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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

Smart, well-meaning people on boards such as this refuse to see the Prison Industrial Complex for what it really is...a jobs program for police, courts, judges, jails, prisons, and of course, lawyers and politicians.

One group "increased incarceration" definitely has a non-marginal positive impact on are all-of-the-above.

Can you show me any examples, anywhere in history, where a group that directly benefits from and controls the entry level and duration of access have ever decided to lower their wages and put at jeopardy their livelihoods?

Because at the heart of it, that's the real effect that decreasing incarceration will have...closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes.

And we are surprised when the very people whom benefit from the status quo don't see things the way we do?

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This. One of the best comments I have ever read. In the south you also need to account for the lack of voting power of African Americans. %30 of African Americans can’t vote in Florida because of their dealings with the “justice” system.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/political-pulse...

"...%30 of African Americans can’t vote in Florida because of their dealings with the “justice” system..."

I'm not a southerner. I'm certainly no Floridian. But I strongly suspect that's not a "coincidence". I think the current system was likely set up as a political "gimme" meant to appease Southerners.

It's a state-by-state system. Whatever is set up in the South wasn’t set up to appease Southerners, it was set up by Southerners to give effect to their desires.

I'm referring to Federal laws and Constitutional underpinnings.

For instance, the loophole in the 13th.

Which, but for it's existence, would not have allowed "...Southerners to give effect to their desires..."

Penal enforced labor was not a uniquely southern thing (or a uniquely “slave state” thing) before the Civil War, and not abolishing it along with chattel slavery was not a sop to the South.

The South really exploited that allowance as a replacement for chattel slavery, though, but they did that with every power state governments were not explicitly denied (and, because of the lack of substantive enforcement of much of the 14th Amendment for nearly a century after the Civil War, many which they were explicitly denied.)

???

Are you seriously proposing that the loophole in the 13th was not placed there as a consolation to Southerners? I mean let's be frank here, the entire issue of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance was a compromise to Southerners. It wouldn't have passed otherwise. Fast forward to the end of the Civil War, and they chose the compromise in the Northwest Ordinance instead of the Sumner Amendment for the same reasons. Sumner's Amendment didn't even make it out of committee.

I don't see how anyone can say that slave states have not had an outsized influence on the slavery question as it is practiced in the US. They've had that influence, in my opinion, since our inception. It, (slavery), really was almost one of the original questions we had to answer at the founding of our Republic.

Yes: the "loophole" you're referring to is no such thing. It's language directly aimed at enabling felons (white, black, or otherwise) to be put to useful work. That's what everyone, everywhere, was doing at the time the law was drafted.

Imagine if Britain had been the one drafting the 13th amendment, at the same point in history. Removing this language would have meant giving up on the penal labor colony known as Australia. America was—not as famously—doing exactly the same thing.

???

Why would we have cared what Britain was doing?

They were our cold enemy during the Civil War. (At least, they were the cold enemy if you were on the Union side.)

What the rest of the world was doing was irrelevant to how the 13th was drafted. The war would be won. Slaves would be freed. The only questions we were considering was how to put that all down on paper. And for that question, the only thing that mattered was domestic politics.

Uh? I think you misread. I was pointing out that every major nation-state was running—and relying on the productive output of!—penal labor colonies in the 1800s. I brought up Britain as a well known example: everyone knows that Britain ran penal labor colonies. But the US was also running—and depending on—penal labor colonies.

The "loophole" is, to put it in modern terms, a concession to the American penal-labor-colony industry lobby. (Well, not really, since we didn't have private prisons back then. All the work being done by US penal labor colonies was directly to the productive benefit of the US government.)

Only it wasn't. The Northwest Ordinance was written the way it was specifically to appease slave states. It was calibrated so that slave states would outnumber free states by three even in the worst case. Everything from the slavery question, to the question of conditions under which territories would enter the Union, was settled in a fashion meant not to anger slave states. (Except, of course, for a few questions settled for what we, today, suspect were generous sums of money. But those were things like education. ie-where and how a university would be established.)

In fact, even a review of the Congressional Record, which I had the misfortune of having to do on these very two questions for a Capstone project back in undergrad, makes that very clear. It's obviously been a very long time, and the material involved was voluminous, but I can't recall offhand any mention of the penal labor industry. The debate was dominated by appeals to interests and even feelings of slave states.

