Yes.
I went to the Design2Part show in Santa Clara a few months ago. The California Department of Corrections had a booth there, offering slave labor as a service.
I went to the Design2Part show in Santa Clara a few months ago. The California Department of Corrections had a booth there, offering slave labor as a service.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
It's immoral and unethical, but it's legal. Not saying I agree with that part of the 13th amendment, I abhor it personally.
The punishment is incarceration, not labor, right? I guess this is an area where I'm exceptionally under-educated, so if you've got any good suggestions for reading on the topic I'd appreciate it.
http://www.lafayetteowilawyer.com/helpfulvideos/beingsentenc...
As a person with Autism, I have always been scared of a misunderstanding with a police officer that would land me in jail, which is a common issue. I would calm my nerves by telling myself “it will be OK. I will think of it as a lot of time to read.”
I later learned books are very hard to come by at prisons, which adds a bit to my fear of going out and doing things.
Knowing I would be forced to work is terrifying because it would necessitate so many more misunderstandings.
Do you think it is reasonable for people in prison to work to offset some of the cost of their room and board or do you think it should all be paid for by taxpayers?
(I have a problem with creating an economic incentive to keep people in prison, but less of a problem with giving people something to do that helps pay for their food.)
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
Edit: I should clarify, I have the choice not to work and be homeless, but that’s such a deplorable choice, it doesn’t constitute a real, free choice.
More importantly (and my entire point) is that you have a choice of exactly what kind of work you want to do. That self-determination differentiates you from a prisoner or slave.
My point is that I have no choice other than to do something someone else will pay me to do. You haven’t addressed the argument; you are begging the question. “Work or die” sounds a lot like slavery to me.
Please reply again when you have a good faith argument.
You are still begging the question. Do I get to choose not to work, or not? “Just go off and die,” on the streets or in the wilderness is not a valid choice.
If the prisoners who didn't work were next to starving, and sleeping on the ground, you would sure have someone come in asserting that they are "forced" to work. Because they are OSTENSIBLY being forced to work by the choices they are offered.
This type of pedantry goes beyond semantics and into deeper meaning that is very hard to communicate.
It's about whether or not we want society to force certain types of slavery. We've barred "defacto" slavery, but what about these myriad other forms?
Dragging old concepts out of their graves by repurposing words we thought we already knew the definitions is one way that progressives are trying to re-try, or appeal, certain concepts.
This one being modern imprisonment. I don't think the term slavery should alarm anyone in this instance, but it will, which is how we get progress in 2018.
But even if you don't agree with that interpretation of the human right of life, prisoners typically aren't free participants in the market. They're being paid well below average wages for the work they're doing, which a) makes it feel like a technicality that they're getting paid for their work, and b) distorts the market for everyone else.
The right to life means that no one can deprive you of your life, but neither is society obligated to ensure you have a life.
The right of life means that you are owed a life and it must be given to you by the relevant authorities.
The reason this is important because the former gives you control over your life, and the latter operates at the whim of the governing authority. To make that a little clearer, the right to life requires passive governmental involvement, the right of life requires active governmental involvement. Guess which one goes out the window as soon as its inconvenient.
</pedantry>
And given the potential savings, why don't more governments do exactly that?
The fact that society forces us to work harder and harder in order just to live, when it could easily sustain a dignified standard of living for all at minimal cost, is the fundamental problem that people on the left are against.
That would be nice, but our current justice system is not even remotely close to being anything like this. That will take generations of change. You're trying to say we should be at step Z when we haven't even gotten to A yet.
Well, we could, but no one wants to sponsor the bill to replace that name with “Department of Vengeance, Torture, Slavery, and Maintenance of th Permanent Underclass”.
"It would be nice to abolish slavery but our current economic system isn't even remotely close to being anything like this. It would take generations of change..."
So we should prefer generations more people be subjected to these horrors than take a risk and make an effort to do better?
>"It would be nice to abolish slavery but our current economic system isn't even remotely close to being anything like this. It would take generations of change..."
This is more like you saying we need to have equal rights for everyone in 1800 before you start working on abolishing slavery in the first place.
There comes to a point where you need to make strong demands if you want to make any progress at all for certain things. Demanding incremental progress for things like slavery in the 1800s leads to half-baked compromise that ultimately led to even more issues later down the line.
If you think you were justified in your crime and can never be convinced otherwise, you don’t belong in jail for the rest of your life. You belong in jail for as long as you deserve and not a second longer.
