Hacker News Reader

Comment by gen3 | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't have any issues with prison labor as long as its optional and safe (and done by the government. I don't know how I feel about private prisons being able to accept outside contracts). I disagree with making visitations paid.

Are there any reasons against using prison labor? It gives inmates something to do and the ability to learn a new skill.

View on HN

"Are there any reasons against using prison labor? It gives inmates something to do and the ability to learn a new skill. "

There are lots of reasons that I find compelling-- I'm generally in favor of the abolition of prisons. I'm also aware that there are plenty of people who think I am a wingnut because I think that.

But even if you think prisons are a "good" thing, here is a reason that you could find compelling for preventing prison labor from interacting with the larger market:

it lowers the pay for other non-prison workers by throwing unpaid labor into the labor pool.

If you have a chair factory and the local prison starts using very low paid labor to produce chairs, how could you compete with that?

This effect is dwarfed by irregular immigrants who don’t have working papers. But yes, I agree they should be paid prevailing wages and escrow that for when they leave or use it to pay any debts they might have outstanding if they have judgements against them.

Okay, I'll bite-- what would you propose as an alternative to prisons? I'm intrigued, and frankly amused, at the idea that there aren't individuals who must be sequestered from society due to past behavior.

since you're actively laughing, I'll just tell you to google the wiki page for prison abolition.

Surely you're creative enough to think of at least 3 or 4 other modes where we sequester people "from society due to past behavior"... there are a lot of other modalities than, say throwing people in an oubliette or conscripting them into an army. Some are actually ethical (in my opinion, which is far from the only legitiamte one), unlike prison in the US (also,, I do understand that this is my opinion as well).

So we should just let child rapists and murderers roam free to offend again, with no consequences?

> there are a lot of other modalities

Seems pretty clear. What about this did you not understand?

I understood that exactly zero were provided that allowed them to not still roam free. Forcing a child rapist or murder into the military is not a viable option.

> at the idea that there aren't individuals who must be sequestered from society due to past behavior.

But over 2 million Americans? At a cost of over $74bn?

Is this a binary issue? Reforming the criminalization and overprosecution of numerous victimless activities does not require abolishing prisons entirely, which would be completely asinine.

Being in prison is fundamentally coercive, so "optional" is not easy to get, and it's compensated as little as the prisons can get away with (because, again, the prisoners not in a position to negotiate). This produces a perverse incentive: imprison people to acquire a population that will work for peanuts in terrible condition.

> Are there any reasons against using prison labor?

It incentivizes making more prisoners.

Easy create 2 factories one inside the prison and one outside. When someone from the work program gets out and there’s an opening they can get a job right away in the outside factory. By factory I mean a building with workspaces they could build themselves.

Preferably not in the remote vicinity. Also you need to separate the inmates from the released people to prevent smuggling.

Set a cap on the inside or outside whatever you think will reduce recidivism. Call exprisoners back if there’s a new project where you need more people.

Why would anyone use the outside factory?

This comes up in the article. The school board had the choice between prison labor and a group hiring former prisoners. They chose prison labor. Why? It was cheaper.

The second company is just a private company that happens to hire former prisoners. Having 2 factories owned by the state would mean they can offer one price using both types of labor.

Pay the prisoners minimum wage but withhold 75% of it until they are released. Allow the 25% to be added to commissary and legally abolish chargebacks to prisoners.

Why does any percentage need to be withheld?

It’s not a good idea to let inmates have access to more money than they need. I can see situations where their family might need it but it will certainly be exploited by inmates and their family.

There’s a lot of inmates that claim it’s easier to get drugs on the inside than the outside. Whatever you want is available for a price.

> It’s not a good idea to let inmates have access to more money than they need.

Why not? What's the downside? Who determines how much they "need"?

It's dangerous to have wealth/value in prison because it's easy for other prisoners to extort you through threats or acts of violence.

If that's the case then we should protect prisoners better, not withhold their money.

Institutional slavery.

If there is no profit motive in any shape or form then voluntary prison labor would be OK with my conscience.

