That setup, of course, just ends up being a gladiator school and/or permanent psychosis camp.
What's worse is that people get incarcerated for increasingly severe crimes. A drug offender spending a stint in prison is very likely to go back in for a more violent crime with a few years of release.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/may/3/long-term-re...
I'm guessing at least partly due to the "gladiator school" aspect.
Just the fact that I can reasonably call it an "industry" should be setting off major alarm bells. Our prison system is one of the most terrifying and evil things that exist in the real world.
It doesn't stop there. For profit prisons spend millions of dollars lobbying: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries./indus.php?ind=G7000
If you want to see intent, follow the money.
This is one of the things that needs regulation, because there will be a monopoly.
Similar to some joint public/private toll roads, red light cameras, etc.
When we hear about how prisoners are treated -- actually we hardly ever hear about how prisoners are treated, because most people don't care that much.
The way society is ok with the treatment of prisoners is the root cause of the way they are treated. Plenty of for-profit enterprises exist that aren't allowed to abuse those they have power over.
For example, when scientific advisors to some governments appear in national media and say there could be upsides to maintaining social distancing for potentially years into the future, and this evokes little popular outcry outside a tiny fringe of wacko “great reset”/antivaxxer conspiracy theorists on Twitter, then you start to wonder if a lot of the population has simply accepted the new normal. That might create less sympathy with prisoners, not more.
Large protests in those countries tend to be unlikely because 1) protests have been banned on epidemological grounds, and the authorities have made it clear that any protest will be swiftly suppressed by the police, and 2) QAnon and antivaxxer conspiracy theorists tend to be very visible at protests, and normal people are unwilling to be associated with that. So, the bulk of the population is not going to be willing to go out and protest.
Mind you, heavy lockdown measures have only been here for a couple of months. I have no doubt if the government makes a step towards keeping it for years, the protests will reignite.
Regarding 1), that stops absolutely nobody here. The city center is bustling with crowds, and protests for other issues still happen, there is no "police squashing".
2), that is a USA-centric view. There is little QAnon talk over here.
And no, not an American-centric view. QAnon has become a very visible thing in anti-lockdown social media and protests here in Eastern Europe.
> As someone there in the country, do you feel this is inaccurate?
It's split. Some support the current measures. Some do not. Privately, in my own experience, most are much more unhappy with the measures than they let on publicly. The common phrasing I hear from the hopefuls is "at least it might end soon". If it does not, they might have a change of mind.
> QAnon has become a very visible thing in anti-lockdown social media and protests here in Eastern Europe.
Yes, in Eastern Europe that might be true.. over here, I would be hard pressed to find someone who has even heard of it.
Currently it has been extended until the evening of March 30 (which is two days after the clocks go forward for spring). That evening, the sun will set at 8.11 pm in Amsterdam.
A further (hypothetical) three-week extension would AIUI take it to the point where the curfew would come into effect before the streetlights came on.
If most people were truly comfortable with the status quo, it seems pretty unlikely to me that there would be such overwhelming demand for vaccines, nor does it seem like there would be a constant push to (often prematurely) end pandemic restrictions in so many areas.
I’ve been unable to find any poll asking people specifically about whether they enjoy the restrictions, so I can’t give a definitive answer, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that if people could wave a magic wand and make the pandemic go away tomorrow, they would. And that’s after only a year of relatively minor restrictions on daily life, not 5 or 10 or 50 years of being held in captivity.
Not to understate the restriction involved in being imprisoned, but “relatively minor restrictions on daily life” is really understating the experience of many people over the past year.
I haven’t seen my parents, sibling, 1-year-old nephew, most of my friends, and any of my co-workers in over a year. I haven’t taken any vacation time because there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. I’m fortunate that I’m comfortably employed, but none of my regular activities are happening, so my life is essentially in a holding pattern where every day is just some variation of working from home, cooking for myself, working out by myself, and reading.
I have supported 90% of the steps my fairly-restrictive government has taken so far, because they are backed by science. Would I be happy if they were extended indefinitely? Well, no. But, realistically, how would I know that was happening?
