In illinois, a warden tried to fix an abusive prison
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
There's still a strong culture in the US that fetishizes punishment. A disturbingly high number of people want criminals to go to prison and get beaten and raped. They don't care how many innocent people get caught up in it as long it isn't them personally and so long as at least some people they feel "deserve it" are being tortured. I'd like to think that those attitudes will change and eventually we'll start improving things, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
Go to the movies. Sex is such a taboo that if it's depicted in detail it is unfit for adult theaters. Maiming and killing is ok even for children.
Our morals are upside down. And constantly being reinforced to stay that way.
Maybe it's better now but Scandinavia has had their moments of censorship keeping those "same movies" out of theaters. Sweden banned The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Mad Max, and even ET (for ages under 11). Norway banned Ichi the Killer, I Spit on Your Grave, and A Serbian Film.
per the constitution forced / slave labor is only abolished for non-prisoners. prisoners are no citizens. many loose the right to vote, too.
and _that_ again is a major reason why marijuana was made a felony crime.
We call it slavery, but is it? Yeah, prisoners make $1 an hour to work for private industry. That sucks for prisoners, sure, but they're being fed, housed, and receiving healthcare at taxpayer expense even without opting-in. The extra $6/hr they don't get paid subsidizes their stay...literally repaying their debts to society.
What's the real objection to this? Competitive disadvantage?
All slaves receive these things. Its in the interest of the slave owner to keep the slaves healthy enough to work. Modern companies shouldn't get a discount by using slave labor. If the prisoner wants to learn a "skill" that is profitable to a company then they should be paid the minimum wage.
Its less awful, but I also believe unpaid internships should also be illegal unless they are purely observational. If the intern is contributing in anyway to the profits of the company, they should be paid.
Sure, but unlike slavery, you get the food and housing independent of whether you lift a finger to do any work. The work is optional. It's rewarding if you do it. Working shortens your sentence. Work output never changes one's status as a slave.
Articles suggest prisoners who don't opt-in to work programs are penalized at parole hearings. This is a dishonest reframing of parole, something intended to be an earned benefit, not a clearance sale. The system is optimizing for prisoners who have been conditioned/rehabilitated into being functional in society-- the ones paroled demonstrated some willingness to play the same game as civilians, working to get ahead through their labor. They appear to have been broken of their criminal ways, so retaining them is expensive and unnecessary.
The ones who insist on avoiding work serve the duration of their actual sentence as proscribed. This is not slavery, it's literally the point of prison. You stay until your term expires or you demonstrate to the parole board that you've changed.
> I also believe unpaid internships should also be illegal unless they are purely observational. If the intern is contributing in anyway to the profits of the company, they should be paid.
I'd argue unpaid internships are worse. The intern doesn't need to prove any sort of reformation, nor are they being punished for crimes against society. They do not have food and housing provided for them. Not paying them is entirely exploitative.
Though what I earn from work does change how much the feds take as their cut. If you don't own the earnings from your labor, you aren't a free person.
In the US, it is already illegal, and has been this way for a while. The enforcement in practice is another story though.
Here[0] is the source with all nitty gritty, but a simplified tldr is that unless an intern’s output during the internship is not making money for the company and is pretty much purely an educational venture, the intern gotta get paid at least the minimum wage.
0. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/25/slavery-unit...
The objection is that it’s forced labor, meaning you’re subject to punishment if you don’t comply. Basically, slavery.
Yes. When you are forced to work and aren't allowed to quit your job, you are a slave. Slave owners may feed/house their slaves, and even pay them slave wages but none of those things make the slave any less of a slave.
> What's the real objection to this?
It's rare that someone asks what possible objection someone might have to slavery. Even if you thought that exploiting, abusing, and degrading enslaved human beings for profit wasn't morally abhorrent, there are purely economic reasons why slavery is a terrible idea. There are also purely selfish reasons to oppose it because if we allow it to happen to others it could just as easily be allowed to happen to you.
