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Inmates forced to farm gold online in Chinese prisons

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How about the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the US forced to work for pennies per hour?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl...

If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc.

Makes many millions in profit for the states and federal government, even some judges own stock.

Ironically it's the only labor in the US that can compete with offshoring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Amer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/prisoners-help-build...

http://articles.cnn.com/1999-11-06/us/9911_06_prison.labor_1...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml

So true. In US, it is the chain gang.

Actually, Arizona still has real chain gangs and other states had them as recently as the mid-90's.

> Arizona still has real chain gangs

It's only in one county (Maricopa), and it's voluntary.

I grew up in Maricopa County (Peoria). I think Joe Arpaio had the right idea.

I've seen a show about him. He is famous even in Australia. Is there any pressure on prisoners to volunteer into the chain gang?

I've seen prisoners, or perhaps folks sentenced to community service, picking up trash along country roads in orange vests under supervision. Is there any difference between that and a chain gang apart from the chain?

Seriously? We should give a damn about this? You've got to be kidding me. Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S.

Is your complaint that you think people are being incarcerated when they've committed no crimes in order to have cheap labor? I find this notion pretty ridiculous considering you need a trial and jurors to convict someone.

Is your complaint that you think the laws are being created to specifically target people so that they can be incarcerated? In that case stop whining about it and stop voting for the people making these laws.

But I digress, you are right.. It's disgusting that the federal government makes any money on the people they pay to care for whom society has deemed should be incarcerated.

At some point in this decade they will hit 1 out of every 100 people are in prison in the US.

If you don't think there is something seriously wrong with that percentage and how two decades ago it was a fraction of that number, then you are far too trusting, isolated or innocent to the world.

Felony laws and prison sentences are made much harsher based on heavy lobbying.

You realize that the number of people in jail and prison labor are orthogonal issues, right?

One can both oppose our war on drug users (near as I can tell, the main source of our excess prisoners) and China's war on the Falun Gong, but also have no objection to forcing robbers/rapists/murderers to work for their keep.

They are most certainly not. Presumably the base rate of bad people in the human population does not vary greatly from country to country, yet the rate of jailed people does. It follows that many people in jail in countries with a high rate of incarceration arguably ought not be there; and making life harder for them is wrong.

Or to put it another way, arguing from justice, along the lines of Rawls' original position and veil of ignorance[1]. If you didn't know whether or not you were to end up a prisoner, you ought to have some concern about how they are treated; and your concern should logically follow in direct proportion to how many of them are imprisoned.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

Presumably the base rate of bad people in the human population does not vary greatly from country to country,

That's an empirical question. I wouldn't presume one way or the other on that issue until I had some data. (I would, of course, have to define "bad people" in some reasonable way that would work cross-culturally to gather my data.)

Well, if it is true that the rate of "bad people" does vary greatly from country to country, it justifies xenophobia, racism and a lot of other nasty things, potentially even genocide on a utilitarian basis. I take it as a given that it doesn't vary much primarily because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. It would imply that people are not created equal (in a human rights context) and in particular do not deserve equal treatment. It really opens up a whole can of worms.

Oh, I see your concern, but I was thinking of cases in which, for example, one country rather than another has much higher rates of some kind of overt behavior that societies around the world generally agree is criminal (rape comes to mind) although the causation of the different rates is something that is malleable (e.g., attitudes toward women). I probably agree with you as to starting assumption about human nature in an idealized condition before societal influences start their work on individuals, but perhaps think (having lived in more than one country) that countries just might differ in social conditions that make criminal behavior more or less likely for otherwise indistinguishable individuals. This all gets back to the issue of what the definition of "bad people" is, as I noted in my first post to which you have kindly replied.

It would only justify genocide if the foreign population were expected to commit a much larger genocide.

It would imply that people are not created equal (in a human rights context) and in particular do not deserve equal treatment.

Nonsense. It would imply that equal treatment would not result in equal outcomes.

Equal treatment: rapists go to jail, regardless of their country of origin.

Unequal outcomes: 10 in 100 people in Rapistan are in jail, whereas only 1 in 100 people in the Withpermissiononlyville are in jail.