If schools are not fully-opened next fall I would definitely be raising a bit of a ruckus. But if Dr Fauci and all the other scientists were saying they really couldn't be re-opened because we were in the middle of another wave? Well, I'm not anti-science.
You can debate each step, but I really don't think that a continual drip-drip of extensions would raise a huge outcry at all.
Some are already quite annoyed with the extensions. Some keep getting more annoyed. Some are becoming accustomed. The question really is: what percentage of people will adapt, and what percentage will revolt?
Keep in mind that it does not need to a majority of people choosing (if choosing is the right word for what is more determined by innate personality traits) to revolt for it to happen. Even a relatively small percentage of sufficiently ravenous people igniting trouble is enough to aggravate the situation of the rest, causing more economic and social trouble. This would further push the society into disarray, and a surefire way to induce people to rise up is to create chaos in a system (historically, hunger was a good motivator).
My point is, I think you're watching the pot before it boils, and declaring it will never boil.
edit: actually, Zeno's paradox might be a better fit here
That said, the restrictions are being released despite it being a bad idea, and I think the government realizes that they can't really tighten them without risking violent protests.
In March 2020, the US government said it would take 12–18 months to get a vaccine approved, and many people even doubted that was possible[0]. Instead, it happened just 9 months later[1].
In the United States, the current president first said it was unlikely everyone would be vaccinated before the end of summer[2], then they shifted to having enough vaccine for 300 million people by the end of July[3], and most recently an announcement that there will be supply for the entire population at the end of May[4].
I don’t know where you live, but at least in the U.S., things have been the opposite of “‘soon’ slowly moving further and further away”.
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/COVID-19-vaccine-rush...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/health/pfizer-vaccine-aut...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/biden-coronav...
[3] https://apnews.com/b7845a7d0f709199265d9243598b629e
[4] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/541283-biden-us-...
Also, some scientific advisors are saying that the present vaccines may be insufficient to fully lift restrictions, and we ought to wait for more advanced boosters to deal with variants.
> I can't believe you would complain about living IN YOUR OWN HOME nice and comfortable while PEOPLE ARE DYING. To compare this to prison is an INSULT to OUR HEALTHCARE HEROES. We're IN A PANDEMIC
There are enough loud voices from people with high Right-Wing Authoritarian Scores (which isn't a Republican/Democrat axis, before you decide I'm being needlessly political) that will shout you down.
As a personal test, I am buying GEO and CoreCivic to see how much I believe.
see: The consistent running "joke" throughout American pop culture of men getting raped on a regular basis
If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute, and the thief got caught doing this for the third time (which means the thief likely also got away with it dozens of times), what then?
Most importantly, why should that person work their ass off for another week, instead of going somewhere else, stealing something, and enjoying the remaining 39 hours off?
House arrest exists, but it depends on that person not just ignoring it and running away, and is significantly milder for the reasons you listed.
First, prison in general, and long sentences in particular, are generally not used that way.
Second, why are you trying to punish people for what they’ve done instead of trying to help them so they can learn to do something other than crime and contribute to society?
> If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute, and the thief got caught doing this for the third time (which means the thief likely also got away with it dozens of times), what then?
Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things (necessarily, as you have said it was the fruit of a minimum-wage worker) to survive.
(A side note: as of 2017, prisoners in the United States with jobs get paid, on average, a maximum of $3.45 per day[0], if you want to compare yet another situation that is worse than working for minimum wage.)
> House arrest exists, but it depends on that person not just ignoring it and running away, and is significantly milder for the reasons you listed.
The point I was making is that house arrest is not that mild at all, and that maybe more people will realise this after being in house-arrest-lite for a year and have more reluctance to subject fellow humans to even harsher and more cruel conditions.
There are antisocial and lazy people everywhere, even in places with a better welfare system than the US. The phone snatching and bike stealing gangs of London aren't doing it to pay for their mum's cancer treatment or to provide food for their kids, they do it because one fun night of robbery pays more than a boring week of work in a grocery or a building site.
“Need” is rarely why people steal. The calculus is, “I want this thing, I don’t have an ethical problem taking it, I think I can get away from it.”
