The prisoners fighting wildfires in California
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
So besides giving them an opportunity to serve while incarcerated we need to make sure that incarceration does not keep them from rejoining society upon release simply because government rules tell them no.
There seems to be a reasonable case for thorough background checks for firefighters. You might be able to persuade me that "any felony conviction" is too broad and only certain kinds of felonies should be excluded.
Pissed on a wall or mooned somebody when drunk in front of a cop? Felony AND sex offender--just for good measure.
Had sex with your 17-year-old girlfriend when you were 18? Felony although some jurisdictions make exceptions and try to reduce this to misdemeanor depending upon age difference.
Picked up for drunk and disorderly and had a knife on you that exceeds specifications? Felony. Side note: there is a reason so many people like MagLite flashlights--they are similar in size to a billy club or truncheon but are legal.
Picked up with a small amount of marijuana while your friend was in possession of a much larger amount in the car. Felony.
Every single male I know has done something sufficiently stupid when he was young that could have been a felony.
In addition, if a cop picks you up, they can probably find a felony somewhere in the law that will stick unless you are a teetotaller.
The real problem is that non-violent felonies need to go away after a while. I seem to remember some research showing that if a felon manages to stay out of trouble for 5 years he is less likely to get in trouble than even the general population.
So, to answer your question, felons who stay out of trouble for more than 5 years are actually a better pool to hire from than the general population.
Hiring a tax evasion convict as a truck driver sounds fine.
Hiring a fraud convict as a CPA sounds pretty risky.
Hiring a murder convict as a beat cop sounds unacceptable.
Positions of trust and power over others will always deserve scrutiny for the sake of the life & liberty of ordinary people...
I could go either way on this. Certainly you don't want someone who has control problems as a cop. But, someone who got convicted of gang stuff very young and then got his shit together could be a really effective beat cop. He knows the people and the neighborhood while serving as an example of doing good.
The problem is that a cop has to give legal testimony. And that would get challenged if he has a prior. Perhaps when cops all have to wear video so we don't have to rely on human testimony that will change.
I think you hit the nail right on the head. The article even notes for this particular program:
> Inmates convicted of crimes categorised as "serious" or "violent" felonies are not eligible, says Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the state's department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR). That rules out those convicted of murder, kidnap, rape and other sex crimes, violent assault, and - unsurprisingly - arson.
They didn't really say what these particular inmates were convicted of, or if they were even felons, but there are plenty of crimes in the US that are treated way more severely than they should, and in some cases shouldn't even be considered crimes at all.
The US is a full blown police-state-for-profit.
The changes we need to do are far more fundamental than what you mention -- even though everything you say is 100% valid.
The US is a broken, defective, state. (regardless of how stable/profitable/functional it may be)
None, thus this line in my comment...
So they go back to whatever they were doing previously because having any sort of decent career is extremely difficult.
http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/olivertwist/49/
(search on page "And here he remained" for the start)
(spoiler alert?)
David Ball, an assistant professor in criminal justice at the Santa Clara University School of Law, says inmate firefighters are part of a long history of prison labour in the US, pointing out that when Congress passed the 13th Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, it made a specific exclusion for penal servitude by including the phrase "except as a punishment for crime".
As outright slavery - the treatment of human beings as property - once was.
An argument is often made that if a prisoner is contributing work that is essential to the operation of the prison, that is easier to accept than an economy which relies on prison labor.
There are wildfires in California every single year. That means that every single year, some prisoners - likely nonviolent - will be asked to risk their lives for $1 a day.
$1 a day.
I bet some of those folks only crime was selling weed.
-not saying I am in support of the situation (or that I'm not) ...
The real danger would be the possibility that this is incentivizing the government to increase the prison population in order to reap the fruits of greater prison labor.
Of course, that's all to say nothing about the national disgrace that 5% of the world's population has 25% of the world's prisoners.
California prisons are horrifically overcrowded, literally they are under court order to reduce it, so your qualifier fails.
It is not. The power differential between the prisoner and the state is so great that any consent is null and void. As such it can never be voluntary. It is the same reason a prisoner cannot voluntarily have sex with a guard, except the relationship between prisoner and state is even greater of power difference than that between prisoner and guard.
Taking the drug war into account, it does become painfully clear that the present system is morally reprehensible, arguably even amounting to a continuation of African-American slavery, in a modern form.
In my original comment, I only had the hypothetical scenario of prison work in mind. It should have been a lot more obvious that actual context summarily demolishes any argument for it.
You do know that the private prison system is literally leaning on state governments and threatening them with breach of contract for not keeping prisons full, right?
... and that not only does the US have the highest per capita incarcaration rate of any country in the world, but California has an even higher per capity incarcaration rate?
... and that many US corporations have business models which rely on prison labor?
Assuming you are correct, I retract any sympathy my other comment displayed toward these kind of work programs.
Cursory DuckDuckGoing yields many more.