As of 2009, it was 0.743%. In 1999, it was around 0.7%, and in 1989 it was 0.426%. So expecting it to hit 1% sometime this decade might be a stretch, unless the trends accelerate - it seems that the rate of increase is leveling off a bit, and hitting 1% by 2020 would be a greater increase in the next 9 years than occurred over the previous 20 (in 1991 it was just under 0.5%).

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_Rate_in_the_...

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/07/us/us-has-highest-rate-of-...

Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S.

Yes, which goes directly to private companies that profit off it, creating an economic incentive to arrest as many people as possible and sentence them for as long as possible -- and to eschew any potential course of action that would reduce the number of criminals, such as rehabilitation.

The US prison system is basically designed from the ground up to turn ordinary citizens arrested for minor infractions into hardened criminals. This is why we have more people in prison per-capita than any other country in the world.

And when it's not private companies, at publicly-operated prisons the money goes into the pockets of prison guards, who are well paid, and whose unions are some of the biggest organizations lobbying for more crimes and longer sentences (California's three-strikes law was strongly pushed by its prison-guard union).

Maybe I'm missing it, but I'm surprised that prison-guard unions aren't more front-and-center in the controversy over public-employee unions. I hear a lot about generic bureaucrats (e.g. in Wisconsin), and about teachers' unions (e.g. in CA), but not that much about prison guards. But when it comes to people getting angry about unions of employees who are supposed to be working on the public's behalf engaged in lobbying in support of their own private interests, I can't think of a more clear-cut case of immorality than a prison-guard union lobbying for more prisoners.

> I'm surprised that prison-guard unions aren't more front-and-center

If they are smart they won't be, they would hide beyond a couple of layers of lobbyists and front groups, as it would be pretty clear what their motivations would be -- "We need more people in jail" is a little tough political sell. Definitely not in the same league as "we need better educated children" What the prison industry should do is lobby for "tougher" laws, then they can hide behind the "tough on crime" crowd. That works well usually.

This judge was convicted of jailing youths for kickback money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

There are Hacker News threads that discuss the hundreds of DNA exonerations in the U.S. This hints at the huge problem of lying and frame-ups by the police and judicial system.

Juries are instructed to give a verdict on guilt or innocence not decide on sentencing.

The U.S. has the highest per capita prison population in the world. It is big business.

Kind of a waste of time to fall back on voting when there are so many reactionaries like yourself.

And once you're convicted there is even more additional lying and frame-ups while in prison:

http://www.westword.com/2011-02-03/news/211-crew-rapes-extor...

See: mandatory sentence laws. Convictions didn't yield prison time before them at the same rate they do after.

> If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc.

Very interesting, I did not know about that aspect and in the back of my mind always wondered why do all these prisoners even work when it pays that little. Why not just do nothing?

Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do, be a part of something, but I guess a system that punishes the slaves (erm...I mean prisoners...) for not working is obviously a lot more effective.

You’ve got that slavery part right. Here is the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “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.”

This led, for example, courts to conclude that prisoners have no right to be payed minimum wage. (I honestly don’t really know what to think about that. I’m not sure whether I have a problem with that.)

Consider your position if you were mistakenly convicted of a crime and incarcerated yourself. Would you have a problem with it then?

I accidentally sounded tough on crime. Who would have thought!

I want good conditions and adequate payment, no jobs that keep prisoners where they are. Well, scratch that, I want what works. I care about reducing the crime rate and keeping prisons quite empty, not punishment. I don’t know what role forced prison labor plays there and would be willing to accept it, should it be beneficial. I just don’t know.

There isn’t such a big difference between forcing someone to work and taking away someone’s freedom, it’s really hard to justify why one can’t, for example, exchange one with the other. It’s both about taking away human rights.

Prison: rehabilitation, punishment, deterrent, segregation. Punishment is largely about the victims, justice being seen to be done, etc.; it shouldn't affect crime rates in ways that don't also come under rehabilitation or deterrence. Segregation (keeping dangerous people apart from the main population) is not relevant to our discussion here, I think.