When I say “need”, I don’t mean literally in the sense of “I need to steal that thing or I will die”. I mean it in the sense of a person being satisfied in enough aspects of their life, and having the necessary skills, to turn themselves away from committing crime.
I grew up running with a sketchy crowd. I knew several people who stole things on a recurring basis. None of them did it because they were desperate or had “poor morals”.
You’re deriving this from an incorrect mental model where nobody “wants to steal” and they do it out of desperation. This leaves out people who steal for the thrill, steal because they literally have no moral problem with taking from huge corporations, etc.,
I think you’ll find nearly identical justifications between a guy that votes for someone to raise taxes on mega corporations and an anarchist who just steals from them directly.
Wow, I’m not thinking that way at all. If that’s how it came across, I did a really bad job at explaining myself!
I don’t want to get into a huge thing, especially on an old thread, but what I was trying to get across is that I don’t think it’s good enough to just look at someone who commits a crime and say that it happened because they are ‘bad’, that all the blame is theirs, that society has no culpability.
When I say “need”, I don’t mean destitution. So take your example of stealing for a thrill. Why aren’t they getting enough thrill in other parts of their life? What easier or better thrill could be offered instead that doesn’t involve hurting other people? They clearly have an unfulfilled need for a thrill, and they are fulfilling it by stealing.
When I say “skills”, I don’t mean like job skills. I mean things like the skill of knowing how to talk through anger instead of physically attacking somebody. The skills of emotional regulation. Stuff that may be natural and intuitive for some, but foreign and unknown to others.
I believe that if we handled crime the same way we handle things like plane crashes—investigate without judging, look at more than just the individual, and help people instead of punishing them—there would be much less crime, it would be less serious, and suffering would be immensely reduced. But it’s way harder than just going “well, this person’s a piece of shit and they deserve be imprisoned until they’re 80 years old”.
You're talking about white collar crime and financial exploitation, which generally is illegal but isn't punished, or is actually legalized. The kind of people who go to prison are lucky if they steal two or three days worth of your work.
And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.
That's a great point that I haven't seen discussed in the media. When I was young, only "Fortune 500" type companies could afford background checks, so you had a fighting chance at getting a decent job.
Now, anybody can buy a instant background check online, and you can get not just felony data, but misdemeanor data, and even "just arrests, not convictions". And it's dirt cheap to do so. So, job prospects are dim, and even simple stuff like renting an apartment is difficult as well.
In France, once you left prison, it means that you have served what you had to serve and start again. Nobody can check whether you did prison or not.
Some specific jobs require a document stating your juridical past but you bring it, this is not some can do on their own.
Then you have military and sensitive civil servants jobs where this is checked for you, but it is really specific.
I would not be happy if anybody could check my past online...
Luckily the french did give us a tool to fight against this bullshit, it is called the guillotine?
It has its pros and cons, but the pros IMO win - bringing some peace of mind to people.
That's not what socialism is. Socialism isn't stuff you like done by the government.
Though yes, if the state is to exist, the least it should be doing is providing for its people - in my opinion via UBI + single-payer healthcare at minimum.
I'd guess the industry built around background checks and the like is partially a response to this. There isn't a national registry of crimes, at least not all kinds, so you could game the Australian system by just crossing state borders. Hence companies selling collections of people's (technically) public record. A solution may be to just create more national registries, but this seems antithetical to the US's idea of statehood. Maybe it'd be for the best, though...
Seems to be the core of the covid situation too. There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.
Can't or won't? If California can get away with its agricultural checkpoints without running afoul of e.g. the Commerce Clause, then it seems like restricting interstate border crossings is at least hypothetically possible.
In practice, it's pretty trivial to bypass those checkpoints if you really want to smuggle produce into the state (e.g. the I-80 checkpoint, where you can take the Hirschdale Road exit and follow Glenshire Drive to 287, then get right back on I-80). I highly doubt COVID checkpoints would be any harder to bypass.
By now, it is just accepted that it is terrible, so it is less sensational.
Searching 'criminal record employment' in Google News yields > 600,000 results.
'Ban the box' gives millions of results
'clean slate law' gives > 80k results
Not when there's an HR department in between the applicant and the hiring manager. People with "sufficient skills" get rejected all the time for reasons far more benign than e.g. having killed someone 30 years ago.
