you’re forced to stay at a place until you pay off your debt, how is that “not a debt prison”? You can call it “restitution center”, but… c’mon. They’re not being sent there because of their other crimes, but specifically because they need to pay off their debt. I’m not saying they’re going into a supermax or something, but their freedom is actively being restricted, because they have not paid their debt.
These people stole that money. Paying it back is part of their sentence. A sentence for a criminal act. The criminal act of theft, or embezzlement. They are, in fact, being "sent there because of their other crimes." If they had taken out loans for that money and failed to pay it back, they would not be in this situation, they'd just have shitty credit ratings.
Restitution is not borrowed money. That's a pretty important distinction. Calling it debt may be strictly correct but it comparing it to consumer debt is disingenuous.
That's the part I don't get about people comparing this to slavery. You have the right to refuse. Everything I've heard from people actually in prison say they're grateful for it because it gives them something to do. Do we need to have reform around the prison system? Yes. Is targeting the one place where they are able to do something productive and earn some money the way to do it? Probably not.
Recidivism is so high for a lot of reasons, but two big ones are 1) prisons are focused too much on punishment for the sake of punishment and not enough on reforming those inmates who can be reformed (not all can); and, 2) ex-cons typically have little to no resources when they get out, have trouble finding employment, and turn back to crime as one of the only ways they can make any money at all. Does this mean they should get a pass for the crimes? Of course not.
But it does mean that we could combat #2 by actually paying convicts working as part of a prison sentence the wage they'd get for that same job after release. Why are we paying convicts less than $0.50/hr[0] for jobs they'd earn $25-30/hr for? Because it benefits those local economies, but at the cause of driving up recidivism. Imagine if you were incarcerated, had the option of working (the majority of incarcerated workers are punished if they don't work), and if you did you'd have thousands in savings when released to get back on your feet?
Being tossed in solitary confinement because you won't work for $0.40/hr sounds like slavery to me. It's right there in the language of the 13th amendment. Maybe has something to do with the US having the largest prison population in the world. Larger than China even, an authoritarian nation with 4x the population. Does that happen in a vacuum?
You think it is different in government run prisons? There are valid reasons to be against forced prison labor, but the prevalence of it has little to do whether the prison is run by the government or a private company.
Take for example California. There are no private prisons. Yet CA is one of the states requiring forced labor and prisoners can earn a maximum of 37 cents an hour:
Who is part of the prison industrial complex? How about the prison guard unions who directly benefit from having more prisoners?
>...Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California. The union spends heavily on influencing political campaigns, and on lobbying legislators and other government officials. CCPOA also hires public relations firms and political polling firms.
>As calls for reform of the state's prison system escalated during 2006, putting pressure on former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to take a more aggressive stance on reform.
This prison system with no private prisons is a prison system where the medical care is so bad that the system was taken over by the federal government:
>...The state's prison medical care system has been in receivership since 2006, when a federal court ruled in Plata v. Brown that the state failed to provide a constitutional level of medical care to its prisoners.
One should care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison in CA. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles.
>...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present.
After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners".
This isn't to say that CA prisons are the worst in the country - likely other state's prisons are just as bad as CA. When you have the people regulating a system be the same people who are running the system, you have an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.
Forced labor in prison is not "slavery", as that term is generally understood. It may be bad, and that labor benefiting private companies may be worse, but that doesn't mean it's "slavery". Also, people duly convicted of crimes lose many of their civil rights. This is not new, and there's nothing wrong with it per se. (It happens in every country.) Seriously people, you're not being clever or radical. You're just being foolish and/or dishonest. People who are against forced prison labor are trying to convince other people that it's "slavery" because they want to get rid of it (or pare it back, or stop private companies from benefiting from it, or whatever). It is very much an Orwellian tactic.
Forced labor is indeed slavery, which the Thirteenth Amendment unfortunately permits.
> 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.
By that definition, forcing a dad to work for child support (which happens sometimes, and I fully understand why) is slavery. That definition can apply to a lot of stuff if you stretch it, or if you remove context. Obviously having to work when you put yourself in a situation through the consequences of your own actions, with a sentence and due process, is not slavery. Having to work to provide for your children (legally so) is not slavery either. Now you can totally be against prison labor, I myself don't think it is beneficial for anyone, but you don't have to say it's "slavery" just to frame it as a pro or anti slavery debate lol.
By the legal definition of kidnapping, putting someone in jail could be considered to be kidnapping yet everyone knows very well that it just isn't the same
> By that definition, forcing a dad to work for child support (which happens sometimes, and I fully understand why) is slavery.
We don't force deadbeat dads to work; we force them to make payments. You can sell assets, use savings, beg/borrow/steal, but you're obligated to make the payments.
If we assigned a job to deadbeat dads, that would be involuntary servitude. (Certain levels of avoiding child support payments being a crime, this is currently Constitutionally permissible, but uncommon.)
> By the legal definition of kidnapping, putting someone in jail could be considered to be kidnapping yet everyone knows very well that it just isn't the same
The second word in the definition is unlawfully. Putting someone in jail via due process is not unlawful. I know we all like to think of Congress as entirely feckless, but the interns writing the regs typically aren't idiots.
