Prison Money Diaries: What People Make (and Spend) Behind Bars
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
Looked up the artist and he has a ton of other stuff. I found a good interview with him, interesting guy [1].
Otherwise, you get institutionalized slavery, like we have now and is documented in this article.
However, if you do take a job, you should be paid for it, like everybody else.
This is important to counter prisons for profit schemes as well as improving the wellbeing of the prisoners.
Top of my head, I’d estimate an effective hourly rate of about £1 to £2 for a week’s work at minimum wage minus payment to the prison for accommodation and food - but then there is an issue of whether prison labour is of real economic value and not often a form of ‘make work’ ie is sewing mail-bags really worth £10 an hour? Perhaps 50p per hour (net) is actually a fair return for value produced?
The problem is that the state is exploiting the prisoners for profit. The profit should go to the prisoners doing the work.
Prisoners should be allowed to acquire and purchase necessities without markups with their earnings.
Prison facilities and services should be free.
Being "rich" in prison doesn't mean you get to improve your gaming rig or buy a Roomba, it just means you don't have to consider whether to spend $2 to see the doctor. I would be fine with that.
Also, everything in prison is reported to be expensive, bad quality, and full of extra fees. So if they only have one expensive brand of toothpaste, they should at least earn enough to afford _those_ prices.
If people leave with money, they can actually try to break the cycle... Perhaps try to keep some of their property/belongings for short incarcerations... Most Americans families would lose their house and/or car if one parent was in jail for 6 months... Which makes prison a family killer, encouraging more crime to continue from neglected children and single mom/dad now working 2-3 jobs to cost the gap
To me if you pay prisoners a normal wage it would seem too much like a reward for breaking crime, given that we pay all their normal expenses as well.
Furthermore, as the article states, prison services are substandard or entirely missing. Either fix that and we can talk deductions above normal taxes or allow the prisoners to earn minimum wage or more and to keep their earnings.
It's not minimum wage. It's minimum wage plus room and board plus shitty food and healthcare. Even for someone young and healthy, albeit uneducated, a few years in prison could yield a nest egg. For someone with a chronic health condition, getting sentenced could be the smart move. (This is true even today, depending on your city and state.)
The price of prison labor, what companies and the government pay for it, should be no less than prevailing wages. Ideally, indexed to the county the prison is in. What the prisoner is paid out of that should deduct some amount, again ideally related to a local cost-of-living index, that goes into a rehabilitation fund.
You want to trade your freedom and clean criminals record for minimum wage plus room and board?
No sane person would do that.
Prisoners should receive their wages less income taxes. Anything else creates a moral hazard, as we have seen with prisons for profit.
That doesn’t mean wages could not be garnished if there is a judgement against the prisoner.
minimum wage (but not really), shitty room, shitty food, shitty healthcare
Cons:
minimum wage (yeah, not really), shitty room, shitty food, shitty healthcare,
AND
- loss of freedom,
- loss of reputation,
- loss of privacy,
- no prospect of advancement,
- no raises,
- even shittier neighbors (on average),
- holidays without your family,
- almost impossible to get a job when you're out,
- no vacation or other time off,
- no or almost no sex or intimacy with your loved ones,
- being treated like shit every day,
- the threat of solitary,
- being in solitary,
I could go on, but why bother.
It’s crap that’s reality. But it’s true, and between the prison population and those folks, I would argue for prioritising the latter. (Naturally, it’s better to do both.)
Then charge them for those living expenses. Pay them a normal wage for outside, and then charge them what it would cost to rent a tiny room you share with another person plus the real cost of a boiled egg plus a peanut butter sandwich. I imagine they'd end up with something like 90% of their wage left.
Truly better and more rewarding than being marginally poorer outside
They are not wards of the state nor are they locked up. That’s a huge win.
The correct solution isn’t to make prisoners more miserable, but to make everybody less miserable.
By giving people more money, it helps people in all situations to avoid going back to prison. Money helps even if you seek social assistance -- you can have better rent options, you can have better clothing for interviews, better peace of mind in their financial situation (because they might not be free and clear of previous debts, either)...