It's not even terrible unlikely that it will. The US locks up more of their own population behind bars than any other nation on Earth. There are plenty of entirely innocent people in prisons too. The best way to protect yourself against slavery is to make sure that enslavement isn't even an option on the table.
That said, there's no reason why that should mean that prisoners can't be employed by choice. If they were free to decide what type of work they wanted, and they were free to decline employment they wanted no part of, and they were provided the same pay for their labor as anyone else would be, and they were afforded the same protections against exploitation and hazardous working conditions as anyone else, then there'd be no harm in letting them make money and it'd be very helpful if they could put some money aside for the many expenses they'll be on the hook for after their release.
No. If there were forced-work programs, we wouldn't be arguing about slavery-not-slavery, we would be calling them concentration camps. Unlike the lies of Auschwitz, work will actually set you free.
Work is optional in prison. If anything, it's a privilege, since if you're enough of a problem it isn't even on the table for you. You are allowed to quit your job.
Black American slaves did not earn wages. Their sentence was indefinite. As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
Auschwitz victims did not earn wages. Their sentence was terminal. As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
American prisoners earn wages. Working reduces their sentence. They are eventually released from confinement regardless of output.
Prison conditions are unpleasant, but that's not the argument. American prisoners are not slaves.
I'm forced to work or I suffer "punishments" like starvation and homelessness, and I've had wages skimmed by an employer. We can all identify as slaves if we try hard enough.
Not usually, no.
>Their sentence was indefinite.
Or even infinite, as far as they were concerned.
>As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
Whoa, hang on. I'm not a slavery apologist, but... are you sure? As in, routinely, not as a bizarre, rare event? Not events like lynchings, but just "well Old Tom here ain't producing anymore, time to string him up"?
I have read some of the work of actual slavery apologists, and one of the points often made is that laws prohibiting manumission of slaves were originally written in response to owners who would free their slaves when they were too old to do the work - and promptly dump them out with no money, no education, no place to live, and no skills beyond basic agricultural labor, to die. I could imagine that was an issue.
The wrongness of slavery is often talked about strictly in terms out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, though a point often made in early abolitionism was that the creation of an entire inheritable status of sub-citizens was evil in itself, regardless of how well or poorly the sub-citizens were treated. Also treated interestingly in Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker (which are not great books, but sure do give you some insight into Card's Mormonism), where the South remained royalist in the American Revolution. It certainly could have, if George III had better positioned his treatment of the colonies. The basic organization of the early South as an agricultural region centered on individual properties owned by some noble (who might or might not live there) and organized like medieval village life. Roads to get to neighbors were relatively unimportant, as water transport was the norm for both people and cargo. The entire coastal and tidewater area from the Sea Islands of Georgia to the Chesapeake worked like that, at least until colonists started trying to push past the limit of navigation (which made large plantations more difficult until you got south of the foothills of the Appalachians).
criminalize strong healthy young men for petty reasons. put them into prisons, private ones, mind you, where there is profit from housing the workforce.
and then make them work "or else" again, no choice, no freedom
fwiw circulating a sea of hand guns keeps the criminality rate high.
nra, private prisons, prison factories dance a happy dance. everyone profits off those "goddam n*ggas" (that was sarcasm)
and it's even subsidized, running prisons is expensive...
harsh punishment even for petty crime is da best for this, don't you ever start this crazy crime prevention social work resocialisation BS. it has socialism in the name already. that was sarcasm again.
its a set up for slavery, masked as "criminal justice"
and a prime exercise in newspeak.
https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/legal-documents/2022...
I've heard this trope a lot, but I wonder, is there any data to actually back it up?
> They don't care how many innocent people get caught up in it
Here I'm certain there is no data to back up this point, anecdotally, this seems the opposite of the truth. Perhaps you just mean the prosecutors and not the citizenry in general?
For the second point, many US Prosecutors are elected. They run on a "tough on crime" platform, and tout their successful conviction % as a key metric of success. Very little credence is given to anything else. It's not a direct poll, but it's more than 'no data'.
A disturbingly high number of cases are plead out - in some states that number approaches 90%. This is more than any other country on earth, and by a huge margin. Many countries completely forbid plea bargaining, and most of those who allow it have strict rules on implementation, oversight and review, where here it is almost entirely purely at a prosecutor's discretion.