Like, this ain't about "stigma". This is about Kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy actively driving crime rates.
If the labor is entirely volunteer and something that actually requires some training, it's job training. If it's forced (which is legal in many states) and it's entirely grunt work like janitorial duty or highway cleanup, then it's prison labor.
Bloomberg famously took flak for using paid, voluntary prison labor for call centers -- not exactly back-breaking labor.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/24/mike-bloomberg-2020-pris...
Just because you're not personally uncharitable enough to object to something like that, doesn't man it's not a common view.
> John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.
> When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”
> The Oklahoma Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify the discrepancy, nor to answer questions about ProCom’s arrangement with the Bloomberg campaign.
Given the refusal to clarify that discrepancy, it ain't unreasonable to assume - barring concrete evidence to the contrary - that these prisoners are being paid a pittance for their labor, and Bloomberg - and ProCom, and the state of Oklahoma - definitely deserve any flak coming to them for that exploitation. The very fact that there is a maximum monthly wage for prisoners at all, let alone one as pathetically low as $27.09 per month, is barbaric.
Because as best I can tell, the objection is exactly the "strawman" I originally alleged, that prison labor shouldn't be used, even when rehabilitative and helps the prisoner find employment after release.
Because that's strongly implied to be the reason for any objection at all - i.e. the coercion of prisoners into working for a pathetically low wage, and the exploitation of that coercion for financial gain. Unless you can think of some other reason why people object to prison labor other than it being coercive and exploitative?
- I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism.
- On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions; it's legal slavery (quite literally; the 13th Amendment carved out prison labor as an exception to the abolition of slavery). Prison laborers need the ability to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, and this negotiation is currently impossible because prisons can compel them by threat of violence to accept any terms, no matter how unfair to the worker. Indeed, if prisoners were fairly compensated for their labor, they might be able to save up enough money to not feel as strong of a need to return to a life of crime should they remain shunned by employers, per above (and hell, they might even be able to bootstrap themselves a startup and sidestep said shunning entirely).
That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it.
>On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions
As in the cousin thread, this may be your objection, but it isn't the popular objection; Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered.
I'm not one to be in the "America is bad at everything" camp, but I think one of the most negative aspects of our culture is that we act entitled to everything like the world is Burger King and we should get everything our way(or your money back). Fries too cold? Send 'em back and don't tip the server! Someone backed into our rear fender? Sue 'em for all they've got! Someone stole your TV? Lock 'em up and throw away the key! It all stems from materialism.
I think it would make a significant difference to the prisoners at these prisons
The issue goes beyond privatization.
Doubtful. Prison reform isn't popular at all amongst voting blocs that matter to politicians and it's a hard sell to the public tuned into a "safety first" and "lock 'em up and throw away the key" attitude.
We don't send somebody to the hospital for "30 days", or "1 year". We don't do it when putting somebody under the care of a psychiatrist either. We deal with the patient until they're recovered.
Perhaps this should be the approach we take with prisoners. They're in prison until a professional determines they're rehabilitated and ready to reintegrate back into the rest of society. With—potentially—minimum and maximum durations to ensure some safety rails on the system.
I have to admit I don't know what this looks like, and I don't mean to gloss over the fact that there are incredibly difficult questions this raises that don't have good answers (what does it mean for a murderer to be "rehabilitated"?), but I do wonder if at least considering the problem from this perspective might prove helpful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/banned-books-week-pris...
Treating prisoners as crappy as they can get away with is usually something in favor of a US politician with any ability to do something about it.
There are lot's of other ways to take this question with this line of reasoning but I'll leave it at this for now.
We need to ensure that these dots are connected; prisons are not only the moral successor to slavery, but the literal legal framework by which it continues.
Strictly speaking, slavery is not against the law in the United States; this carve out in the 13th amendment was seized upon immediately and remains with us today.
If a person is in prison for violence then treatment would be no more violent games and videos.
If a person was in prison for theft or gambling related, then treatment would be prohibiting acts that deal with money or games of chance.
If a person was involved in bribery or lying, then treatment would be avoiding anything that involves cheats.