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Comment by kthielen | Hacker News Reader

Right, but what’s the problem exactly?

Freed slaves would wind up convicted of "vagrancy". That is, being black and unable to prove employment to the judge, who would be getting kickbacks for each conviction from the local lumber company that hired out prison labor.

Sounds like an unjust law and/or an unfair enforcement of the law, rather than an argument that incarcerated people shouldn’t be forced to work.

Freed slaves also were unfairly scrutinized for eligibility to vote. Does that mean we should never work to guarantee the integrity of our voting systems?

There are unfortunately many companies who lobby the government to keep prison population high because they depend on cheap/free prison labor. Over 4,100 companies profit off of prison labor in the US. That's a lot of incentive.

https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-c...

That there is no rehabilitation, only punitive. This undermines the domestic security of the US (as the convicts are still in a marginalized status after the sentence is over and also not rehabilitated, promoting destructive behaviors)

And its purpose is specially for a slave population.

Some developed nations have reevaluated this, to have convicts be rehabilitated and more collaborative members of society. And the inhumane conditions in the US prisons - for slaves - being valid arguments to prevent extradition.

Rehabilitative justice is better than retributive justice, but I'm partial to transformative justice; fix the system that lead to the crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice

It creates an incentive to grow and maintain the slave class. Instead we should be thinking rehabilitation and how to have less people in prison.

Why should we be thinking that?

Some people might argue that we should pursue even more extreme punishments, to dissuade people from committing crimes.

The outcome of punitive retribution is that it undermines the domestic security of the US when convicts sentences are over. They are less integrated into society than before the arrest, and are not rehabilitated from the crime they did, are not rehabilitated from the punishments and society in prison, and are marginalized from the rest of society pushing people towards more petty and violent crimes against the population just for basic food and shelter.

So your idea exacerbates the thing you want to dissuade.

The concept is called recidivism if you are interested in corroborating or learning additional perspectives of this. And why it occurs such as the misaligned incentives that promote recidivism that we as a society can fix.

Huh, seems like that theory isn't getting much support these days, with sympathetic DAs on the chopping block.

Maybe it's actually wrong?

Or maybe the motivation for punitive retribution is punitive, not corrective, so that the truth of the empirical theory has no bearing on the support for policy?

Disagreements on values often masquerade as disagreements on facts, especially because people often use fact claims oriented to their audience’s perceived values to sell actions based on different values to them.

Or maybe punitive retribution is also corrective.

sympathetic DAs are the wrong approach, hampering enforcement is the wrong approach. those are bandaids that are incompatible with society that doesn't have other structural changes. since those structural changes don't exist, all you have is amplified domestic security problems as more violence occurs without penalty, incompatible with the concept of civilization.

you're looking at this through the lens of more enforcement+penalties versus less enforcement+penalties, a false dilemma that's not what the rest of us are talking about.

You negated a lot of ideas but left off the part that summarizes what you're talking about.

Is there any thread you found productive here?

Yes, each thread produced several words.

That is quite interesting. Maybe we should start enforcing the law against school shooters.

Sure, seems like it's worth trying.

I'm not interested in fighting on the internet. You asked

> How did the 13th amendment codify slavery?

It codified it the above sense.

If you’re not interested in fighting on the Internet, you wouldn’t have posted what you posted.

You can say “it codified [slavery] in the above sense”, but obviously this isn’t the sense that people meant when they went to war to end slavery. And neither you nor I had to make the sacrifice that those people made to end what they considered to be slavery in the US.

Maybe it’s worth considering what the purpose of the 13th amendment was? It’d be a pretty huge mistake to conclude that the purpose of passing the 13th amendment was to enshrine slavery in law, which so many people fought and died to abolish, right?

I was acting with the principle of charity, assuming that you did not actually understand the sense the above poster meant. Hoping that you would apply the same principle to my comment, I pointed out in my original response that that sense drew an equivalence between unpaid imprisoned work and chattel slavery that is...

That's the last I'll respond to you about this topic.

> That's the last I'll respond to you about this topic.

I love it when this one gets pulled out. UH OH, NO MORE RESPONSES!

Well I'm also happy to leave it here, that the 13th amendment absolutely outlawed slavery and that people arguing for policy changes in law enforcement are making a weak case that their poorly justified agenda is somehow on par (or even more morally virtuous) with the 19th century abolitionists.

NOW I'M TAKING MY BALL AND GOING HOME.

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