That's like saying locking people in camps is legal in the US. Technical not a lie, but a bit misleading.
Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book. We can talk about safety conditions, perverse incentives, whether the trials were fair or the punishments were just, etc. But the fact that we make a murder work 8 hours a day isn't per se some human rights abuse, in my opinion.
97% of federal and 94% of state convictions are not convicted through a trial. They are convicted through plea deals. Plea deals function as the shadow justice system of the U.S. where prosecutors have overwhelming coercive advantages to shape the crime and punishment. They play judge and executioner.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
Yes, that’s right, most accused do not “make a plea deal”. The prosecution offers the deal to avoid a labor intensive trial.
Also, prosecution is allowed to deceive (lie) to trick the accused to accept plea deals. There is no evidence burden once the accused pleas guilty. For example, the prosecutor can legally claim they have a mountain of evidence, and once the accused pleas, there’s no requirement for the “evidence” to be provided. https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
Yea, they can refuse the offer. For an accused that cannot afford bail, they may have 2 options: take the plea deal and start serving the sentence right away, or refuse the deal and be incarcerated for an undetermined amount of time awaiting trial.
Either case, many accused faces incarceration whether they accept the deal or not.
> That's like saying locking people in camps is legal in the US. Technical not a lie, but a bit misleading.
Actually labour as a punishment is called labour camps, it is generally frowned upon in the civilized world.
> Forced labor as a proportionate punishment for a crime you were found guilty of by a fair trial is not a problem in my book.
But the punishment is x years in prison not x years of forced labour.
The average person is forced to work in one way or the other. Not sure why committing a crime is a get out of work (and into jail) card.
Eh, they don't do this with the actually dangerous criminals. Too much of a risk. Slavery usually used for nonviolent crims, think drug possession charges. Much easier captive population.
Let’s see all of the things wrong packed in that statement:
1. Most people in jail aren’t “found guilty” of a crime by a trial at all. Most are pressured by both the DAs and the state funded Public defender to accept a plea deal. 95% take a plea deal.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/11/04/the-truth-abou...
2. Trials are rarely “fair”. All of the statistics show that minorities get harsher sentences for the same arrest.
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/racial-d...
3. The state has unlimited resources. They rarely give enough funding to the public defenders office
https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-ab...
We have moved people to concentration camps (excuse me, "internment camps") just because of their ethnicity within the past 80 years...
So yeah, we do have slave labor and we have locked people into camps.
The murderer working 8 hours a day in a prison is an outlier. A huge percentage of the prison population are normal people like you or me put in a bad environment being abused inhumanely because people have decided that they deserve it for some reason.
> they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.
Gosh it's so much suffering for such chump change too. Really sad.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
It is possible to be outraged by all these things at the same time. No one has to pick between different types of exploitation and only be mad at one thing.
I think all prisoners who voluntarily choose to work should be paid a market wage for their labor. I also think some of that wage should be used as compensation to the victims of their crimes.
> Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers.
> After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated.
> Meghen Yeadon, a recruiter for Stoughton, found part of the solution: a Wisconsin Department of Corrections work-release program for minimum-security inmates.
> Work-release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison.
Secret Police records, generally result in a system where people just "disappear". So while there are good intentions to sealing police records, the result of those good intentions would likely result in extreme abuse of power
I think the better course of action would be a path to have convictions expunged, and once expunged allowing for civil defamation against any entity or person that reports the individual was convicted once the record was expunged.
The time it takes to expunge a record should be determined by the courts with a max time set in statute
The Labor in this context is directly derived from government criminal codes, thus not disconnecting it from anything resembling a free market
I think true free marketers are about fair competition, and few would argue that legislation is necessary.
Allowing one company to benefit by illegal behaviour distorts the market and thus goes against the principles of free markets.
Exactly. Without legislation, the market is for sale.
> Allowing one company to benefit by illegal behaviour distorts the market and thus goes against the principles of free markets.
You've noticed the tautology at the heart of the ideology.
Fair competition is the ideal state for a market to be in, but a free market is about unrestricted competition and that can easily turn into monopolies or cabals.
Fair market value is a reference to what the market will bear, not what is or is not fair.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...
Like if you steal a car, six months working a shitty job while locked in prison seems appropriate. The money shouldn’t go to you, it should go to defer the cost of catching, prosecuting, and housing you.
We even have “community service” which is literally forced labor for zero compensation, are people unhappy with that?
Prisons are expensive, which is one reason why we should really only lock up people when there is no other way. If someone is not a danger to society, we shouldn't lock them up.
The main reason to be against prison labor is that it creates perverse incentives to not rehabilitate prisoners (even though participation in labor may help with the rehabilitation process). There's also a risk that cheap prison labor undercuts legitimate businesses. Prisoners also can't be entrusted with anything outside menial and low-impact labor, and as a result the amount of productivity they can offer is really limited.