This falsely pushes conviction rates up, as there are huge swathes of cases where it has been demonstrated that people plead out as the path of least resistance, rather than factual guilt.
For example, the other issue I didn't see the other commentor speak on is it can lead to UNDER enforcement. It can create an incentive to ignore "complicated" wrong doing, or quickly dropping charges against those who plea bargain to preserve a high conviction rate, even if it's against the public interest.
So when you see "conviction rate" it's impossible to know if they're actually good at prosecuting. You can only tell they're good at identifying cases where a conviction is highly likely.
Which is entirely relevant to their competence and job performance, of course.
We as a society are gleefully accepting of cruel and unreasonable punishment, with a disturbing level of bloodthirstiness.
Similarly, we are accepting of the merciless brutality of Healthcare-as-industry.
The unspeakable violence of poverty.
We have hardened our hearts in order to see, walk by, live along these, and more, sources of easily preventable suffering.
This hardening is making us sick, too. We just somehow can't make the connection.
It would be really strange if observing the default state of humanity would make humans sick.
Ditto for punishment - historically punishments have been much more harsh (the only modern innovation that I'd really support for violent and property crime is dealing with is reducing false convictions; 3-strike type laws deal with that well, I wish they were more widespread).
The mental health / politics correlation in the US, especially in recent years, seems to indicate that it's being excessively bleeding-heart that's making "us" sick.
There was a recent post on Reddit made by a prisoner [1] (who was in for life for murdering his sister) who has a locker full of manga, books, MtG cards, and a tablet with minecraft (which he rooted to allow for sideloading of apps). He says he feels very comfortable with the prison life there. I never expected this from a prison in the state of Georgia of all places.
This is only one anecdote, but it struck me as surprising when I heard of it. The more we start to focus prisons on rehabilitation instead of just punishment, the better.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Prison/comments/q96ixg/this_is_what...
> [...] I was a young kid who thought I was smart and clever and thought I knew people. Prison dunked my head in a cold river of reality. Many people in these prisons have a strong criminal mindset. You learn by fucking up that there are always people who have had it worse, are more clever, stronger, but also more debased, cruel, and uncaring. From this though I have been forced to overcome my autism symptoms. I was thrown off by loud noises, physical contact, and was completely socially inept before I came to prison. Free world society softly caters to autistic kids but in prison you have no choice but to confront your mental health. In short, prison is an adverse environment which can bring out the good, or more often the bad, in people. As a young kid I learned quick that I couldn't rely on any staff or inmates as far as trust goes. I quickly saw I wasn't going to be babied and if I didn't fight for myself and who I was I would be lost. Not everyone becomes a paragon, very few do. [...]
Not sure what to make of him. He's very forthcoming about what he did, but evasive about the why.
He arguably belongs in a forensic mental health institution rather than a prison. Or maybe normal prisons should be more like hospitals.
This is the most fascinating guy I've seen on Reddit in the past year.
No, you just don't understand the civilization you were born into.
It's not a fetish... it's the point. If government promises to punish transgressors, then individuals will refrain from vigilante justice. This punishment is done, because our monkey morality demands it.
There are a few secondary goals. We also seek to sequester the offender away from society, so they can't do more injury. We hope (mostly in vain) that public acknowledgement of the punishment acts as a deterrent.
> They don't care how many innocent people get caught up in it
Can't speak for anyone else, but I care about that. It's mostly easy policy fixes too. If prosecutors were barred from using plea bargaining (we don't have to ban it absolutely, limit it to 1% of the cases they see per calendar year), some large chunk of the wrongly-convicted would avoid that fate. Absolutely demolish bail bonding as an industry. Hell, if you really want to fix stuff...
Prohibit eyewitness testimony in court, including but especially confessions (they can be useful as investigative leads, but aren't evidence of anything except some really perverse human psychology).
Who am I supposed to talk to to get the policy fixes implemented?
Maybe it's not the attitude problem you think it is.
