How corporations buy and food made with prison labor

This post would earn that.

There are many countries that treat their prisoners as prisoners, not as slaves. Maybe prison work can be good in those countries? Just not in yours.

There are many articles on how Norway is one of the best countries in rehabilitating prisoners, and in Norwegian prisons prisoners do work. I'd guess that prisoners work in all the countries that are among the world top in rehabilitation.

As a matter of principle though... the principle is violated inevitably. A prison guard "profits" (or rather, makes a living by) imprisonment. Any company supplying a prison profits. Community service is forced labour, etc.

That said, I totally agree on incentives. It's dangerous, especially private prisons.

The pay rate does bother me... I can see why real pay isn't done, but just paying pennies per hour does not sit well. Maybe a 3rd party should get the money, and this could take on a restorative rather than punitive aspect. There might even be a case for demonetize prison labour, supply the food directly to food banks instead of for market.

The phrase, "debt to society" is used often. Debts are not redeemed by suffering, generally.

However in Germany a large part of prison work is around qualification. The inmates can learn a job and once released have a useable qualification for finding a job. Most prisons in that way are self supporting. Meaning food is made by inmates who are cooks or are learning to be a chef. Repairs for heating or doors or furniture are made by inmates etc. Only a small part of the work is for external customers and even a smaller part is for the prison's online Shop like https://www.haftsache.de/

And yes salaries are low, but they get free food and accomodation and aren't there for fun but punishment ...

I have no respect for someone who thinks forcing people to work as slaves is ok, and I will take the hardest stance possible on this. There is no wiggle room, there can be no compromise. Slavery is morally repugnant.

Here you can buy some products made by American slaves. https://unicor.gov/SopAlphaList.aspx

And here is an advert for slaves you can hire to run your call center. https://unicor.gov/ContactCenterVideo.aspx

Bill and Hillary Clinton had house slaves in the Arkansas governors mansion. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slav...

I understand this is common practice in many state governors' mansions to have house slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_State_Penitentiary

I lived for years a few miles from a federal penitentiary, I had friends who worked inside. The picture I have is that prison jobs are good and sought after by the inmates. (Versus eternal boredom.)

It's better for the jobs to be meaningful than meaningless, as make-work projects would inevitably be. This is not a broken system, there are no credible politicians or officials calling for change.

I know what I'd rather do.

Forcing inmates to work under harsh and/or exploitative conditions is wrong but forcing them to do some sort of work for some portion of their time is not inherently wrong. The devil is in the details.

Prison guards should work for free? How about maintenance workers? How about contractors who build the prisons? Are they all incentivized to keep people in prisons? What if a government-run prison outsourced management of prison to an outside company - is that OK?

I understand your sentiment, but I think private prisons is one of those non-issues that are blown way out of proportion (like the idea that somehow prisons are full of non-violent drug offenders). Nothing changes if you get rid of private prisons. I suspect you know that because your primary objection is philosophical rather than practical. You just don't like the 'idea' of them.

>If we as a society have to do that, fine, but it's unconscionable that it be a profitable venture.

Again ... WHY?! Vilifying profit as this great evil is a common trope among the internet intelligentsia. In each case though, the individual exempts their wage and savings (i.e. profit) from this rule.

I used to work with mentally retarded people. They had a jobs program where they contracted with companies for small jobs that these folks could do. TI teamed up with the school, and together they set up a "workshop" where they would fold up power cords and tie with twists. The people were paid like a dollar per day... they worked a couple of hours per day. It was beneficial for all (TI indeed sold those cords with its products), and hardly slavery. It was hailed at time for all its good. That was not a prison, but it served a similar purpose. Not a single complaint of slavery or exploitation was ever raised... but this was in the 1980s.

At what point should prisoners do something, anything, to mitigate what damage they've done to the rest of us? Is planting potatoes in the hot sun in Texas too much to ask? Regular law-abiding folks do it after all.

And note: when folks have to plant potatoes in the hot sun as part of prison, recidivism is very low. For whatever reason, though I'd guess that petty criminals are essentially lazy and having to work a real job is more than they want to do. It changes their outlook, when prison work outweighs the benefit of petty theft etc.

There's a moral dimension (who are we to judge etc) and a political one (out-of-control profiteering). But fundamentally, making prisoners work is not a bad thing.

Slaves in China peel that garlic, and the garlic is grown in california and shipped to china for slaves to peel it all, and they lose their fingernails due to how much garlic they need to peel.

I love garlic, but on par with the fucking Sackler family of Oxycontin, The garlic ranches of Gilroy are fucking despicable.

> I don't even necessarily disagree with that possibility - sure, work provides meaning in life, it's better than sitting in a cage.

If it's better, then why don't they let the people decide for themselves whether they want to work for free? My guess is that they wouldn't get many takers. Also, exploiting people by giving them a choice between slave labor an worse options doesn't count.

Fundamentally, who are some HN commenters to decide for others what's 'good' for them? The 'maybe slavery is a good idea' stance is one I've seen around Internet forums, a trendy pseudo-intellectual provocation that is transparently absurd. Those who are serious are encouraged to volunteer first for slavery and show us how good it is, or for something much less onerous - free hard labor. It strikes me that people value their freedom and self-determination, not to mention their energy and time, and nobody is a slave voluntarily.

