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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

I apologise in advance for a lack of reference (was probably Popehat) but the most bizarre if not scary thing I read about the public’s attitude to prisoners and justice was that if you asked them “Should prisoners be allowed to read books?” or ask them “Should prisoners be required to read books?”. You’ll get very different results. Basically any question asked of the public will broadly favour the one that sounds like a punishment :(

Edit: as per the reply below, it’s entirely possible I misremembered this. I asked Popehat and he said it sounds familiar but he doesn’t recall.

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There was a post yesterday about Arizona prisons inducing labour (birth) in inmates against their consent. Plenty of comments saying things like "they're wards of the state so consent isn't needed".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235888

Edit: fixed a typo and clarified that it's labour (i.e., giving birth) and not physical labour.

Without commenting on the morality those comments are correct. In the United States those who are incarcerated can be compelled to labor, per the 13th amendment.

"Inducing labor" is a medical procedure.

If you're unconscious or altered mental status a doctor can force you to do a medical procedure to overcome an emergency situation, like say a baby that needs to come out immediately. Whether you are a prisoner or not would be irrelevent.

The doctor made this clear to me when I was unlawfully detained in Arizona while officers lied to the doctor telling them there was drugs in my GI tract. The doctor was chomping at the bit to find some clinical evidence of emergency so he could force me to do what he wanted.

While this is not a 13th Amendment issue, and possibly not an issue under federal statute law banning slavery, servitude, forced labor, and human trafficking (which unlike 13A doesn’t have a penal exemption, so it may apply), it does violate medical consent rights which prisoners generally retain.

>violate medical consent rights which prisoners generally retain.

Do they? I complained to my state board when medical personnel performed "care" on me without my consent while I was detained (not arrested, not in prison/jail, and at the time no warrant/court order -- just 'detained' and dragged to hospital on a hunch by an officer that there might be drugs hidden up my ass). I was told by my state board the nurse/doctor can do what they want without my consent as they are basically acting as a police officer, and that my (extremely thorough, well documented, 100+ page) claim was denied -- not only that it was denied in triage and not even assigned to a detailed investigation. The medical records clearly listed I was alert and oriented and also expressed there was no clinical evidence of emergent situation, so this wasn't some normal civil exception.

Considering the act in the article happened in Arizona and my own interaction with the state board is that it is legal for nurse/doctor to do as they wish without your consent if LEO is involved, it seems to be de facto legal. Not only that I got the bill and even though the "insurance" was listed as "ICE health care services" the debt in full was sold to debt collectors who are chasing me to this day.

> > violate medical consent rights which prisoners generally retain.

> Do they?

Generally, yes, but there are some exceptions, and it is an area that is complicated in the details because it involves multiple federal Constitutional rights and statutes interacting with state laws.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/nov/4/beyond-estel...

> I complained to my state board when medical personnel performed "care" on me without my consent while I was detained (not arrested, not in prison/jail, and at the time no warrant/court order -- just 'detained' and dragged to hospital on a hunch by an officer that there might be drugs hidden up my ass). I was told by my state board the nurse/doctor can do what they want without my consent as they are basically acting as a police officer, and that my (extremely thorough, well documented, 100+ page) claim was denied -- not only that it was denied in triage and not even assigned to a detailed investigation.

Well, yes, this sounds like a cavity search, where the legal issue isn’t medical consent but potentially unreasonable (and thus unlawful) search under the 4th Amendment as incorporated against the states by the 14th Amendment.

The state medical board is the wrong forum for that complaint.

(Note that even for the actual medical consent issues in the above cited source, federal courts have been the forums; state medical boards are more convenient—because when they decide to get involved, they bear the cost of investigation—but are really not generally an effective method of holding state and local law enforcement and correctional authorities, and medical practitioners employed or directed by them, to task.)

I agree that it appears they should, but again recall this happened in Arizona. I personally have spoken with their board. They personally have expressed to me that it isn't even against the regulatory bounds of the license of medical professionals to act without consent. They refuse to even _investigate_ acts that happen under detainment without consent by a patient who was fully alert and oriented without any emergent condition. That is, there is zero effect to the license of anyone doing it as the board refuses to act on it in the state this article is in. The claims simply die in triage -- and this isn't some theoretical but my concrete experience.

>The state medical board is the wrong forum for that complaint.

The complaints I made to medical board was about medical staff at a private hospital acting without consent. I was even sent the bill this wasn't a prison or other state hospital. Why would the board be an inappropriate forum? I understand the board doesn't control actual police officers but they were not the direct subject of the complaint.