Some (if not all) states require you to continue paying debts and taxes (e.g. child support) while incarcerated.. so at $.10/hour you almost certainly had to sell everything you own even if you're incarcerated for under a year.
But simply on the topic of paying prisoners the market rate for labor, the idea does seem unjust to me.
Let's say we have two people, Jack and Jill, who both work a low paying job and are miserable. One day Jill decides to rob a store, but is caught and goes to prison for a few years. In prison she is first working some menial job, but a government program trains her in some skilled labor (we might imagine she is learning to code). After completing her sentence she is released and has the entire amount that she earned (minus no expenses) and trained a valuable job skill that will enable her to get a better paying job.
Meanwhile Jack, who committed no crime, has had to pay for his expenses (which eat up the majority of his pay), and received no help or training.
We reward Jill for her criminal behavior by "fixing" her life so she is less likely to commit crimes in the future, but we ignore Jack even though he was equally miserable, but chose not to commit a crime.
The real issue is that currently both Jack and Jill are getting screwed over by society. We should fix both. It wouldn't even be that expensive and it would in fact probably lead to greater happiness and lower overall societal costs like healthcare (e.g. poor people kicking the can until they can't escape it any longer and now it's a very expensive stage 4 cancer) and justice (don't need to pay for as many expensive courts if there's less crime). And probably more tax take as everyone in the bottom 90% of society basically spends what they earn and doesn't hide it in the Caymans.
But greater and more equitable overall growth is still less short-term growth for the top, so we can't have it.
Welfare provided to one shouldn't necessarily be compared with all other potential recepients always. Improving the situation of one does not mean others' shouldn't receive assistance as well.
It varies wildly in the US, but some of those like "medical" and "food", are debatable. Our prison system is truly barbaric in some places.
We should encourage reading and education in prisons instead
That said, prison labor is quite common across the globe and considered rehabilitating.
But here in Finland the prisoners are paid minimum wage or more per law. This change happened in the last 15years or so and was mostly about it being considered unfair competition, which is an angle that might work in USA too.
Nobody should be forced to work for slave wages in slave conditions.
I cannot speak for Finland specifically, but in many places prisoners are taught and can earn qualifications while in prison. If they can leave prison with qualifications as a cook, car mechanic, car painter, carpenter, electrician, or even locksmith (yes, I've seen that, as ridiculous as it sounds), that might actually help them.
However in the US prisoners are often exploited to perform utterly menial tasks. Forget any formal training or earning qualifications. Even if they would perform the same task outside prison, they probably couldn't compete with $0.10/h prison labor. If that cheap human labor didn't exist, those tasks would likely just be automated.
So there's a bit of nuance there and I wouldn't consider all kinds of prison labor rehabilitating.
The philosophy in the US seems to be that you just have to change people: Instead of giving people opportunities to lead a normal life after prison, options are actually taken away from felons. Most other western countries recognize that many crimes are also a result of circumstances and lack of opportunities. The easiest way to get people to follow your rules is not punishment, it's making them want to do it because conformity is the path of least resistance.
In the USA that’s simply not true. There are boundless opportunities for every individual to take advantage of. There is a labor shortage at the moment. There are severe shortages of people that are craftsmen as well and tons of free training online.
No one is desperate due to the circumstances created by the USA. They make the conscious choice to become a criminal.
Criminals are not victims and the coddling, condescending attitudes to criminals is degrading to them if anything. They made the choice and should own it like you’d expect from any adult.
Man, if any quote could be used to show how HN should not be taken seriously on any topic that strays outside of the strict definition of STEM-related, this could be a contender.
I don't even know where to begin, but consider the fact that people are born into situations far more horrible than you may ever truly comprehend, where criminal acts and lifestyles are as normal to them as anything you would find normal to yourself growing up.
Possibly because you don’t have a good point to make.
Most people that grow up in bad places or situations don’t become criminals. Criminal acts may occur more frequently in certain places but the vast majority of people from those places do not become criminals.