Is slave labour rehabilitating? More or less rehabilitating than productive labour? A net wash? I personally think education would be more rehabilitating. Perhaps that can be combined with labour? Probably not chain-gang type labour though.

Deterrence, I'm more skeptical of. I don't think prison time has a lot of net impact on crime. Someone on the point of committing a crime, but with their rational thinking cap on, may be evaluating their expected punishment; but that expected punishment will be moderated by their expected chances of getting caught. Obviously, if they expect to get caught, they would not rationally choose to commit a crime; therefore, very drastic changes in punishments need to be applied in order to stay significant after the criminal has taken into account the chances of being caught. (Yes, there's risk / reward calculations where very high rewards may justify taking higher risks so the expected punishment has higher effects, but I think big bank robberies etc. are not the majority of crime we need to be worried about, at least outside of white collar crime, which does need more focus.)

And that's all with the rational thinking cap on. Other crimes where rationality appears to be less evident - I'd guess most non-organized violence, for example - the punishment is very far from mind, if it's in mind at all.

I think if you're truly interested in reducing crime rates, what you have to focus on is increasing the probability of criminals getting caught and convicted, so that deterrence is credible. Reducing repeat offenders requires more focus on rehabilitation. Fiddling with the punishment in and of itself is, IMO, unlikely to have a large impact unless it's a disproportionate change, which would make it unjust.

> Deterrence, I'm more skeptical of. I don't think prison time has a lot of net impact on crime.

This is usually measured by looking at the rates of recidivism. I don't have the data but I think it is pretty high. Or in other words, if prisons were such a good deterrent, they would have the strongest effect on those who have actually been there before, so if that doesn't work, then the deterrence in general is not a strong factor.

There is a lot of research indicating that criminal behavior is strongly tied to inability to be deterred by far distant punishment. Therefore the high recidivism rate could happen because criminals are a preselected group of people people who are hard to deter through punishment.

That’s actually my view, too.

If I were incarcerated for a crime that I didn't commit, that would totally suck.

I don't see how being forced to work would make it suck any more, though. It actually sounds better than (a) having nothing to do all day, and (b) stuck with a whole bunch of much worse people who also have nothing to do all day.

These are not the only two possibilities, of course.

I'm confused, doesn't the thirteenth amendment specifically allow involuntary servitude for convicted prisoners? It's right there in the text!

That’s what I’m saying, sure.

One thing to consider: "Follow the money", and consider whether the work is contributing to rehabilitation, restitution, and expenses. Or whether it is lining other pockets.

Whom is the work benefiting.

Given the continuing privatization of prisons as well as the apparently rampant level of corruption, I have my suspicions.

And how much does it compete with the normal labor market? Is it reducing employment or depressing wages? As more and more people in the U.S. are imprisoned, this question would seem to become more pertinent.

Now, if formerly "unemployable" people left prison with job skills, and someone was actually willing to hire them, perhaps we might even consider prison labor a form of "internship".

But, to my very limited knowledge, the statistics do not bear this out.

Pennies an hour are unlikely to add up to any substantial restitution.

And states seem to be going broke paying for their prisons -- directly or via contract.

Maybe someone else can cite some informative journalism or substantiated data with regard to these questions.

P.S. I'm somewhat uncomfortable commenting at all, from my position of limited knowledge and experience. But, damn it, imprisonment is a State activity, and therefore, like it or not, the responsibility of all the State's citizens (at least, in a representative government). So, it's our duty to try and make some sense of this. It's not simply "someone else's problem".

Is it merely a matter of "idle hands", and allowing select individuals to benefit from the side effects? (Or vise versa.)

>Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do,

That's definitely part of it too. I hear (and I would guess everyone can imagine) that prison is excruciatingly boring. So having something to do can help a lot, also working a job can be part vocational training for when one get's out of prison.

Another factor is that when you're in prison, the littlest things become of utmost importance. Life or death (literally) battles are fought over Twinkies and Doritos...so if you have a chance to earn a little money to get yourself some cigarettes or cup o' noodles it's very tempting to take it.

That's the "carrot" that accompanies the "stick".