But requiring prisoners to work partially for their own food and shelter in itself shouldn't be that controversial, especially when they are convicted of serious crime.
No choice? That’s pretty laughably untrue and flies in the face of all the evidence about incarceration being totally rubbish as a punishment.
We start by taking these hundreds of thousands of people who really shouldn't be in jail or prison at all and ask, "what programs would help them from not doing this again? What's the root cause we can address?" And we start implementing social programs that will help support, educate, and reform folks.
Some combination of:
1) Remove a lot of drug crimes from the books and clear convictions. Many of these shouldn't be punishable at all.
2) invest in housing, food, and mental health support to catch folks before they turn to low level theft. Give them to people convicted as well. If you change their situations, many will never need to commit crimes again.
3) Levy fines, garnish wages while providing support. Restrict movement if needed by requiring folks stay in contact with a parole officer or mental health support professional.
Etc
Most "criminals" are folks who are in positions where we left them few choices as a society.
Let’s not even talk about the “War on drugs” that becomes “treat drug abuse as a medical condition” when it happens in “rural communities”
But to some extent maybe it’s moot because most prisoners would never be able to cover the full cost of their stay. I wonder though if there was a sort of coding-bootcamp-like profit sharing model with inmates where the gov tried to maximize their economic productivity they might end up getting trained for better and more humane jobs, trades, nursing, coding, winwin.
Taking 30% of wages for housing and some for food, maybe. But not a fine.
[1] To clarify: there should be an element of punishment (in the form of forgone rights), but there's obviously more to it.
Locking a murderer in a jail cell is moral, I also see no issue requiring them to work.
Where I do see a massive issue is when incarceration is used by private corporations to enrich themselves rather than enriching the public or individuals whose harm is what caused the incarceration in the first place.
I don't in principle oppose private prisons, though I am wary of them in practice. I think there could exist a model where private prisons would be rewarded based on recitivism, but unfortunately such a system would be hard to create for a variety of practical considerations.
It takes away a job that someone who is not a criminal could be doing.
No matter how harsh is the punishment there appears to always be crime. What seems to work is rehabilitation as well as inevitability of capture.
So even if it sounds unjust to try to help offenders (even murderers) If we want them to not offend and not murder _more_ we need norway style prisons rather than US ones.
Regardless of what’s effective and what is just though, having prison companies benefit from forced labor is just all ways of crazy regarding incentives and screws the market soo much, normal people now need to compete against slaves, the state / companies now have incentives to there to be _more_ prisoners which would lead to actually _more_ crime in and off itself.
And to top it off, you have big entities that can lobby (bribe) the government to change laws to the detriment of society at large. It just sooo messed up.
And its not some crazy tinfoil hat thing - we can see that “experiment” play out before our eyes - the US penal system is so proven to be so ineffective its silly.
The prisoners wouldn’t mind working for more pay, but most of them do like it considering the options.
Another part is just accounting - if the federal government paid its employees tax free (no fed income tax) it would work out the same (salaries would drop) but the accounting would be different and people would complain.
And perhaps you cannot pay them in cash, but why not invest the money for the duration of their incarceration, or pay a stipend to some dependent on the outside, like a wife/child? A $10k/year rate of savings is above what many people achieve outside, and a massive boost to get one's life in order once they get out.
> you can certainly incentivize it without resorting to torture.
How?
Children are motivated by love, respect and authority. Convicts are less likely to respond to those.
Something like that.
That way they have enough money for a deposit to rent a place to live and can cover their expenses for some time until they find a job.
If you force them to work, and don't give them money, then they have no way to start a normal life after prison, will depend on money from the government in the best case, and get back to crime in the worst case.
We need to treat prisoners well. Not just because it's the morally right thing to do, but also because it's the best thing we can do if we want a society with low crime rates, where you can walk through the city at night without being scared that an ex-convict mugs you because they don't have any other options.
Punishment
Deterrence
Rehabilitation
Protecting the general public
You can debate the relative merits of each, but rehabilitation is not the only possible goal. If you lock up a repeat violent offender for X years without rehabilitation, the other factors are still relevant.
I would take issue with the usage of the words "the point". There can in fact be multiple ends or goals of incarceration. Whether you think retributive justice or rehabilitation should be primary or secondary would be up for debate, but I primarily mean to say that you don't necessarily have to pick one or the other in the grand scheme of things (I'd say you'd also have a sliding scale of which is more important).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-016-9229-0
https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/19/2/391/3066...
Like many things, there's substantial evidence on both sides of the argument. The devil is usually in the details, and this is a case where success or failure seems to be greatly affected by the quality of the programs themselves and the people who administer them.