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Comment by countryqt30 | Hacker News Reader

Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning, construction, ...)

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This already exists for less then $1 an hour[0]. They’ll even do CAD design work[1].

[0]https://www.cio.com/article/2417888/prison-labor--outsourcin...

[1]https://www.unicor.gov/Category.aspx?idCategory=1691

Then you just undercut all your competitors who actually have to pay their workers, which leads to all sorts of other problems.

Seems a non starter. If your costs are $75K per inmate you'll never make that up in prisoner labor productivity. Even if your costs are half that. And if you do get profitable labor, regular citizens will rightly complain that good paying jobs are being taken by criminals.

That's called slavery.

Good thing the 13th amendment allows slavery for inmates!

There will always be an activist group which will tell you that forcing people work is inhumane and violates their freedom of expression.

By "an activist group" do you mean "people against actual slavery"?

most people rightly oppose slavery. but confining people to cages for years at a time is pretty bad too. if it's possible to justify imprisonment in the first place, are all forms of forced labor significantly worse? what if the prisoners get training as webdevs and have to spend 6-8 hours on weekdays improving the UI of government websites. they get an aeron chair, free coffee, ping pong, etc., and when they get released they have some experience to list on their resume. kind of an absurd proposal, but hopefully it illustrates the point of my question: is it immoral to have them do literally anything to defray the cost of their imprisonment?

Your proposal is not absurd.

They used to do it in the Soviet Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka).

Not exactly aeron chairs and ping pong tables, but way better than the regular prison camp.

The thing is that then the warden sells of the inmates to make money on himself or through the state.

California paid inmates fighting fires a dollar an hour.

this is a non sequitur to my post. I asked a pretty specific question that you have not answered in your reply.

Did you edit your post? Im pretty sure I answered something that was above the first paragraph and isn't there anymore. Otherwise it was meant for some other post, disregard.

nope, only edit was to correct my spelling of "aeron". no worries, I often reply to the wrong post in deep threads.

> is it immoral to have them do literally anything to defray the cost of their imprisonment?

It depends on your definition of immoral...

By "an activist group" I mean people who confuse work with slavery.

People in prison eat what they're given, sleep when they're told, have (almost) no personal property and are at mercy of the administration on many other issues.

Work is one of the greatest things a human being can do. Working doesn't make an otherwise free person a slave.

> By "an activist group" I mean people who confuse work with slavery.

You mean, people who confuse forced work with slavery.

I think that depends on definition of "forced".

If I stop working, I'll get kicked out of my house and will probably die of hunger. Does it mean I am forced to work?

A lot of people hold that position

Yes, you are forced to work and that's one of the main arguments in favor of a basic income.

I personally find the idea of basic income very interesting (I'm not yet confident it will work in real life though), but that's probably an off-topic for this thread.

Back to your point though: isn't it ironical then that pretty much the only place where a person is not "forced" to work is prison? How's that ever fair?

While the question of whether capitalism is slavery is perhaps interesting (and quite a large number of people have answered that question in the affirmative), the system where you are committed, without free consent even as that is constructed within a capitalist framework, to an arrangement where a private party rents out exclusive control of you and your labor for a period of time from the government, and compels you to labor for the benefit of that private party is very different from the “you must find a willing party to give you food, and most of them are only willing to do so for money, and most people are not willing to give you money without some exchange of value” feature of capitalism, in ways which make it fit a much less controversial understanding of slavery than any that include capitalism as a whole.

> Does it mean I am forced to work?

Absolutely yes. You told it yourself, if you stop working you're going to die from hunger. In what sense can you argue "you're free not to work"?

Its a definition game, but in philosophy and political economy free is "free from other people" not free from nature, as that is impossible.

You can look for another job, though.

>will probably die of hunger

It looks like you’re in the US. You’d have to try quite hard to die of malnutrition here.

You've hit upon the concept of wage slavery.

> If I stop working, I'll get kicked out of my house and will probably die of hunger. Does it mean I am forced to work?

This is such a bad argument in my opinion...living is working...it might not be at a job in an office, but if you want to eat/drink/shelter, you're going to have to work one way or the other...your question kinda seems like complaining about the fact that consuming calories and water and making shelter to live is not forced already, when it is by nature...

The legality of forced work of prisoners is due to an exemption in the 13th amendment.

> 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.

Prison labor is literally slavery.

Calling servitude as punishment "actual slavery" is disingenuous to the point that I'm willing to call it a lie. You can't buy and sell them. You don't have them indefinitely. When they reproduce your don't own their offspring. They get sentenced to this servitude by society's justice system, not captured through conquest or purchased from foreign lands.

Calling labor as punishment "actual slavery" is incredibly dismissive of actual slaves.

Historically slavery has certainly been term-limited in numerous jurisdictions. And private prisons certainly can, and do, trade away problem inmates.

You are dimly correct in that it is not identical to every other form of slavery practiced historically. But it's close enough for me--and I can only speculate as to your motives for splitting this hair.

> You can't buy and sell them. You don't have them indefinitely. When they reproduce your don't own their offspring. They get sentenced to this servitude by society's justice system, not captured through conquest or purchased from foreign lands.

All of these individually are features of historical systems uncontroversially identified as slavery. The particular form of penal slavery at issue may be unique in combining all of them, but I don't see any coherent argument why that would make it into not-slavery.

Ah yes, those pesky social justice warriors working to make slavery illegal. We should have a war or something.

What is actually terrible is that they are paid a dollar an hour, even if they are fighting fires and dying from it.

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