>he legal issue isn’t medical

And this is the problem I keep confronting to try and solve this situation. If you argue it was medically improper, suddenly it was a "criminal search and you need to hold accountable the process for the criminal search." If you argue it was an improper search, suddenly it was "medical care and you need to determine if the medical care was improper." This allows both the LEO and medical personnel to weasel out of it by flipping things to the other side, which is part of the reason why it is probably done this way as a slippery "be medical when you argue against the criminal aspect and be criminal search when you argue against the medical aspect." I know the game being played with that card because it gets played a lot.

You're reading too quickly and inferred the wrong meaning of "labor" here. The meaning here is "give birth to a child" not "engage in work" so the 13th amendment is completely irrelevant.

Edit: It didn't help that "including" was probably an autocorrect from "inducing"

> Edit: It didn't help that "including" was probably an autocorrect from "inducing"

Damn the awful auto-correct on my phone! Thank you for pointing that out, it certainly made the intended meaning less obvious.

That the 13th amendment doesn’t extend abolition to prisoners doesn’t necessarily mean that no other rule or law could extend abolition to prisoners.

18 usc § 1589, the general statutory forced labor ban in the US, does not exempt penal labor.

You might even say that's the whole purpose, historically and economically, of prisons in the first place.

> You might even say that's [ed: forced labor] the whole purpose, historically and economically, of prisons in the first place.

Generally, no, that would not be accurate.

OTOH, prisons were, before fairly recent history, generally of fairly limited use. Forced labir definitely, and as a direct replacement for chattel slavery, is the original reason for mass incarceration practices in the United States (though overtly, directly using it for that purpose has since fallen out of favor.) Different systems have different hiatories of penal practices and have used similarly described institutions for different purposes.

Under this view, presumably historical nations that made most of their money from trade, and didn't rely much on local production (the Netherlands, say; or Portugal; or Hong Kong under British rule), would see little-to-no local economic benefit from a marginal slave laborer — and so just wouldn't bother to establish any prisons / penal colonies. And also, likely would find it hard to sell these criminals on to other countries, given their known criminality / disobedient attitude.

Is this accurate? If so, then what did such countries generally do with their criminals? Exile them?

The 13th amendment doesn't say anything about forcing prisoners to give birth

The context of slavery in the 13th amendment was the recent slavery in America. Could you not basically do what you wanted medically with a slave in the early 19th century? Forcing birth seems to fit within the limits of slavery.

Actually there were limited restrictions on what could be done to slaves, but that's irrelevant since the 13th ammendment doesn't make prisoners slaves, it merely doesn't make involuntary labor as part of a punishment illegal.

The 13th amendment doesn't expand the right of the state to abuse prisoners.

Expand? No, retain? Yes, unless you've decided slavery isn't abuse.

Memory is very fallible, and if you can't remember the source I'd suggest it's quite possible you're not accurately remembering the information as well. Even in cases where someone's memory is entirely accurate, without a source it's hard to see if we're missing relevant context (for instance, if a certain piece of information was gathered decades earlier). A few years back[1] the ACLU claimed that it's polling found broad support for prison reform and reducing the prison population.

When Obama first came into office, Senator Jim Webb (generally considered a moderate) actually had a plan for a commission to study the criminal justice system in the U.S. in an effort to reform it. It received widespread support, with even a number of Republicans co-sponsoring the bill. The leadership didn't seem particularly interested in it, for whatever reason, and nothing came from it.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/91-percent-americans-sup...

Prison reform in particular seems to be one of those things folks educated on the prison system (or even just close to it) are in favor of, but folks who don't interact with it at all believe for whatever reason that it's fine and any attempts to make it better is immediately equivalent to making things "easier" on prisoners which sets up a knee-jerk negative reaction.

The leadership was probably afraid that even a bipartisan effort would be vehemently opposed by a vocal minority as soft on crime, anti-LE, or something else.

I’m glad you posted this as a reminder to everyone to be wary of my supposed fact. I was unsure if I should have even posted it but I’ll spend some time now and have a look for the source.

Edit: wow @popehat deleted all their tweets!

> Edit: wow @popehat deleted all their tweets!

Yeah, he wrote about why here: https://popehat.substack.com/p/goodbye-twitter

He's on Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@Popehat) and coincidentally re-tweeted (or whatever the Mastodon equivalent is) the author of this piece a couple days ago talking about this topic.

Previously 're-tooted', but, disappointingly, no more :( https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

(In practice, people still use the 'toot' terminology a fair bit)

Why would you expect to get the same answer to those two questions? They're completely different, and answering Yes to 1 and No to 2 is self-consistent.

Or do you mean that responders answered No to 1 and Yes to 2?

The implication is "no" to 1 and "yes' to 2, because the first is framed as giving prisoners a privilege and the second is framed as punishing them. Unfortunately the source for this was likely Ken White (@popehat), and he's left Twitter and removed his tweets, so it's not possible to confirm the original wording. I'm pretty sure it was just an offhand remark he made and not something that's actually been studied.

I think on balance you are most likely correct and I added an edit to explain

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