Penal labor was very common in the 1860s. The UK, and its colonies, didn't ban penal labor until about 1950s. France didn't ban it until 1987. The statement was added to the Northwest Ordinance and the 13th Amendment, not as a sop to the Southerners to reintroduce slavery by backdoor means, but to ensure that someone couldn't look at the text and decide that the customary practice of penal labor would be considered outlawed.

I would advise being careful about treating this as just a north/south thing. For example, the exact mechanisms by which it happens might not be quite the same, but the disenfranchisement rate among black voters in Wisconsin is about the same as what GP reports for Florida.

Oh it's the exact same mechanism.

The only difference is that here in Wisconsin we know that our government is corrupt, and because of the corruption here there is little we can do to combat that corruption. I mean we have everything from Walker, to little boys being used for sex at Lincoln Hills, to out and out DA's who are crime lords. (Literally, a few years back there was a DA who would take "donations" to "charity" from drug runners. They would actually divert shipments to go through his jurisdiction because if you get caught all you had to do was pay the "donation". It was really bad.)

I'm pretty sure if you were to ask the average Wisconsinite, they would openly admit much of the corruption up here. Not only with crime, or blacks, but with money, with land, with everything basically. Why do you think we have protests with hundreds of thousands of people showing up? It's not just Walker, at least in my opinion it's not. It's the system that people feel he represents and defends.

By contrast, in Florida, I get the sense that people think that's the way things are supposed to work. They believe they have a good system and that the system works the way God intended.

> By contrast, in Florida, I get the sense that people think that's the way things are supposed to work. They believe they have a good system and that the system works the way God intended.

It depends who you ask. I've only lived in Florida for 40 years but I find it split in thirds with 1/3 willing to tolerate Tallahassee corruption and crumbling infrastructure as the price of low taxation while the other 2/3 are appalled but don't or can't vote.

I think from an outside POV the sorts of divides are more in your face and more geographically dispersed in the south.

There also seems to be more political homogeneity.

The 13th amendment only ended slavery in name.

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted[...]

The current system is absolutely a political gimme to appease the south, or at the very least the south of the past.

I continue to have a hard time seeing the difference between a US prison farm and any other (slave) labor camp.

The UN ILO should have IMO effectively abolished US labor camps in 1957 with resolution 105 [1]. It bans among other things its use "as a method of mobilizing and using labour for purposes of economic development." As such prisoners in the US can be loaned out to private enterprise, an argument should be made. Not to mention, forget immigrants, nothing undercuts wages payable to US workers quite like slave labor.

I actually can't see why the US system isn't in violation of resolution 29 in 1930 where forced labor is only permitted when under "supervision and control of a public authority and that the person carrying it out is not hired to or placed at the disposal of private individuals, companies or associations." [1]

When your system is "universally condemned" by the United Nations, maybe it's time for another look?

[1] http://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-inte...

I don't think anyone is arguing that these are not slave labor camps. These are slave labor camps. That fact is not in question.

The question we're debating is why they are legal in the US. My theory is that the government made them legal to appease Southerners after the Civil War. Some people disagree, but the evidence in terms of the Congressional record of the time definitely points to a deal to appease Southerners.

The North was maybe a little more than an inch less racist than the South. It's just that the line of slavery being right or wrong went right through that inch. Institutional racism has come from everywhere, in particular by the power of the silent majority.

The Nixon Southern strategy was not to appease only Southerners. It was to appease the ignorant. Bigots with malice in mind.

It's worth listening to the Lee Atwater interview he didn't want released until he died. They had a vile plan, they put it into action, it was successful, and it's still happening. And such ideas and policies are far worse than just a word that begins with the letter n. https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

Emancipation was a political decision that was made for practical purposes.

Race baiting incited draft riots in the north. Low wage labor was very much threatened by the prospect of freed slaves migrating.

Prison labor isn’t a uniquely American institution and IMO was less about appeasing southerners and more about practical management of prisons.

> My theory is that the government made them legal to appease Southerners after the Civil War.

It didn't; this is indisputable, because they existed and were legal, both in and out of the South, before the Civil War.

You could argue that they were not outlawed at the time chattel slavery was in order to mitigate the imposition on the South being done by the Civil War amendments (13-15), but that's implausible for a number of reasons, but most notably that being punitive was major feature of th Civil War Amendments, the cooling to punitive measures and accommodationist approach to the South didn't take long to appear after they were imposed, but it was a later thing.