Is anyone else tired of the fact that on the internet you can't say "Hey, look at this sucky thing in Random Country X" without having someone pipe up and say "Yeah, but what about this vaguely-similar thing in the USA? Huh? Huh?"

An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.

As a foreigner who studied in the US, I used to find myself attacking some US actions with some American friends, while attacking senseless knee-jerk anti-Americanism back in my country... A sad, and also tiring state of affairs, without much (even partial) support on either place.

I may give out about something in my country and say how it's so much better in that other country but if someone from there is here and does the same I feel like saying it's a wonder they didn't stay there so if it's so bloody good.

So it is quite possible that you may indeed agree with that foreigner on the issue being discussed and yet wonder why s/he didn't stay home... So much for open, frank dialogues!

In my case, I have plenty of criticisms of my own of the US and tend to have foreign friends (in part because I grew up in a bicultural home). So I have certainly had conversations with foreigners where I agreed with some of their criticisms. And I have also had friends who lived in a country where the country as a whole had a negative view of the US and where the US had a negative view of their country and it wasn't some big personal issue between us. In some cases, it was treated more like an in-joke. In this particular case, my friend was so consistently critical in a very ugly way and so rabid about it that I did often feel like "If you think all Americans are pure evil simply for being born here, why on earth are you friends with me? How sick is that?"

This was an extremely good friend. I still miss them. One of the things that stops me from trying to reach out to them is that I don't know how to get past these issues. And I'm not interested in being someone's "whipping boy" for their personal bugaboo. I don't think there is anything healthy or constructive about something like that.

Meta-comment follows:

Would you have replied if comment scores were displayed?

In this specific case, I don't know.

Meta answer: Though there are certainly times that I reply these days when I would have only upvoted if comment scores showed.

I agree that this is an issue with the lack of comment scores. If I see something I strongly agree with, I'm more inclined to reply with a "Yeah I totally agree" if I don't know what the score is than if I see it already has 100 points.

For what it's worth, my original comment to which you replied has 25 points.

Thanks, though I wasn't specifically suggesting it was an issue. I was only answering the question asked of me factually and the fact is that, yes, it does change my behavior in some ways to not have comment scores visible. However, I do not feel I have sufficient information at this point in time to draw conclusions or make value judgments in terms of "this is a good thing" or "this is a bad thing" or even "this is what is good about it and this is what is bad about it". (I personally like engaging people in conversation. Although I am aware that concerns about signal-to-noise are very valid concerns, I have long been baffled by people who join discussion lists/forums and then loudly complain about people talking too much. So I am not yet ready to say, yea, verily, stating agreement in place of or in addition to upvoting is inherently a bad thing.)

How are the Chinese and American situations vaguely similar? Just because one involves computers and the other doesn't? If these counterexamples are not made up, what would it take for you to go from being tired to seriously revising your beliefs on the US system?

I think you two actually agree, the grandparent is saying he is tired of seeing that for many morally questionable practices happening in the world, there is sadly similar conduct sometimes happening in the US and he would rather this wasn't the case.

The use of the word "vaguely" makes me doubt it.

Well honestly, I don't have a problem with prisoners being made to work under certain reasonable conditions. Heck, I'm from Australia, a country which wouldn't even exist if it weren't for prisoners being made to work. And I think a prison where everybody is kept occupied is probably a better place than a prison where nobody has anything to do except work out and gossip.

Making 'em farm gold in a MMORPG, on the other hand, comes across as silly.

The difference between many of the corruptions in China vs the USA is that in the USA it's legalized corruption with lobbies that pay congresspeople, legally. So the corruption is out in the open, the average person just doesn't have a chance in hell of changing anything.

In China the corruption is actually illegal but hidden and therefore the abuses even worse because thy are undocumented and unprovable without great sacrifice to somehow prove what happened (and then they will still get away with it).

Forced prison labor is somehow perceived as "okay" in the USA because it's documented and in the light and some people can say "OH THE PRISONERS DESERVE IT, THEY SHOULD PAY US".

In China the same people say its not okay because it's not documented and the cannot feel good about why the people may be in prison (in the USA apparently all people in prison are very guilty of moral laws, regardless if the law is just or not, because there was possibly a "jury").