Sometimes it's voluntary because the alternative is sitting in high confinement most hours of the day.

> the alternative is sitting in high confinement most hours of the day.

Then it's not voluntary.

Prison is, by definition, non-voluntary.

Prison, by definition, is opt-in. You do the crime and show disregard for society, you opt-in.

And of the people innocently imprisoned?

https://www.innocenceproject.org/

Or those imprisoned for life for stupid shit?

https://www.aclu.org/report/living-death-life-without-parole...

>And of the people innocently imprisoned?

"estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted."

https://www.innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-ar...

While it is unfortunate, they make up 1% of the prison population.

All fine and good until you're in that 1%. Then you might have a slightly different opinion on forced unpaid labor for someone else's profit, otherwise known as slavery.

But seriously, I see that 1% and it solidifies why prison populations should not be subject to forced labor for profit. That is not a low number.

So if the prisoners aren't paid but the prison is, that creates motive to (have more prisoners|create more non-voluntary workers) with an illusion of volunteering because otherwise those non-voluntary workers would be involuntarily staring at a wall all day.

> Then it's not voluntary.

Precisely. Prisons are allowed to create inhumane conditions to help boost their supply of willing volunteers.

>Institutional slavery.

I would rather have them working, following rules to keep their work privileges, than sitting around being bitter about being incarcerated or learning new methods of committing crime from others incarcerated with them.

The unfortunate truly innocent people in prison aside, if you break the law you deserve to serve a sentence proportional to the severity of the crime.

As long as you aren't using them to break rocks, do dangerous jobs that normally pay very well, etc then I'm completely fine with it. Stuff like manufacturing, basic construction, food prep, even order fulfillment I have no issue with whatasoever and if I were incarcerated I'd actually prefer to be doing something 40 hours a week instead of sitting around reading the same handful of books wondering what's going on with my friends, wondering if there's any new cool tech, wondering if I'll be able to cut it when I get out, wondering if the new guy is going to try and kill himself etc.

Last year it came out California was using prisoners at 1$ an hour to fight wildfires, but it was completely voluntary and they did NOT have a shortage of volunteers. I believe there was a thread on here (possibly reddit though) where a commentor mentioned how a family member had done this sort of work and was happy to be out doing it. While those individuals were denied the ability to get firefighting licenses when released I imagine mentioning in your job interviews "look, yes I messed up and went to prison, I did my time, while there though I volunteered to fight wildfires. I risked my own life to do backbreaking work to try and limit the spread of the fires, I could have easily sat back at the prison watching tv of playing cards but..." is going to also help you considerably, as will most prison work programs to various degrees.

Prisoners are not meant as cheap labor.

You say this, and I agree with you, and yet the system works the way it works for a reason.

Like if I were an amoral shitbird with lots of money and familiarity with law enforcement, I'd probably start opening a chain of for-profit prisons while also lobbying for "tough on crime" laws and politicians. Then I'd use my for prisoners to produce goods which I could then sell back to someone for a profit.

But I'm sure no amoral shitbirds like that exist and the 80s/90s saw this happen purely by coincidence.

They should get paid the same as anyone else. If they're not good enough to get paid a fair wage, then you don't need their labor, and they don't need you.

Want to keep people out of prison? Teach people that they're valued and that their work has value.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, incarceration costs an average of more than $31,000 per inmate, per year, nationwide.

I'd call the amounts they get paid to work are more than generous since they do not have to repay the cost of their incarceration.

---

And not directed specifically at you, but those in general in this thread griping about how little they get paid and how expensive stuff is in prison commissaries... commissaries aren't there to provide basic needs in most cases, they are there to provide rewards/amenities like canned foods and vending machine type foods, radios, televisions, mp3 players, soda, ice cream etc depending on the facility. There are numerous prisons in the united states that have cable/satellite tv in-cell or in common areas (the company Correctional Cable TV alone serves more than 140 facilities across 21 states).

Getting paid ANYTHING for the labor is a reward. Never mind that in many prisons being allowed to get a job is again, a reward, that you can get for following the rules and not causing problems.