The antislavery amendment* explicitly permits prison labor and this was put in as a sop to the former slave states. The later used this to reproduce their prior system de facto (look up Parchman and Angola prisons for much discussion of the sordid details).

Not surprising Jim Crow was an important part of this, and the use and deployment of drug laws (other than alcohol) began as part of this racial mechanism.

* 13th: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist..."

Does it? As far as I can tell it expands it but does not create it. This is an important distinction because that incentive exists even with 100% public prisons. Even with public prisons, workers are prisons, any organizations that represent those workers, and any private organizations which supply the needs of prisons all have an incentive to expand prisons.

>There are so many horror stories, like prisons saying that they'll close if they don't get some more prisoners.

And if a public prison has to close, it will still be an issue for those who work there and those who supply it with goods. Even if they were guaranteed another job, which isn't likely common to begin with, would it be comparable in pay, duties, and commute time?

In every country with prisons this incentive exists, so I think it would be worthwhile to looking at how other countries handle it.

Let's keep this in perspective. 8.1% of prisoners in the US are in private prisons. Maybe that number is too high, but clearly it isn't the primary driver in US justice policy.

This does seem like a cynical take. In most agriculture jobs this would be the case.

No, they're doing it because they know they can severely underpay these workers and treat them badly, knowing that they have no recourse to push back.

People who run such businesses rarely have any pure motive. It's all about the profit and they don't care who suffers in the pursuit of it.

Now if they'd provided the prisoners with a decent wage for their work, that would be a different matter, and indicative of some good intent. But none of these companies are going to do that, when they know they have a source of people they can continually exploit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf

I don't know which is worse..

He told me he was falsely incarcerated. I didn't know what to believe, or say. I was young, and still kinda believed in the system. I do remember telling him there are nonprofit attorneys whom might take your case. He said, "I just don't care anymore.". I didn't quite understand, probably because of my young age. It turns out he was kept in jail over a clerical error. It didn't matter because he died homeless over a pnumonia.

For violent offenders, no amount of tech is going to keep them from hurting others.

Is it actually? The results of the recent census paint a picture of a country which, in the long run, might become the largest economy in the world, but will struggle to maintain growth - more so than the west.

It's ironic that you raise China in your comparison, because the chinese people have been massive beneficiaries of global capitalism.

It's very nifty. As long as all the vices are conveniently offshore in the places that people already don't really think or care about (or buried deep enough in the underbelly of your society, where it has the same effect), you can extol only the virtues and continue to reject any useful change.

I'm starting to think that from a global lens the economic system doesn't even matter - none could really have mitigated the unbridled greed combined with the population explosion of humanity in the 20th century. Now most of us are stuck relying on the poverty and deprivation of others to support the vaunted quality of life of the 21st; food, clothes, etc can only be so cheap when somebody is willing (or even forced) to take pennies to produce them.

Cool. Now, do something useful and suggest a better option. Utopia doesn't exist.

A system that would improve the life of people after prison without falling for this pitfall would have to entirely remove the profit motive from prison labor (for example by prohibiting the prison to keep any proceeds from prison labor, or by paying inmates competitive rates for the work they are doing, so that overall prison labor is guaranteed to be more expensive than just hiring/outsourcing etc).

Kind of how America went from the slave labor system to the prison labor system seamlessly. There was just too much money to be made.

I would expect there are large percentages of the prison population that might be familiar with these things, also I mean the expectation a job in prison might be getting you ready for is a low paid job in which you are exploited, which once having been in prison in the U.S is probably what you can expect - but I don't know if having that expectation will actually reduce recidivism.

I think if I wasn't a programmer and only had the skills to work a minimum wage job, crime would absolutely seem more rational.

Whenever you have a captive consumer or producer of marketable materials, you have a perverse incentive to exploit, because the other party has no choice in the matter and must take whatever you offer (if anything). Every dystopian movie makes heavy use of these kinds of story elements.

In the case of prison labor, you essentially have slaves, and can therefore leverage that slave labor to undercut your competitors in the open market. The slaves, meanwhile, suffer the indignity of their forced labor and exploitation for someone else's benefit, which is why we outlawed slavery in the civilised parts of the world.

In the case of captive markets (food, commissary, communications systems, etc), price gouging is commonplace. Food quality is so low that malnutrition is common. Quality is shit but it doesn't matter because the consumers of these products are not empowered to decide, while everyone else involved benefits from their exploitation and therefore has no incentive to fix it.

This is then further exacerbated by trade groups that influence laws to increase incarceration durations and incidence in order to preserve and even expand their supply of captives for further exploitation and profit.

I suggest you look into how Western European countries handle their prison populations for comparison.

Imprisoning someone should be a purely negative action on the state, by having some potential benefit you reduce the costs imposed to the state and therefore incentivize imprisonment.

Afaik, prisons jobs in general do nothing of the sort.

Yes, all prison labor is bad in all cases.

Why? It's very simple, you're creating a market that incentivizes incarceration. Prison should be about recovery of a human being and trying to create negative incentives so people think about making a crime (this is a bit debatable).

When you create a market for incarceration, what you're saying is "we don't want to lower crime". So yes, it's bad in all cases because we should be creating incentives to lower crime instead of how to make it profitable.

The product is tainted because it was made by enslaved workers being exploited for their labour.