But the USA has political prisoners too - on the mild side for example, not paying your taxes - isn't that political after they have taken all your assets to pay the debt? Should Wesley Snipes be forced to work for 23 cents per hour now? What about if you are arrested at the DNC or RNC for protesting and the patriot act or similar is thrown at you and you have to serve in prison for year? Is it okay for that person to be forced to work for 23 cents per hour? Aren't they a political prisoner?

Forced prison labor is somehow perceived as "okay" in the USA because it's documented and in the light and some people can say "OH THE PRISONERS DESERVE IT, THEY SHOULD PAY US".

Well I think it is okay and... a

Aw fuck, why the hell am I arguing about politics on the internet again?

Original article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-...

I would've thought something like Mechanical Turk would be more valuable. Mining WoW gold sounds like something that could be fuuly automated. Why not have them do things that require human insight instead?

Stalin invented it before you :) The main problem with your idea is that people capable of valuable insight are notoriously rare in the prison population. Stalin though was able to work such problem around. Google for Soviet Union "sharashka", in particular "sharashka Korolev USSR space program" :)

Blizzard (the company that owns & operates WoW) doesn't want people to automatically do gold mining, so they try to stop it. A lot of 'gold mining' is "move you character around, click on this pig 10 times to kill it, collect the little bit of money/goods it drops". In order to automate it well you'd have to solve a lot of computer vision problems. Probably cheaper to just use cheap labour.

In this case it would be free labor.

From my own experience with gold farmers, they have gotten much smarter and efficient which at the same time means it is much harder to automate than the regular WoW "farm bots" that will run around and kill pigs. Also, blizzard actively monitors your PC with the infamous "Warden" cheat prevention.

Back in the "Burning Crusade" days I got an in game whisper (message) with an obvious spam for Chinese gold. I whipped out google and found a few phrases in Chinese and began chatting back, asking where they are from, how are they doing etc.

Sure enough after a couple of tries, they would reply and tell me they were from Wuhan, I believe. Next they invited me into their group, told me to come with them.

They were two Frost Mages and went into the "Underbog" dungeon and proceded to clear the first room with nothing but "Frost Nova", "Blizzard" and "Arcane Explosion" spells - so they kept an absolutely deadly group of 6 hostiles completely immobilized and killed them more or less slowly with "area of effect" spells. But ultimately it yielded them a better result than killing regular monsters would have.

It was absolutely hilarious to watch and help them and it is a very fond memory of an otherwise actually quite boring and repetitive, non-extraordinary game.

And my point being: with blizzard constantly working on making it harder for the gold farmers, they have to constantly come up with new tricks; with the introduction of the "diminishing returns" on root effects, this would not have worked anymore, for example.

Well, that's it. I no longer have to read science fiction.

In the 22nd century, when everyone has supercomputers embedded in their heads, prisoners will be forced to mine bitcoins...

Grinding for gold all day but you never get to keep any of it? That is pure torture. Not only do they force you to play that game for so long all day but they also take away the only 'reward' you get for playing. I would go crazy for sure.

But you could still grind rep!

About $800 for 300 inmates playing 12 hours each? That's about $0.25/hr for each of them. Is gold farming in these games really that unproductive? Who would do that voluntarily?

Lots of places have daily incomes below $2 a day.

That said, there isn't a huge overlap between those places and cheap electricity, internet and computers.

But I guess China is one of them..

Original story discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586469

I m trying to imagine a serial killer killing goblins... That's why it's torture.

"A former prison guard turned inmate"

wait what.

What's the problem? A dude was a prison guard. Then he (presumably) committed a crime. Now he's an inmate.

Meh. Worse ways to be tortured.

Of course, but incarceration is supposed to be the punishment itself, not extra abuse from the guards. The article does note "the inmates were kept playing until they could barely see things and missing the daily quota would result in physical punishment and abuse."

True. I am just being somewhat defeatest with respect to the inevitability of torture in such a jail. I'd rather be farming gold until my ass hurt than some alternatives.

I bet my little cousin would turn himself in! :)

Somehow I was thinking about those game-addicted kids…

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