> the evidence in terms of the Congressional record of the time

Specific citations would be welcome.

A popular theory is that mass incarceration was the replacement for segregation when it was outlawed.

Ahh yes the old Three Fifths Compromise is still in effect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

A constituent group that removes rival constituents from the voter pool... wow, talk about a conflict of interest

A webcached version of your article, since orlandosentinel.com blocks visits from European countries because of the GDPR: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pI5zTYk...

You can't vote if you're in prison..?

I don't think it even needs to be controlled by the same people. Look at TurboTax. They built a company to make an insane tax code easy and they lobby against simplifying it.

Once it's big business there's a huge finical and employment incentive to keep the machine running no matter who's running it. Some might say that privatising prisons would even make it worse.

It's hard to stop a multi-billion dollar industry but what the prison system is doing to our population is not OK.

Not so easy.

In the US, the prison system is also used to deal with mental illness, unemployment and homelessness.

See NYC for how that works:

  1., Create a zero tolerance policy

  2., Invest in high police coverage

  3., Arrest people on small stuff, like public intoxication, urination, etc.

  4., Three strikes is a compounding factor, so three small things and boom, you're off the streets for years.

It did help clean up NYC, but rather going the social housing and mental health way, it simply put a lot of poor people in jail.

Now, is this for societies greater good? Is NYC overall a better, safer place for poor people? No easy answers there.

>Because at the heart of it, that's the real effect that decreasing incarceration will have...closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes.

I don't think reducing prison time would necessarily result in all of those. Closing jails perhaps, but it's possible such a thing would require more police and county court bandwidth, not fewer.

That said, I believe non-violent offenders should never be put in jail. Give them mountains of community service or some other more productive remedy. If it's financial crime, freeze their ability to access the financial system. But sending them to jail is more likely to make them more effective and more hardened criminals.

> I don't think reducing prison time would necessarily result in all of those. Closing jails perhaps, but it's possible such a thing would require more police and county court bandwidth, not fewer.

Not to mention the court systems and police work are already incredibly backed up in many jurisdictions.

> That said, I believe non-violent offenders should never be put in jail.

So how do we stop people from constantly stealing our stuff?

I read recently about Moloch ( http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ ) regarding this very topic.

Ideally, lowering everything about the criminal system is a net good at all levels. Politicians and government are the ones who control expenditure levels along with what is defined as a crime.

Collectively, with would suit all levels of citizenry and government to raise threshold of what constitutes a "Crime", along with massive reduction of forces across all levels. However the first politician to 'defect' and recommend this gets lambasted as being "Weak On Crime". Unfortunately for the politician, it only takes a single person who was let out early and commit some assault/robbery/rape/murder to then show the 'evils and horribleness' of said politician.

Quote from the Slate Star Codex:

For example, ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to implement.

Exactly...great comment and thanks for the link. I have not heard of Moloch but from what little you discuss it would seem we share insights, so I look forward to reading him.

Florida, for example (where I am from), is a retirement state mostly. You know what retirees reliably vote for? Fucking hard-ass law and order so they can drink their booze and eat their prescription dope without the fear of being robbed.

I see no chance that any politicians can ever win in Florida with a message of "soft on crime", so its depressing to think that this crap and injustice justice will ever be fixed.

And you know...it's hard to blame them for wanting that. They have worked their asses off their whole lives and now want to live the remaining years feeling safe.

And yes...the "one bad apple" metaphor always rears it's old ugly head when it comes to this topic. Hell, I've lived in the Florida DC and I personally saw inmates who would enjoy busting up any new "liberal" program as long as it got them an extra cigarette or a can of soda.

They literally couldn't give a fuck about anyone but themselves at that moment, and see any program that may be put in place to help inmates as security-bypass vectors that are to be exploited as soon as possible.

The "one bad apple" effect seems to drive most of our laws and regulations. One bad incident hits the news, and the "there outta be a law" folks go berserk in a rush to pass more laws to "fix" it, never mind the negative consequences of those laws.

Actually, given the way many private corporate prisons are operated, a lower occupancy rate directly results in profit. The state is obligated to maintain the prisons at something like a 90%+ fill rate. If they fall below that, the state has to pay multi-million-dollar dines. Arizona recently faced this, paying out $3 million for not providing enough prisoners to one of their private prisons. It provides a monetary disincentive toward granting parole or shorter sentences... probably not a great idea.

