How convict labour increased inequality | Hacker News Reader

How convict labour increased inequality

economist.com

71 pointsedward65 comments

I recommend the book The New Jim Crow if you'd like to read more about this, particularly on how it relates to extending pseudo-slavery.

I'd suggest the documentary 13th as well.

If - for a moment - we can abstract from the actual conditions of the "lodging" and from the quality of the food (that I understand can be terrible in some US prisons), if we take a single "free" man or woman that is working the same hours (possibly not full-time because there is not such a job offering) at minimum wage BUT has to pay rent, utilities and food, plus medical care, etc., I don't thing that the net (i.e. what remains after having paid all "basic" bills) is very different from a few cents per hour.

This hypothetical single low-pay worker has not done anything "bad", and there is no reason why society should "punish" him/her, but I doubt that he/she can save more than 50 US$ per month.

I get where you're coming from, but I think it's a little disingenuous to abstract away living conditions. For all those 'basic' bills your minimum wage laborer is likely getting a comfortable bed in their own room with only a few housemates, much better nutrition, a cell phone, private showers, etc. If they wanted to live in a storage unit, shower at the YMCA, and eat for 2 dollars a day they likely could save much more.

> If they wanted to live in a storage unit

Which is illegal. And even if it wasn't, it's sad that someone working minimum wage has to live like a prisoner if they want to save anything significant.

I totally agree. I'm using a reduction to absurdity to make my point that prisoners experience abysmal living conditions, not arguing that the state of minimum wage workers is just.

There were people before the civil war who defended slavery on similar grounds. Free workers may or may not be able to afford the necessities, but slaves are guaranteed everything they need. It's not necessarily an absurd line of thought.

Sure! It's not absurd at all, as long as you don't care about silly stuff like fundamental human rights.

It's exactly this distancing, this "abstracting away" of the intangible, unquantifiable benefits of freedom and agency, that allows people to slip into these ethically barren silos.

People are capable of rationalizing extraordinarily inhuman abuses.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/us/holocaust-education...

> Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was.

Now that might be one of the craziest things I've read all month.

That is absolutely insane. How bad is our education system that it is unable to teach and retain such simple facts.

I learned about it as a kid at my public Chicago school, but it took resources: textbooks, novels, field trips. I even had the privilege to see a play recounting one family's attempts to escape.

Public school systems around the country are under attack by the people in positions of authority. Neoliberal Democrats and Evangelical Republicans have allied in a fight to privatize and strip resources away from the public school system. Public school teachers in the most neglected states have finally had enough, and are rising up and striking for better conditions for themselves and their students.

It's worth it, to make sure we remember to never repeat the horrors of our past.

http://kfor.com/2018/04/03/these-crumbling-textbooks-show-wh...

It's also not really a simple fact. When you live in a safe, stable environment where you are taught empathy, that everyone should treat everyone else fairly, and that nurtures a healthy skepticism, horrors so extreme are hard to wrap your head around. How could people treat other people, other living, breathing, bleeding humans, with such callous disregard?

How to educate about hate, how it develops and how it manifests is hugely complicated and always encounters political friction. Americans have our own genocides[1], cultural erasure[2], history of violent bondage[2] and modern[4] internment[5] policies[6] that we also fail to educate about on a wide scale. It's not surprising that so many have slipped through the cracks wrt the Holocaust.

1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1567.html

2. http://www.gwichinsteeringcommittee.org/the-forced-assimilat...

3. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/lynching-memorial-montgom...

4. https://eji.org/mass-incarceration

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

6. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/18/immigr...

Then again, a single phone call in or out of prison is super expensive and so are various fees. And it is not like medical care in prison counted much.

And more importantly, it skews incentives and market.

The issue becomes that these prisons are exerting downward market force across the industry by using this labor source. They're creating an additional supply of workers which decreases demand and therefor wages. I'm fine with "The Free Market" doing its thing, but not through slavery/unfair practices.