Before forming an opinion on the role that "Rehabilitation" should play in parole hearings, HN readers should talk with (or at least read about) someone who has been through that process. Even when the intent is sincere, the implementation in American prisons can be downright draconian. "Rehabilitation" means learning what you are supposed to say/do and saying/doing it in a convincing way. Including, e.g., believing in God [1].
Rehabilitation makes sense in the abstract, but its implementation often boils down to "learn how to lie convincingly about your true beliefs", sometimes even about beliefs that are explicitly enshrined in our constitution. Which is pretty much the opposite of what we should be going for.
Now consider the case where the intent is not sincere; e.g., the case of a prison chaplain or guard who was rubbed the wrong way by a particular prisoner's personality. Rehabilitation is effusive and basically boils down to "anyone have anything negative to share with the parole board?"
And all of this without considering civil disobedience. E.g., should MLK Jr. have stayed in jail until he publicly denounced his own Letter from a Birmingham Jail?
Must drug offenders publicly profess their undying allegiance to status quo drug scheduling laws before earning their freedom?
IMO we should always allow for the possibility that criminality and morality are not intrinsically linked. And the modern practice of considering rehabilitation in parole hearings too often runs counter to tht belief.
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[1] http://www.kcur.org/post/court-says-atheist-inmate-s-religio...
Reform is needed, and IMO more punishment and less opportunity after exit will probably not help.
I do think some of the sentencing in the US is too high. But also that people deserve punishment for their crimes.
1. "Rehabilitation" -- the actual implementation, not the abstract idea -- is insidious. How can anyone ever know for sure whether someone is truly rehabilitated? Especially given that prisons don't typically attract that best and brightest of the medical profession.
If you've ever talked to someone who spent time in prison, you'll realize that "rehabilitation" in US prisons mostly means "parrot what they tell you to say and don't be stupid enough to seriously engage. Just. Repeat. Your. Lines."
E.g., claiming you have no spiritual belief can result in denied parole [1]. Too often, "rehabilitation" is just short-hand for "brainwashing". In those cases, bodily punishment without the pretense of "rehabilitation" is actually a far kinder and just system.
Far from truly fixing the underlying problem, modern rehabilitation often amounts to an exercise in honing one's inner psychopath: lie without remorse or guilt, and lie well enough that you don't get caught, or be denied parole on the basis of your lack of religious faith.
2. What do we do with people who cannot be rehabilitated, but whose crimes do not justify a lifetime prison sentence?
3. what do we do about criminals who are very unlikely to re-offend but are not rehabilitated? I.e., what is the purpose of rehabilitation? A common answer is "limiting future damage to society". But this justification fails to explain why we should jail a bank robber who managed to hide $1 billion on a remote island and who we honestly believe will be happy living off of that $1 billion on some remote island in peace for the rest of his life.
4. What about people who commit heinous crimes but are easy to rehabilitate (e.g., due to a treatable mental illness)? How do we deal with vindictive families of victims who might want to take justice into their own hands?
Prison sentences serve many purposes: rehabilitation, protection of society, punishment, and a disincentive for criminal activity.
Rehabilitation is certainly the most in-line with enlightenment values (but can become draconian in the case where the crime is relatively small but rehabilitation proves impossible, or in the case where rehabilitation means "learn how to lie about your inner self").
And I will certainly agree that the US prison system does not come even remotely close to striking a good balance between these multiple purposes. But the other roles are also important, and "rehabilitation" isn't always all it's cracked up to be.
[1] http://www.kcur.org/post/court-says-atheist-inmate-s-religio...
And for a lot of people when someone does something pretty awful or scummy, we kind of want them to be punished severely for their crimes and are outraged when they're not, because we've been conditioned to feel that way.
We want some people to be punished and spend years or decades in prison. Maybe not you specifically, or maybe there isn't always agreement about who, but for a lot of people that's the deep seeded idea of justice.
It's a tough row to hoe to change that at every level. People need to agree with more sensible ideas and vote that way. But it's clear that a lot of folks prefer the most draconian approaches because that's what makes them feel better.
Given we pay so much in taxes for our prisons, I’m not convinced this is just covering their room and board.
According to a quick search, Design2Part is a manufacturing trade show. I didn’t know that before.
But yes, imprisoning people is ridiculously expensive and that cost is borne by the taxpayer while offering almost no benefit. We should not be imprisoning them to give private companies a cheaper labour source.
The problem isn’t prison work, it’s prison slavery.
But if you don't "volunteer" for work, you spend a week in solitary (aka: Torture).
