The New Debt Prisons | Hacker News Reader

The New Debt Prisons

nytimes.com

19 pointsmooreds9 comments

This is incredibly rich, coming from someone who was a member of two Democrat administrations - a party that runs on increasing fees and taxes and prison penalties for those of us that choose to own weapons that our rulers deem too dangerous for us simple folk to own, and which has the convenient "side effect" of disarming and making easy targets of low income people and a disproportionate number of PoC.

Regardless of the author’s political affiliation (and problems which are outside of the scope of the provided discussion topic...), it seems wrong to collect fees from people who have supposedly “served their debt to society.”

One might argue that your debt to society is ALL of the legal consequences of your crime including not just imprisonment time but also fees, fines, etc. In these discussions it often seems like people have the feeling that the prison time is the sole punishment for the crime when in fact that's not the case. Your debt to society is the entirety of the consequences.

That being said, I've read some of the details of the particular fees/fines/etc and they are often times a wholly unjust prison trap that is difficult to escape. Laws that allow that sort of thing should be changed to provide reasonable cost offsetting onto people who commit criminal acts without creating nightmarish situations that people can't rationally be expected to deal with.

There's no way to accomplish reasonable cost offsetting. It literally costs more to try to impose fines and collect them than you'll ever get back from people who have a criminal record and no employment prospects.

The costs of processing criminals need to be borne by the society that chose to create criminality as a concept. That cannot be part of the debt because they absolutely cannot pay it.

Except, you know, by engaging in higher-profit criminal activity. The whole idea is moronic on any practical level. It exists only to maintain an underclass.

Really? So like a system of if-can-pay-do-pay wouldn't be an example of reasonable cost offsetting, exactly like we do with being able to afford counsel?

Surely you're not saying that we can't levy fines instead of prison time for crimes. Are all fines therefore unjust because some people can't pay them?

See, I agree about prison debt traps to an extent, but I feel like this topic always goes off the rails from "debt trap bad" to "prison is the only punishment for crimes, fines are unjust because poverty."

This does not seem particularly related to the subject of the article.

> But what has gotten inadequate attention is the increasing role these fees play in funding our courts and police departments, and how they crush the chances of millions of Black and brown Americans to make a better life for themselves and their families

Lest anyone think whites are absent from prison, at least [0] 40% of prisoners are non-Hispanic white [1,2]. Since whites (Hispanic + non) account for 43% of homicide perpetrators [3], they are, if anything, over-represented in prison.

So I don't understand why the NY Times chose to explicitly ignore them.

[0] Assuming all the inmates counted as Hispanic were also counted as white. Otherwise the share of non-Hispanic white inmates is even larger.

[1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_ethni...

[2] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race....

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

>whites ... , if anything, are over-represented in prison

The prison population statistics from the BOP only account for federal prisons, which is less than 10% of the incarcerated US population. In your cited Wikipedia source, the number of homicides tallied by the FBI (in Wikipedia’s [44]) totals around 6000, or around 5% of the size of the number of BOP inmates. These two figures do not come together to provide your conclusion at all.

According to [1], 30% of all prisoners are non-Hispanic white, which is close to the numbers given for federal prisons.

And I used homicide as proxy for violent crime, since if I had used anything else, you would have claimed the numbers can't be trusted due to over-policing and police racial bias. To get around that bias, you can also look at the national crime victimization survey [2], which does not involve the police, and paints a similar picture.

Again, I fail to see any reason why the Times explicitly excluded almost a third of all prisoners, for which you needed no justification.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-bl...

[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf

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