And what do you know about me growing up? I grew up around a lot of these types of “horrible situations” and most the kids turned out. Sone choose to commit crimes and sone died or were incarcerated because of those choices.
Consider the other possibilities. If someone confidently told you that our flat Earth is 6,000 years old, where would you begin? There's a lot to unpack, and you're not even certain if all the work will be worth doing or just a waste of time.
> Most people that grow up in bad places or situations don’t become criminals.
Most people who smoke don't get lung cancer. So by your logic have we proven that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer?
Poverty, in the US and globally, is correlated with higher crime rates. Isn't it such a strange coincidence that people who happen to be born into poverty also consistently happen to "choose" to commit more crimes, given that their environment has nothing to do with their choices? Shouldn't crime rates be equal across all socioeconomic classes?
> I grew up around a lot of these types of “horrible situations” and most the kids turned out.
Again, most people who do X don't end up Y is in no way a valid argument that X doesn't cause Y.
You don’t find it convincing that poorer/less-educated places tend to have higher crime rates?
I’m not saying people aren’t culpable for their crimes, but surely it’s not as simple as people “consciously choosing” to become criminals.
Just because some people from lower income brackets choose to risk their livelihoods by doing crimes doesn’t mean there isn’t boundless opportunities.
If a person would rather gangbang or sling meth instead of doing something productive then that’s their choice.
There aren’t exactly a bunch of dudes desperate for cancer treatments they can’t afford so they turn to criminal enterprise to fund it. They choose the lifestyle.
It's simply not true that people in lower income have the same opportunities. They don't have access to the same quality of education, people who care about their career prospects or the ability to afford higher education.
Poor people aren’t as stupid as you think. Most don’t turn to crime.
To reverse your logic, affluent people should never commit crimes but yet sone do too. People make choices.
I think this was once called the soft bigotry of low expectations. You are a bigot by your logic. Looking down on poor people is offensive.
I'm not arguing that people make choices. Also, we are talking about the rate of criminal activity, not absolutes. Nothing in my argument says affluent people never commit crime, that is a straw man.
> Poor people aren’t as stupid as you think. Most don’t turn to crime.
I don't know how to be any clearer that I am talking about the _rate_ of criminal activity.
> I think this was once called the soft bigotry of low expectations. You are a bigot by your logic. Looking down on poor people is offensive.
I appreciate the ad hominem, but the one thing you won't answer is why then do poorer communities commit more crime on average? It seems pretty clear that less opportunity/resources makes it _more likely_ to turn to crime.
How do you explain the difference in rates if it's just choice?
Broken cultures and bad values. If it were really about money then violent crime that has nothing to do with money wouldn’t be higher as well.
Single motherhood is the leading cause and it’s endemic in poor communities. This value is not only tolerated but celebrated somehow by affluent liberals. It’s astonishing.
America is so incredibly boundless with opportunity that people wait years to move their lives here and others risk their life to come here illegally so they can take advantage of the opportunities and send money back home. Many of these people come from places that are actually poor (America doesn’t really have poverty compared to other places) and could probably be justified in stealing bread. But they don’t.
If that’s not clear evidence it’s a choice then I don’t know what is.
We don't get to choose where or to whom we are born. If you are then born into "bad cultures and values", as you say, that has a huge influence on your "choices". If you drop the same kid randomly into a more affluent family, I highly doubt he makes the same choices.
I just don't think that the cause can be simply boiled down to choices, when environment clearly has an outsized effect.
Poor communities had as a value the 2-parent family and their crime rates were far lower than today. As our social values have changed our crime rates have generally increased. We like to point out that since the 90’s they’ve gone down but not overall the last 100 years.
In the Netherlands only in a few political cases after WW2 did people lose their right to vote or enter parliament.
As it happens, in the UK there's a chain of locksmiths (they do a few other things, but key cutting is their stock in trade) called Timpson that employs many ex-offenders:
https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offend...
I'm not sure what you mean by this. To me it looks like prisons in US are a good business and good for business due to cheap slave labor. Many places have for profit prisons, high repeat offense rates and ridiculous incarceration rates.
