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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Huh, this article has nothing to do with how prisons are run as a for-profit business. The prison boom began in the 1980s when Reagan and Bush privatised them:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...

Isn't that our smoking gun? People are being sent to prison because someone is making a pretty penny?

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This must be investigated. We can't just say 'there no clear reason for such a steep increase in conviction rates' with such a potential motive sitting there.

I'm also concerned that prisoners are used for labor at rates lower than the third-world, such as fighting fires for $2/day. It seems that investors have not just found another income source off of the backs of the very poor -- but we have found a whole new way to establish essentially slave labor.

Btw, incarceration has been historically used as slave labour for a long time. Blacks would get rounded up on the crime of "vagrancy" and would be sentenced to labour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_%28United_States%2...

This was a widespread practice until the 1960s.

Oh wow, that is fascinating and depressing reading. It really does seem that such a system would lead to invested parties pushing for more incarceration so they retain their financial gains.

Wouldn't any business try to maximise it's profits and push for conditions where making those profits becomes easier? That's the nature of a business isn't it, one run solely for profit anyway?

Yes, the article says nothing, because some things are just "politically incorrect": prison is a continuation of slavery. The drug war attacks certain cultures. Some make money off cheap labor and government prison funding. A country that ravages people outside the country in war, will ravage people inside the country too. Prison is a tool to maintain a status quo by reducing many people's freedom to resist.

If the article talked about China or Russia, it wouldn't talk about regulating lawyers. It'd talk about the systematic incentives that make everyone (not just lawyers) act so zealously to imprison their populace.

Please don't use the political correctness strawman. Nobody is refusing to talk about privatisation of prisons because of it. Many people talk about it, and there's no evidence that the Slate article refused to talk about privatisation from fear of offending anyone.

Much agreed that PC is a crappy straw man. I'm glad Slate is talking but I don't think anywhere close to enough of the nation is willing to have this conversation.

Many are willing to have the conversation, but the majority want to be tougher on crime.

Much agreed that private prisons are slavery. It's superficially racist and classist, but out of misplaced respect for (white) feelings it is truly difficult to have a national debate around it.

(downvote utterly expected)

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