Try seeing it in another light: that is our punishment for failing to create a society that removes the need for crime.

How much of those 30k/year inmates are we wasting tax dollars incarcerating because we refuse to acknowledge that marijuana is not worthy of a schedule 1 certification? How many because we failed to provide an equal opportunity education system?

The prisoners are already being "punished" by having their freedom taken away. I don't see why they should have to pay for the mechanisms that remove their freedom at the same time. They're still citizens. They have paid and will continue to pay taxes. They still participate in the system despite being a prisoner of it.

We don't make people pay per usage of the existence of the FDA. Why make them pay for their own prison?

> I'd call the amounts they get paid to work are more than generous since they do not have to repay the cost of their incarceration.

Prisoners do not have any control over how much their incarceration costs, therefore have no obligation to pay any of it back. The idea is that the loss of liberty alone is atonement, no judge ever sentenced an inmate to 'n days of incarceration + repayment of expenses incurred by the state in a negotiation process in which the defendant played no part'.

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve with your comments, whatever your goal is you are likely not helping it.

It sounds like you may be coming from a different law system than the person that you're replying to as there are many places in the US where such days of incarceration also mean incurring costs for housing and supervision.

It's hard for someone to control the costs of something that they've already committed, but I don't think there's any way around that. If it turns out that destroying a painting costs more or less depending on who does the restoration, that's not in the vandal's control.

For what it's worth, I think he made a valid point along with a fact that contributed to the discussion.

If prisons want to garnish wages, I have no problems with that. Put it on a balance sheet and hand over the receipt.

Right now that's not what the system is for, and it's outright slave labor.

I believe some states do exactly what you say.

> It gives inmates something to do and the ability to learn a new skill.

This is more or less the "we'll pay you in exposure!" cliché.

It gives the prison industry an incentive to keep prisons full.

No, that incentive comes from private prisons being paid by the head.

Prison labor has a long tradition as been seen as a source of income in form of a cheap involuntary labor. To the point that you got people imprisoned on arbitrary laws to keep that workforce large enough. Many states exploited this hard after the ban of slavery, to the degree that offenses where made up, like not being allowed to change your employer as a freemen in order to keep the slave like workforce large enough. If you look at the history its hard to pin the moment where this ought to have ended. After the worst offenders of openly racist laws aimed at forcing people into slave like conditions got revoked and three wars relying on the draft happened, the war on drugs had started with another set of arbitrary prosecutions. The history of incentives to acquire more prisoners is quite a bit older then the private prison complex.

edit: About the history of prison labor as a replacement for slavery, "Slavery by another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon is a great book on the topic.

A good article on the subject: http://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-...

> Here’s how it worked. Black men – and sometimes women and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

> Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.

IMO, nothing wrong as long as they're paid competitive market wages for their work and none of it is taken by the prison system for things like visitation or necessities (or anything else really, just let them have the money when they get out).

At the end of the day, work is work and should be rewarded fairly regardless of the context. Otherwise, yea, it's slave labor.

There's no distinction between government and private prisons in this regard. Money is fungible. Even public prisons are partly privately run.

Government-enforced slavery isn't better than privately-enforced slavery.

"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."

Is this system in fact slavery?

Yes. A few sentences after your quote [1]:

> 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.

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

Ah, I suppose I would have less concern with this more broad definition of slavery. A child being forced to do chores would qualify as slavery in this case, right?

Human language and human behavior are both very squishy, so it's unlikely we'll come up with an objective definition that everyone can agree upon in all cases. I wouldn't define slavery strictly in terms of the law because then things like human trafficking are excluded. Cast your net wide enough and sure, children being forced to do chores would qualify.

At some point you just have to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say "this is slavery, that is not".

Of course, that "optional" work that pays a dollar an hour or less also comes with having to pay full retail price for basics like shampoo and band-aids.

Full retail price? Must be nice.

Some prisons are much more expensive: https://psmag.com/social-justice/are-prison-commissaries-fai...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com