This is all from an external point of view, I'm not from the US.
Fuck that. Sending stimulus checks to prisoners is beyond asinine. But stealing stimulus check from prisoners is an entirely new level of evil.
The prisoners amd their support systems (if they were lucky enough to have one) were still affected by the pandemic.
People got sick, lost jobs, etc.
Prices of items that they already pay insane amounts for keep going up.
One day we will look back on all of this with shame.
The thing that makes people emotionally happy is to punish wrongdoers, and while punishment has its place as a disincentive it does not provide a good framework for reform--none of the causes of the crime being punished are addressed and the prisoners are often in worse situations coming out of prison than they were going in.
At the end of the day, if we want punishment we shouldn't expect much in the way of reform.
I completely agree. Equally if you focus on reform, as some European countries do - by growing the person's self-esteem, ups killing and training, treating them like a human, and fostering good social skills - you need an environment that doesn't appear to be particularly punishing.
Of course there are also different reasons for being in prison in the first place. Drug offenses (should they be classified as prisoners of war?), non violent crimes, violent crimes, sex crimes, mental illness etc.
This clouds the issue - if I say "prisons should be hell on earth", because I'm thinking rapists, and you say "prisons should be places of reform" because you're thinking "marijana possession" then we can both be right.
Yes, different prisons exist, and some lean rehab, some lean punishment. Some inmates expect to be released in "reasonable time", others are in for life.
While prisons could, and definitely should, be better - I would argue that the whole justice system needs overhaul. Its too easy to be sent to prison for minor offences. Sentences are generally too long - they remove hope, and without hope there can be no reform.
But equally society is crowded, living together in small space means we need rules, re-offending rates are high, and some folk just don't want to be reformed.
In short, it's a complicated question, with no simple one-size-fits-all answer. The current approach seems to be failing on many levels.
Some people can’t be rehabilitated. Some people just need to be kept away from the population at large. More than simple “punishment”, incarceration also serves as risk management. People need to accept that some humans are simply asocial psychopaths. Albeit a small number, but they do exist. Just look up the heinous crimes of serial killers.
>”Even for rapists, thieves and murderers.”
This sounds like moralizing. Would you, you personally, really be okay with said people moving in next-door to you and your family? It’s easy to take the high-road, knowing the odds of having to be in close contact to “rehabilitated” rapists and murderers is quite low.
A financial incentive so perverse that you could imagine a locality shortening the yellow lights to create more offenders & revenue, at the expense of drivers’ wallets and sometimes even contributing to serious accidents[0].
It’s not surprising that local officials would be so corrupt, right? After all they are only human, just like the people in their prisons.
[0] https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...
Give them some fucking soap.
Slavery is not illegal, that's a fucking lie! It is illegal, unless it's for conviction of a crime. The main objective is to get you in your fucking prime. And keep the prison full and not give you a fucking dime. But they the real criminal keeping you confined. For a petty crime but they give you two-to-nine.
I never really understood the lyrics until another article posted on HN recently and was shocked at how truthful the lyrics were.
Bookie, football pool: I inherited this game from Jakym Tibbs in Albemarle. The way it worked is that players would pay a $1-equivalent commissary item in exchange for an entry slip. On the slip they would select the winning teams from each Sunday NFL matchup, and an exact total score from a specific matchup as a tiebreaker. I collected the slips and commissary, and then recorded it onto a master sheet. I would take a cut of the prize pool. It was practically no income, just for some Sunday fun.
Tattooist, stick and poke: Ink can be created from soot or sourced from a flex-pen[0] and a staple or other small piece of metal will serve as a needle. Sell tattoos.
Tattooist, tattoo gun. Create a tattoo gun using a motor from a beard trimmer, a toothbrush, and a straightened and sharpened spring from an illicit ballpoint pen. This tool allows for much larger and more lucrative works, but is harder to conceal. Sell tattoos.
Vinter: Prison wine is called "Buck" in the North Carolina system. Buck is made by combining some bread, fruits, and a generous helping of sugar procured via Trustees. For small batches of Buck you can ferment it in individual bottles. For larger batches, double up a couple of clean garbage bags. You can make gallons of Buck this way, and then distribute it into bottles after it has finished fermenting. Sell the resulting product.
