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Comment by tseabrooks | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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-...

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

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