To the point you're making of all the other things the prisons provide for the convicts and how that would amount to pay equivalent for free laborers: that's their job. They provide a public good service, feeding/clothing/housing in a humane way people who have violated laws. In exchange they are given money from the government. Their primary business should be that and not disrupting labor.

Oh man, you are so close to realizing what's actually going on. Once you realize that creating a permanent underclass to apply a constant downward pressure on wages is a feature of market economies and not a bug you'll be all the way there.

Regardless of who goes to jail and why, I can only figure on three possible activities for convicts -

1) Rot in their cells. 2) "Busywork" i.e. stuff that resembles work but has no value other than occupying convicts' time. 3) Economically useful work.

The economic / social case against option 3 is pretty strong - I remember analyses of the economic collapse of the USSR blamed convict labor among other things - except that options 1 and 2 have strong downsides as well. Not just for convicts, but the COs and prison staff as well.

They could be doing /charity work/. That time could also be spent in training designed to rehabilitate and promote re-integration when the correctional institution is done with the convict.

A moral and just society should be promoting the maximum freedom which does not negatively impact others (this is a balancing act, as restricting freedom IS a negative impact) as well as the maximum connected social value of individuals within the whole of society. Retribution and punishments are petty and short sighted; they fail to calculate the cost on any front aside from a limited emotional scope. Recompense is different; in that the interests of reforming an offender and bettering society overall might align in that it can repair the rift between the individual and the whole as well as attempting to bring more good than bad to the relationship.

If you're going to give them economically useful work you need to pay them a fair wage or it drives down wages for everyone.

Or option 4, don't maintain a massive prison population. This combined with policies that encourage (demand even) spending the time focused on rehabilitation (so that's job training etc) and keeping convicts inside for as little time as possible. No slave underclass eating your economy, far less stress on staffs, more skilled laborers in general. Everyone wins when society distances itself from the archaic punitive system of justice.

Everyone wins except for the prison industrial complex. And they got the big lobbyists.

And the prison warden syndicates.

Rehabilitation or education?

Prison itself was an effort at rehabilitation, the theory being that you had plenty of time to think about the wrongdoing. Rehabilitation is ultimately something a person has to want, so you should offer it, but it can't guide sentencing.

The idea that criminals need education is actually pretty racist... the crimes we care about are violent and even young children know perfectly well that violence is wrong.

The real reason for jail is that society is largely self-regulating; it works because we have a critical mass of people doing the right thing with only the most minimal oversight.

So the law-abiding majority needs to see that criminals are punished so they don't feel like suckers for following the law, basically, so they'll continue being law abiding.

We also put people in prison to alleviate the daily terror and misery that career criminals inflict on their neighbors.

“The idea that criminals need education is actually pretty racist”

Lolwut. Education is a great way to spend time. Anyone can benefit. I said nothing about “need.”

But go on, call me a racist and lecture me condescendingly about why we put criminals in prison, that’s a super convincing.

Is there significantly more crime in developed nations where prisons focus on actual rehabilitation as opposed to punishment (so you don’t feel like a sucker)?

There's no reason that the inmates should word for free. Economically useful work is great, both for the prisoners and society. Maybe take a 50% tax cut out of minimum wage and give the prisoners the rest of the money. Put them in a personal account they can use when they're released. It would help them immensely with rehabilitation.

> There's no reason that the inmates should word for free.

If someone is fined, they had to work for that money. So we're taking the fruits of their labor from them.

And they're in prison in the first place, so they're being denied their livelihood.

It's almost like we're trying to punish people for crimes they commit!

The punishment that prisoners are subjected to is the deprivation of their liberty.

As noted by other commenters, prisoners should be paid at market rates. This is both fair, and avoids market distortions.

By enriching a private corporation? That doesn't make any sense.

> Maybe take a 50% tax cut out of minimum wage and give the prisoners the rest of the money.

So you're okay with the tax, now it's just down to the percentage.