When in an ideal world, the justice system would be a tool to minimize the negative impact that the set of individuals and corporations that do not follow a set of agreed apon rules causes to the set of all individuals and corporations in a society.

You forget the other benefit, that incarcerating people makes the non-incarcerated feel better. People like to see other people locked away. It makes them feel safer. That feeling results in votes, votes for the people doing the locking up. It is unfair to blame the police or the courts, or even the legislatures. Blame all those voters who call for "tougher" laws.

Want to really reduce prison populations? Take a hard look at the drug and sex offender laws. That might mean not locking up the meth dealer or rapist, but that is what reducing the prison population means: living with the knowledge that such people will not be entombed far away. That fear is the real issue underpinning the problem.

In it's current form it's literally welfare for a certain class of people.

If you're talking about closing prisons, then yes, there are misaligned incentives.

However, a lot of prison reform policy suggestions would result in increased costs, while making the prison system more humane.

These higher cost prison reform policies haven't been put into place, which sort of discredits the assertion that lack of prison reform is primarily driven by misaligned incentives.

> Smart, well-meaning people on boards such as this refuse to see the Prison Industrial Complex for what it really is

Random. When your recidivism rate exceeds 50%, you might as well flip a coin at sentencing to decide whether they go to jail or not; will likely be just as effective as the current system.

>closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes

How will it so any of these things? People will still be arrested and prosecuted for committing crimes. Its the incarceration vs alternative actions and programs that is being discussed here. Prisons would certainly be affected, but they aren't even in your list.

While it's true that prisons could be shut. Its also true that a whole new rehabilitation industry could spring up if alternatives to long term incarceration were enacted.

'who' benefit, not 'whom'

Thanks for the correction.

It's also a new form of slavery.

US 13th Amendment keeps slavery legal for punishment of a crime.

It's always interesting telling americans that there is still slavery in their country and it is completely legal.

You could say the same to any country with forced conscription.

I guess the discussion here would be what rights they have and don't have because of that societal imposition.

That depends entirely on your definition of slavery. I don't believe that the average person considers a murderer making postbags for 25 cents a day is a "slave". Nor do I think it helps the argument for a focus on rehabilitation to suggest it is so.

Obviously as you change the crime and the task and the wages, peoples perceptions change. Which is fun, non?

It sounds like you’re missing some things.

Of course, substance possession and other victimless crimes are the useful place to begin.

And it’s crucial to differentiate between privatized prison labor and state prison labor. Privatizing human rights raises a major moral discrepancy as it stands. Profiteering of human rights with forced labor is a fair definition of slavery in my view.

Your argument concerns justice, though. Following emancipation, no time was lost in instituting the strong prison labor system the South known for. When there’s a profit motive, the entire system of justice becomes contentious. If seeking to get murderers off the streets (something I support) it’s critical we not conflate that civic duty with profiteering motives, lest we become the demon, or at least hypocrites. Of course, we popularly criticize the Soviet Gulag system on these same terms, among others.

There’s more, too. Getting a murderer off the streets is a categorically different goal from inflicting punishment or vengance. Getting a murderer off the streets is an easy decision. Punishing them is also widely supported, but still categorically different. If we intend a moral system, we must differentiate and actively acknowledge the difference.

There's yet a further subdivision to be made too, as there's getting a murder off the street (justice), punishing the murderer (vengeance/retribution) and stopping more murders (prevention).

After the Rwandan genocide and even in reaction to the residential school system in Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions were set up to focus on the justice and prevention elements of the triangle and explicitly pass on retribution. [1]

The US system focuses, IMO, almost solely on vengeance to the detriment of prevention. The US has one of the highest recidivism rates in the entirely world at 75%, so if your goal is to stop people from doing it again, the US system is an abject failure. If you want to enslave and torture, it works great. Norway focuses on justice and prevention, and as a result, has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, at 20% [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is...

> There's yet a further subdivision to be made too, as there's getting a murder off the street (justice),

The standard term for that is “incapacitation”; “justice” is more ambiguous.

> stopping more murders (prevention).

“prevention” is usually broken down into “incapacitation” and “deterrence”.

Thanks! I do like those terms more.

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