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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Sounds what you get if you sell what essentially are sovereign duties of a state to the highest bidder: An extremely lucrative system of modern-day slaves that have to shell out their hard earned below-market dollars to a rigged monopoly system completely provided by my buddies (of 10$/min landline calls, cash transfers with 50% fee, all kinds of shady "service charges") to extract the maximum amount of cash while they're in.

So what do you do if you're sitting on such a gold mine? Well, I'd probably fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences and take a really, really tough stance on those immigrants. Keep 'em coming.

Completely coincidentally, the US has the highest incarceration rates on any halfway civilized nation on the planet by a large margin.

Free markets for the win.

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>fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences

Also, don't forget about clandestinely supporting terrorists like the Nicaraguan Contras who were smuggling billions of dollars of cocaine into inner cities in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...

When you work for no pay in a communist prison camp, we call it a slave labour camp. And why wouldn't we? There are no slaves in America.

When you work for next to no pay in an American prison (And are then billed for room and board when you are released...) Well, that's something else.

How many millions of lives has this institution of liberal democracy destroyed?

The constitutional amendment barring slavery carves out an exemption for criminal punishment. I don't think you're technically constitutionally protected from being a slave if you're in prison.

That's pretty fucked up.

> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

The 14th amendment's exception from prisoners is broad but kind of essential for the whole concept of incarceration to work at all it seems. Amendments are left generally broad because it's so hard to fix any mistakes and Congress can always put further protections in place should the need arise.

> How many millions of lives has this institution of liberal democracy destroyed?

How is this an institution "of" liberal democracy? I can either interpret that as liberal democracy as destroying lives, or that working while incarcerated is a feature of liberal democracy. I don't think either are true.

It's clearly a product of liberal democracy, and it's liberal in the sense of allowing such business ventures to exist and to indeed to be voted for by the public (manipulated by advertising and ark money, of course, but nevertheless).

The problem of liberalism is its failure to adequately guard against such institutional abuses, just as the problem of communism is its failure to guard against being hijacked by authoritarians. In the 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the general consensus that communism was an ideological failure, western democracies own ideological limitations have been examined and found wanting in many respects. Chief among these are an incarceration rate that far exceeds that of the most stereotypically autocratic nations, and the deplorable conditions therein.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

Liberalism all too easily degenerates into mere license, and has demonstrably failed to result in liberation for those who suffer unjustly under the yoke of authority. To some extent the blame falls on a myopic utilitarianism that equates its quantitative capability with omniscience, and by assuming its own goodness as axiomatic has lost the ability to evaluate its own moral anchorings, instead drifting about aimlessly on the currents of its own desire.

Liberal democracies get extremely holier-then-thou about slavery - state-sponsored or otherwise. Yet, they have no natural means of preventing it from happening inside them!

My point is that we turn a blind eye to it happening at home. People working in the GULAG were also paying their 'debt to society'. Not all of them were political prisoners, either.

So is the "institution" the different perception of local incarceration vs incarceration in other countries, or the incarceration itself?

It's a difference in perception - cognitive dissonance. There are obviously differences in the incarceration (Our prisons ruin many lives - but Soviet ones ended them. Depending on the year, mortality rates were between 1 and 20% - the highest were during the war.)

Ah. The original comment seemed to imply it was the prisons that were a feature of liberal democracies, which seemed a weird leap to take. I agree with you in general. The penal system is just one of many systems that's overly politicized in a national context. It's part of the general problem of the U.S. not being very good at relative comparisons with other countries without reverting to a nationalistic dick-measuring contest.

It's the nasty downside to American Exceptionalism. On one end, it spurs people to attempt to be better because they expect they should be better, on the other it causes people to infer differences between our attributes and those of others that we don't particularly like, even when in practice those differences don't amount to all that much.

Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration. Incarceration rates started skyrocketing in the 1970s. The number of people in private prisons, in contrast, was minuscule even in 1990: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-ameri....

> Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration

Nothing that OP mentioned is specific to for-profit prisons.

The prison-industrial complex is perfectly capable of existing and generating incredibly lucrative profits for the industry even if the prisons themselves are ostensibly either state entities or structured as non-profits. The "for-profit/private" vs. "public/state-run" distinction only changes how the money gets accounted for on paper; ultimately, the same entities are capable of making the same amount of money on either form of incarceration.

That's a very grim picture you paint; I don't believe the majority of US citizens would be OK with this, if there was an awareness.

Must be incredibly hard to come out of a system like that rehabilitated, and not very bitter.

insightful, earned the upvote

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