50% is just as justified as 100%.

Wait a minute...you're telling me using slave labor is bad? BUT IT'S SO CHEAP!

The idea that we allow FOR PROFIT prisons to "employ" prisoners for less than minimum wage while they make money is an embarrassment. This is not justice. This is not "repaying your debt to society". The fact that all criminals get stigmatized and penalized during and well after their incarceration is punishment. The use of them as a labor force to perform tasks to create additional revenue for the prisons is just gross.

And don't get get me started about how this leads to a potential conflict of interest when you allow the prison companies to hire lobbyists who could lobby for harsher sentencing in an effort to create more slaves.

Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling, and correlates with low-information rants. We're trying for the opposite here.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I really appreciate the role the site guidelines play in making HN a useful place to read comments (often more than the actual articles). However FWIW I appreciated this particular usage as I read it as a form of parody which i might not have caught had simple emphasis been used.

It may be that there's a slippery slope problem so maybe objecting to it is still a good idea, but I thought I'd simply mention my feeling for this particular case.

That's a good point and I partly agree. This might not have been the best hill to plant that flag on!

I wrote a reply, deleted it, walked away from the computer, thought about what I wanted to say, and am writing this.

I appreciate your guidelines and what HN is trying to do with its comment section. I enjoy the discourse here and I feel that it's one of the better places for discussion on the web. I also fully acknowledge that I have here, and in other comments, gone against the guidelines. Finally I recognize that you are an authority on this site and are attempting to correct behavior you find problematic/potentially leading to a deterioration of the level of conversation you're trying to curate here.

I still stand by my Allcaps(Tm) usage here. I will try to keep it to a minimum. Sometimes the proper response is yelling. Also, correlation is not causation.

Edit: Also, if italics are used for emphasis, which is interpreted as yelling/voice change, I see literally no difference except your opinion on how people should designate yelling. I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE vs I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore! just feels like the comment section version of Tabs VS Spaces.

I think the problem is the yelling itself, not how it's designated.

That is to say, if you simply replaced all caps with italics but were still intending to invoke the feeling of yelling (which I consider distinct from emphasis) then your comment would be in violation of the spirit of the guidelines. The all caps are just a red flag.

Man, your comment comes across as pretty classist. Would you extend the same argument against the use of italics? If not, why? Can you statistically demonstrate a disparity between information density of comments using all caps versus using italics?

_Man, your comment comes across as pretty classist._

Yes, when someone is trying to set a "class" of standards, they are being classist. In this case, it's a standard that requires not holding down the shift key, so it's hardly exclusive.

Sure, but the underlying question is why are italics okay and not capitals. Arn't they both means to the same end, communication of emphasis? I understand no one want's to be yelled at, and it's a turn off in conversation, but arn't these just different methods of communicating the same thing? See my comment below for more.

Right, your objection is that we're excluding people, and you ask:

> Is that what we want to do here?

Yes. Just the fact that articles are oriented on tech excludes a whole host of people. And if you include too many people, that in itself will start to exclude people; in addition, the discussion will fall apart.

You're looking at it as a moral issue, and you're not wrong to, it's just that the morality is very much overshadowed by the practical mechanics of running a discussion forum.

I recommend "Choosing in Groups" by Michael Munger for some very insightful thoughts on how this all works.

Thanks for the thoughtful and honest response. I'll check the book out.

Also, I do find that I post better stuff on HN than on other forums because I'm aware that if I'm ranty it will get downvoted. Sometimes insisting on standards can motivate people to elevate themselves.

If that's classist then the guidelines as a whole must be classist.

Not all class is bad.

I generally appreciate the caps restriction, but in this instance side strongly withgumby,,abovee.

Of course, now we're discussing site regs rather than the evils and contagion of prison labour and for-profit prisons, which is its own meta-level of distraction and conversational degredation.

Yes, that's a real possibility.

Look around at other comments, no one is using all caps to get a point across. It’s uncouth to use caps here.

