Nobody should profit off of prison, period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
The prisons also counted all the people in them as residents, for apportionment of votes, money, and so on.
You would have a rural county where 6,000 people, including 1,500 prison guards, actually live. And then 6,000 prisoners.
Which would count as 12,000 people in terms of congressional and state representation. But only half of them are actually allowed to vote.
This is known as prison gerrymandering, although in New York it was made illegal in 2010[0].
However, it's still legal in many other states[1].
They should be able to vote though
Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district. Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
Or is it just a way to suppress voting by as much of the Left as possible?
The Right are the ones who define all these laws. The Left are the ones who seem positioned to run afoul of them (pro-drugs, pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, etc.), then lose their ability to influence change.
Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise, and mass criminalization plus felon disenfranchisement is its direct replacement.
Also, you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
> Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
That, too, but its largely a federal politics thing.
Thanks-- I [think I] see where you're going but still don't get where this ends. You have a district with a minority of people who can't vote. Yet they are counted among the population.
This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?
> you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?
Presidential voting power (for the same reason as the House; well, really, as a direct consequence of apportionment of the House).
Yes, Atlanta metro is about 60% of the population of the state of Georgia.
This is egregious.
Snark aside, this is how you systematically disenfranchise minorities. See Florida.
Democracy doesn’t mean only the “deserving” get a vote. In theory.
Making the slave labor illegal wouldn't get rid of most of the economic/political incentive for prisons.
Or that you have to buy any medications sold in commissary from there and won't be given them at medical (which costs $5 a visit when you don't make $5 a month) like aspirin at the for profit commissary that buys from jacked up 'prison commissary' distributors and has a way shorter than what you buy in the store expiration date. Keep in mind you are not allowed to share 'medication' and that having expired 'medication' in your locker can be a shot (writeup, potential loss of good time, potential to have your security points increased and shipped to a higher security(i.e. less safe) prison).
"Nobody should profit off of prison, period" is very simplistic: the electricity company makes a profit; the store selling bread, sausages, milk, potatoes, and whatnot makes a profit; the supplier selling books makes a profit; AT&T will make a profit from the phone lines regardless, just as they make a profit off phone lines to offices, etc. etc.
The problem isn't private companies: it's the prison officials. How much of that revenue goes back to the prison? A substantial amount I bet. That's why they do it; that a private company is involved isn't all that important. Yes, it's exploitive and counter-productive, but few seem to care as prisons are for evil people who deserve to be assraped on a daily basis anyway, and anything more than bread & water is a luxury.
This fully fits with the general attitude that exists in the US towards criminals. This is a country that puts 9-year olds in full leg and arm shackles for stealing bubble gum[1] (putting a kid like that in court is already dubious), and there are plenty of examples ranging from the existence of the "innocence project" to all the drug tests for employment, etc. etc. What is wrong with you people?
[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/courts-shackle-...
There's discord between the discussion in this thread and discussion any time the subject of San Francisco policing comes up. They're too soft and let crime happen. They ignore shoplifters. People are just shitting in the streets. Okay, well what do you want the police to do? It seems the options are you either kill petty shoplifters and homeless people or you send them to prison. But then the same people will complain about exploding prison populations.
Am I lacking in creativity? Because there are three options I can see:
- Create a society where even unskilled, somewhat antisocial people who went through great trauma as children do well enough that they don't turn to crime, and actually treat those who are so mentally ill that they'll be long-term homeless virtually no matter what.
- Allow some amount of non-lethal crime to happen and live with it.
- Put massive amounts of people in prison.
It seems like voters have converged on the third as their preference, not because they're being brainwashed by private prisons and corrupt corrections officer unions, but because the first option is too expensive and the second option would mean they need to see human shit and broken windows when they're walking around the city. At least prisons tend to be in the middle of the desert or swamp where it's out of sight, someone else's problem.
There's room for a middle option between passivity and slavery/prison. Some people need to be wards of somebody, so set up an institution like the military (endless boot camp, or the mining-town setups of old) and use that for alternate sentencing. Last chance: you get training, a mandatory job, shitty housing, and limited freedom (shore leave/weekend passes). It's not ideal, so work the program as long as you need to and GTFO. Fuck it up and next time you will go to prison.
The problem is the "they don't deserve things for free" mindset. It's even here in this thread too, I had to pay for education, why should prisoners get it? This vindictive thinking is all over HN, just a couple days ago a top comment was wondering why we allow them to "infest" cities like they're some sort of disease rather than other people. If you ran on a dog whistled "kill the homeless" platform, you'd get a lot of voter support.
Of course they shouldn't, and they shouldn't profit off of healthcare, or higher education or a bunch of other things either.
Which one is actually going to get fixed?
None of them, because the goal is making money, and it's working really well.
Maybe, prisons buying food isn't the problem with American prisons.
I don't know the current state of them, but you can tour Seodaemun prison (operational 1908-1987; it's now a museum/memorial). They make no attempt to hide the fact that the conditions were historically even worse than you're describing-- basically concentration camps sans gas chambers. Food was watery gruel, toilets were rat-infested holes in the ground, etc.
Visit in the winter when it's 30F out for the full experience; the prisoners weren't given adequate clothing for the cold themselves so even bundled up to the teeth you can appreciate their misery.
Out of curiosity, how many servicemen did the US allow to get into foreign prisons?
I know at least two highly mediatized cases of US servicemen committing murder in Europe[1][2] but were instantly airlifted to the US before they could be arrested by the local police, so they couldn't be trialed and jailed in the EU and instead got to walk free back home.
If the US stepped in for them in Europe, I doubt they won't do the same in Korea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
Here is a 2007 article in Stars and Stripes (USDoD newspaper) about the special treatment American service-members receive in South Korean prisons: https://www.stripes.com/news/u-s-servicemembers-treated-diff...
Wait, what?!
He was meant to board a plane back to America where he would be thrown out of the military, but he evidently decided to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I suspect the north will keep him as a bargaining chip to exchange for something later on.
We're happy to send people to public prisons, and they're not that many private ones.