Pharmacist: Drugs can be smuggled into a jail via a corrupt guard, an inmate[1] entering from the street, or the mail. As for the mail, Suboxone strips are small enough to conceal in a letter. Practically anything else can be obtained by way of guards or inmates from outside. For rolling papers they would impregnate normal paper with a coffee mixture and then dry that out and use it for smoking marijuana. Obtain drugs and sell them for a markup.
Porn Merchant: Pornography is prohibited and so there is a market for it. You can rent or sell single pornographic images or an entire magazine of it.
Tailor: In Edgecombe the dress code was lax, and destruction of jumpsuits was not punished. Jumpsuits can be modified into a two-piece outfit, which allows for better range of motion. This makes your outfit more comfortable and is advantageous in fights. Obtain a razor or other sharpened blade and cut a jumpsuit in half at the waist. Cut vertical slits around the top of the shorts/pants and then run a string through those slits to act as a belt. Charge for this service.
Poker Dealer/Player: Poker chips were created by ripping up a deck of cards. The dealer took a percentage of the buy-in, and also played at the table. Cheating is met with violence.
Spades Player: You and a partner learn how to play Spades and go try your hand at the table. The buy-in to a game of Spades was a $1-equivalent commissary item. Some people would play this for 5+ hours a day, round after round, back to back to back, without speaking a word.
You also had thieves and strong arm robbers. If someone stole from you then you would have to meet it with violence, "check off" (get yourself transferred out of the unit), or become a target of increased predation.
I think I've basically covered everything that I encountered as far as money-making goes. The cooking, haircutting, and laundry side-hustles basically worked as described in the article.
Edit: Thought of some more! Artist, weaver, and hair braiding. The weaver created and sold little bracelets with designs on them. The artists took commissions, and the braiders did hair.
[0] Pen in a flexible, translucent rubber casing. See Shomer-Tec Prison Pen. While you could make the barrel wide enough to comfortably write with, the ballpoint tips on these are completely worthless.
[1] In the prisons you have green-clothes and brown-clothes, low and high security. I am told that some in green-clothes are eligible for employment in state services outside of the facility. Groundskeeping at the state ferry system, for example. During your work detail you can collect a parcel of contraband and then smuggle it back into the facility. It is then sold.
Much could be resolved by attacking the lack of goal based outcomes from the criminal system. Perhaps influenced by punishment culture in American.
Most state funded institutions are incentivized to produce good outcomes or lose control of their funding and eventually employment.
The same should apply to the prison system. Shut them down, reorganize. Repeat until we achieve desired affected.
America has become a no nothing culture. Watch agape, engagingly discuss, wait until next distraction.
There is no problem America cannot ignore if they work together. Paradoxically, there is no problem America can work together to solve.
Moreover, in the US after prison your life is going to be very hard, and even if the restrictions on felons are removed the kind of friends, networks, and lack of education/training I assume (including from these comment) people get in -prison would not be conducive to becoming a normal member of society.
I don't think even 30-day prison sentence is needed - what good can it do? If you're poor you are likely going to lose your job and rent, and if evicted you'd lose all your stuff.
I think that people incompatible with society (significant assault/armed robbery and up, or lots of repeat crime) should simply be executed, and then for most, the incentives should be aligned correctly. I don't pretend I know exactly how, but e.g. a sketch - let's say for property crime (including white collar) people have to work off the damage + some penalty via a repayment schedule (without any detention, maybe an ankle monitor or something); if needed, give them a minimum wage job or training - even a "welfare" job/training from the govt that doesn't pay for itself. With the alternative being indefinite detention, i.e. that only ends when you agree to work / are done working it off.
The most lucrative hustle though was painting. Take old roll on deodorant bottles, fill them with water and drop candies in them, M&Ms, skittles, etc to make colors. Then paint people pictures and Holiday cards to send home. They went for a lot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnethicalLifeProTips/comments/m9oqm...