Forced prison labor is very clearly not chattel slavery. And chattel slavery is what 99.9% of people mean when they talk about slavery in the US.
And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" qualifies "involuntary servitude", not "slavery". And in any case, lawyers like to err on the side of ruling out any possible misinterpretation, no matter how ridiculous.
If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that. You're being either daft or disingenuous, or both.
> Forced prison labor is very clearly not chattel slavery.
But it is, if unpaid, slavery.
> And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" qualifies "involuntary servitude", not "slavery". And in any case, lawyers like to err on the side of ruling out any possible misinterpretation, no matter how ridiculous.
No. The distinction between the two is that involuntary servitude covers being forced to work while being paid or otherwise compensated; a slave, in contrast, doesn't get paid. Both are forced labor, but one is slavery. US prison labor may be one or the other, depending on payment.
(An English teacher would also sigh at you for your parsing of the clauses, I suspect. Your interpretation would require a different arrangement of the commas, i.e. Neither slavery COMMA nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted COMMA shall exist within the United States...)
> If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that.
Correct, because at a glance, you don't know if it's forced labor. Some states do voluntary work gangs; in some scenarios it's even considered a perk.
> No. The distinction between the two is that involuntary servitude covers being forced to work while being paid or otherwise compensated; a slave, in contrast, doesn't get paid.
Do you have a citation for this claim?
> > If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that.
> Correct, because at a glance, you don't know if it's forced labor. Some states do voluntary work gangs; in some scenarios it's even considered a perk.
What if the adult in the scenario happens to know that the prisoners are not being paid? Then you think the correct answer to the child's question is "Yes, those are slaves"? With no further qualification necessary?
> The words involuntary servitude have a "larger meaning than slavery." "It was very well understood that, in the form of apprenticeship for long terms, as it had been practiced in the West India Islands, on the abolition of slavery by the English government, or by reducing the slaves to the condition of serfs attached to the plantation, the purpose of the article might have been evaded if only the word 'slavery' had been used."
If there wasn't a distinction between the two, the Amendment wouldn't need to mention both.
Your original claim was that "slavery" means forced work without compensation, whereas "involuntary servitude" means forced work with or without compensation. Your citation doesn't justify this claim. It not just that there's a distinction, it's the nature of the distinction that I'm disputing.
> If I see forced unpaid laborers, I'm entirely comfortable deeming them slaves.
Yeah, you're comfortable with it because you've redefined "slavery" to mean whatever you want it to mean. But if you did a survey of native English speakers, and asked them if unpaid workers on a chain gang were slaves, how many do you think would say "yes", without qualification? I would be shocked if the answer were more than 20%.
For most of the world's history, life ran on one motto:
"If you don't work (or someone who loves you doesn't work for you), you don't eat."
The alternative is manifestly unjust: A prisoner who might have killed 20 people gets to just live life, and can't be ordered to even keep the cell doors clean.
Why not keep going and just start selling prisoners directly into indenture? You could call them "servants" and sell them on blocks to the highest bidder. Require as a condition of purchase that a percentage of the purchase price be delivered into their hands when their indenture ends.
If we cannot punish prisoners for their crimes by being required to do even a modicum of labor (it's certainly not brutal anymore), why even put them in jail in the first place? We're restricting their right to free movement, which is de-facto slavery. If we want to abolish slavery fully, prisons themselves cannot exist.
Forced labour _is_ slavery, by definition. If your rights are taken away and you are forced to work, you are a slave.
The US 13th amendment says,
> either 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.
"Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". Ie, you're in prison, and required to labour. It's slavery. It's right there in that US consitutional amendment.
There are different types of slavery. You may be thinking of chattel slaves, where a person is owned. A prisoner is not owned. That does not mean that someone who is not owned by another human, yet who is forced to labour, is not a slave: it's called de facto slavery or state imposed forced labour slavery.
> people duly convicted of crimes lose many of their civil rights. This is not new, and there's nothing wrong with it per se.
The wrong part is when you connect "X loses many of their civil rights" to "Y makes a greater profit", and now Y has a lot of money and an incentive to spend a fraction of it on lobbying for legislative changes that will send even more people to prison... which means even more money for lobbying, etc.
A few iterations of this feedback loop and you get a system which routinely sends people to prison for trivial things, which routinely sends innocent people to prison, heck even a system where the innocent people are officially advised to "confess" and accept a plea bargain rather than insist on their rights and risk 10x greater penalty if they are falsely convicted.
> With the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865, slavery was deemed unconstitutional. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, was still explicitly allowed.
See my response above. When people talk about slavery in the US, they mean chattel slavery. Forced prison labor is clearly not chattel slavery. To pretend otherwise is to be either silly or disingenuous, or both.
Because it pisses me off when people try to 'argue' by stretching the commonly-understood meanings of emotionally-charged words like "slavery". Argue the merits, don't attempt cheap rhetorical legerdemain.