You're going to be in for a real surprise when you learn why they get paid a $1/hr to do life-threatening work (that they're banned from afterwords), and where the rest of the money goes. Do you think corrections departments who sell these services charge $1/hr? Do you think them buying an overpriced toothbrush at over $20 and being price gouged by a prison actually saves the ever-deified "taxpayers" any money? Or that prisons don't pocket that and want more of it?
Of course, historically, some slaves got paid by their masters, too. Unsurprisingly, it was a very popular argument (by slave owners and apologists) against their freedom (from being enslaved) because at least they got something (besides being a slave) instead of nothing (from the slave owners who got everything) and hey -- we're all making a buck, so that's their fair share.
It's almost like.... slavery -- of all forms -- is really economically effective and has really, really good margins, and can make lots of money. Super weird. Can't imagine why people got rid of it.
If they are a threat to society, why are they given access to computers, the internet and programming tools? (The security implications should be obvious there.) Even better, why are they let outside the prison at all?
If they are not a threat to society, why am I paying any amount of tax money to keep them in prison? We should pay zero dollars for any offender who is so little of a threat that we can let him/her outside of the prison. (Or, indeed, give him/her hacking tools.)
Any prisoner qualifying for these work release programs, should probably be released. And the money paid incarcerating them can be saved, or at least put to better uses.
Certain companies (like private prisons and contractors who make money off of prisons) make profit out of people being in prisoned, so it is in their self interest to keep people, even people who are not dangerous to anyone in prison because it affects their bottom line. They then lobby politicians and the like to keep their place, get more funding, as well as lobby for legislation like mandatory minimums so they get a fresh supply of humans to exploit.
So, it never was for the general public's interest, it's in the private interest of these corporations.
(I've heard of them being able to send email to whitelisted addresses from locked down kiosks, but that's not the internet as we know it.)
But they are taxpayers. Or more likely were before being incarcerated and will be again once released.
The same is said for people losing their job: no unemployment coverage since they aren't working. No, it's not how the social net is supposed to work.
Keep in mind I live in glorious EU though.
"One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
For example, consider a prison which forces (which I'll define as however the prisons currently gets inmates to work the jobs) it's inmates to attend classes to learn job skills and avoid behaviors that landed them in prison. Would this not also be a form of slavery given they are forced to attend? Slavery isn't defined by the slave doing something useful to the owner. A slave is still a slave even if they are doing nothing or if they are being commanded to improve themselves. And in this case I wouldn't see it as immoral.
What about if the slaves are equally forced to clean up the class once done (think stereotypical Japanese school where the kids do much of the cleaning). This could potentially be saving money for the prison by reducing the number of janitors needed, but I don't see it as any more immoral that I see the kids cleaning the classroom as a form of child labor.
In a general sense, imprisoning is a subset of enslavement, though one we generally see as just as long as the laws and legal system which lead to imprisonment is seen as just. In the US in particular, we see some cases as just and some cases as unjust.
This raised all sorts of alarms in my head, so I decided to look up a more formal definition. In this case, the source is Wikipedia[0]:
> Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave is unable to withdraw unilaterally from such an arrangement and works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will.
Your redefinition of slavery is significantly broader than the accepted definition of it. This is extremely problematic in trying to talk about whether or not it's immoral.
> In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will.
Seems like what they were saying fits well with this.
Please note this is not my redefinition of slavery as I was largely using the definition many other posts here assume, but only pointing out that it isn't limited just to hard labor on the enslaver's behalf.
If you think this definition of slavery is wrong, then this would apply to numerous other posts here and the core take away would be that prisoners aren't slaves. At which point we can just pick a different word or create a new word and continue to the point.
So, if you have an issue with the word slave, then I'll define a new word to capture what people in other posts are complaining about, praves (yes, just combining prisoners and slaves into as single word). Now, I repeat my point using praves instead of slaves.
The 13th Amendment doesn't prohibit it, the way it prohibits (most forms of) chattel slavery. But there's nothing preventing Congress (or state legislatures) from passing laws prohibiting it.
It'd be pretty hard to extract from the 13th amendment a constitutional right to put prisoners to unpaid work.
Furthermore, it's a myth that only for-profit prisons that profit from it - state-owned prisons also profit off the system to the same extent.
Fair, I had forgotten the "except... shall exist wording"
> state-owned prisons also profit off the system to the same extent
Also fair, but I'd expect the private prisons to be the ones to sue states.
Maybe, but at the moment the LEO/correctional officer unions are the ones actively lobbying to prevent laws like these from passing in the first place.