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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

The headline seems to be very misleading as one might assume that "inmates" of a "prison" are criminals and paying them less than minimum wage has been determined to be illegal.

That doesn't seem to be what happened!

According to the article, the Washington state attorney general, in praising the decision, said "the people detained there are not criminals, nor part of a treatment or rehabilitation program"

They are people in "detention", who are "awaiting civil immigration proceedings".

On the one hand, that makes it seem more egregious, but on the other, it maybe doesn't change the status quo for prison labor as much as one might hope.

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> On the one hand, that makes it seem more egregious, but on the other, it maybe doesn't change the status quo for prison labor as much as one might hope.

Society is already paying to house, feed, and monitor prisoners. We should also pay them to work? How about if instead, we keep track of how much prisoners cost society while they're in jail and they have to pay it back when they're out (or while they're in and working). Do that and I'm all for paying them for their work.

The USA is already one of the world leaders in percent of population incarcerated; it doesn't seem we are suffering from an inability to imprison. If we as a society decide to revoke someones freedom and choice, then we should be willing to shoulder the cost. Making imprisoning low cost, or even worse profitable, creates massively perverse incentives. If it costs the system little to nothing, why bother to make sure people are really guilty? Why bother to spend the money to rehabilitate? Your goal should be to align incentives, which makes a high-cost and humane prison system have lots of favorable characteristics.

If the goal is to save money, then the inmates should just be released.

I agree. They should release all of the minor drug offenders, make recreational drugs legal, sell them at liquor stores, be done with the whole "war on drugs", and reduce police forces.

For everyone worried about people driving while high, there are way more people already driving while drunk, we have policies to deal with it (not saying they're great), and IMO, driving while on the phone is a bigger problem than drunk/high drivers. My sister likes to take informal surveys from her front porch and says more than half the people driving past her house (she lives on a pretty busy street) are on their phone.

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