Right, that's what I'm pushing back against. I don't feel that the rules governing the normative HN discourse should be the rules by which we determine the informational content of a comment. Not following the manners of a certain group (acting uncouth) has no bearing on the truthiness of a statement. When the content of a person's comment is evaluated by their adherence to discursive standards alone then groups of people with alternative discursive standards, and by extension their thoughts, are more readily dismissed. Is that what we want to do here?

Certainly statements made with "alternative discursive standards" can be just as true. Convert any English sentence to uppercase and it's as true as it was. But from my point of view the issue is the systemic effects that "discursive standards" have on a community as a whole. The HN guidelines mention a bunch of things that we've found, over the years, to be important for that reason.

Hacker News is one kind of community among many. Think of it as a place where a certain game is played, with its rule set. If that's classist, then chess is classist because it doesn't allow "alternative gameplay standards" like moving your knight diagonally.

To me the important thing is that everybody is welcome who wishes to participate and play by the rules. Playing by the rules isn't always easy (including for me—I often have to edit my comments to make them more civil), but all it takes is a wish to do it, and that's as inclusive as HN can get while still having its particular character. It's fine not to like that character, but in that case the thing to do is find a community you like better, or create one. There's room for many communities and should be more.

They usually do.

Forced labor is slavery, no matter how you put it. The fact of the matter is the 13th amendment needs to be fixed.

Yes, it's slavery, that's the point, just as prison itself is imprisonment.

We have a retributive system of justice, the point of a sentence is to punish you by harming you. You do a bad thing, society exacts retribution by doing a bad thing to you.

Fines, prison, forced labor, the death penalty are all punishments, and if you don't want those to happen to you, don't commit crimes.

The problem is those punitive actions are not considered from a more enlightened position of causing a net positive to society. A better approach retrains the individual and helps society by enforcing a mutually beneficial result rather than administering some measured form of torture.

Retraining the individual requires that the individual wants to be retrained. That's certainly something to offer, but a sentence is something you're forcing on a person.

For it to be effective, yes. You seem to be arguing the details of the implementation rather than the goal of what the implementation should solve.

Individuals (and circumstances) are different, there should be plenty of discretion and possibly review to ensure that solutions are measurably effective.

Have you considered that punishment may not actually create a positive outcome for society as a whole? Generally speaking most people come out of prison as hardened criminals and not reformed. Prison historically has been intended to kill the prisoners prior to release. Either we need accept we're trying to kill people or we need to realize that punishing people doesn't work in most cases and instead work on CORRECTING people (it is the department of the corrections after all).

TL;DR; retributive punishment is useless and produces worse results.

Slavery was much worst, realistically. Forced labor is bad, but the comparison is whitewashing conditions under which slaves lived.

Would you feel better about it if the prisoners' situations were identical, but the profits went to the government or to reparations for victims of crime?

No, especially since such a huge percentage of US prisoners are non-violent offenders. What would make me feel better is if we made serious efforts at rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.

God no. That just incentives the government (who create the laws) to put people in prison. And who is the "victim" if someone goes to jail for say, possession of drugs/paraphernalia?

The only correct answer is "if you employ people, you pay them." This includes people currently serving jail sentences. Going to jail is meant to be a punishment. You're losing months/years of your normal life. If people wish to offer convicts a way to help mitigate this by offering them employment, then they shouldn't get the ability to employ them at a discounted rate, because that's punitive to people who are not in jail.

No. It's still an incentive to create crime and enslave people.

> ...or to reparations for victims of crime?

The courts already have a way of doing this that doesn't involve slavery.

To that end: if there was a civil suit against someone and you wanted to allow convicts to work in prison while paying them a fair wage in order to pay off this debt, that is a logical and even noble choice.

I think the biggest issue everyone seems to have is the idea of below market wages being paid to the workers.

No no no. Money should go to the people doing the work.

Absolutely not.

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