This impulse pre-dates hominids by quite a bit. It's shared with some non-mammalian birds.
The Constitution* enshrines the right to face your accuser in open court. That to me seems proper; why do you propose to eliminate it (what gain do you expect)?
If you want to eliminate that right, there is a process for amending the Constitution laid out in the document itself.
* Technically, the Sixth Amendment.
Sure. They'll get to see the face. Of course, for the vast majority of crimes, the accuser is the state.
> That to me seems proper; why do you propose to eliminate it
Because we don't allow dream interpretation, tarot card readings, or other nonsense to be admitted as evidence either.
You know how every few months you hear of some black man that has been in prison for rape for 30 years, until DNA evidence exonerates? Behind every one of those convictions there was some sobbing woman on the stands pointing a finger at him.
Eyewitness testimony is junk of the lowest grade, below even those tarot cards I joked about.
But yeh, they'll get to sit in the same courtroom with any accusers, we just won't let the accusers get up and make up bullshit that they believe are infallible memories. This isn't a constitutional issue. Legislation is absolutely permitted to set standards of evidence.
Human memory isn't video recording. Eyewitness testimony has to be rid of, or we're all just going to keep suffering for its inevitable, constant, and all too common failures.
Any evidence can be misinterpreted. While I agree that eyewitness testimony has been shown to be nowhere near as reliable as most people think, it still has value.
Punishment itself isn't the problem, some people should be punished with prison time. The people who fetishize punishment aren't content with restricting people's freedom, keeping them separated from the their loved ones, and having years of their life lost. They know that prisoners are beaten, and raped, and kept in solitary for years, and forced to eat rotten food infested with maggots, and are denied basic hygiene or healthcare, and are being cooked to death in cells without AC, and they'll actively oppose any efforts to improve conditions for inmates. We knowingly allow prisoners to be tortured year after year and decade after decade and it isn't because nobody wants things to be that way.
> Who am I supposed to talk to to get the policy fixes implemented?
It's a problem because politicians know it's popular to be as tough on crime and as cruel to prisoners as possible. People like Joe Arpaio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio) get elected again and again because they're abusive sadists hurting the "right kind of people". If you can find someone willing to run on prison reform you can back them, but otherwise all you can do is reach out to your representatives. Your proposed policy fixes all seem like great ideas.
We need to police the police much more strictly.
There is a particular balance that is needed here... This just shifts the abuse to the typical abuse non-unionized workers receive. Low pay, bad working conditions, dangerous working conditions which leads to more staff rotation and increasing danger in the work environment.
Like if everyone's bosses organized, what they would have isn't a labor union but something else. Police unions use the nomenclature of labor unions but they are actually a different thing.
So, this shows that you have zero idea what the inside of prisons are like for it's employees.
A captain level at a jail would tell a corrections officer to go into a pit of angry inmates in a heartbeat, and in general the unions for these officers are what help push the rules to keep said officers from getting killed, or working double shifts.
A good thing and a bad thing can happen with a system operating normally.
If a group of business owners coordinates for the benefit of their shared interests, what they have is a business association or chamber of commerce or cartel not a labor union. This is despite the fact that their work individually could be grueling or dangerous, or they have an even worse boss or whatever.
Cops and prison guards, like business owners, are part of the system that coordinates who produces value, when and where. But they do not produce that value, and so their organizations aren't labor unions. It's not merely a semantic point either: they have working conditions sure but their goals and tools are different because of this relationship. From a guard's perspective the ideal prison has no prisoners in it; the second best has them drugged and restrained at all times. How would a union reconcile either of these things?
And you're right, I've only ever been in a prison as a prisoner. What's your experience being employed in one?
A very close family member had a 27 year career as a corrections officer until they retired.
But pretty much point you on here is stupid beyond belief. Do you think anyone at any job wants to do anything if the other option was getting paid for doing nothing?
The workers at low levels in these organizations are treated like shit, just like every business that has low paid, low skill jobs. Why in the living hell would you think that a corrections officer is "part of the system". I'd say, "Hey go get one of those jobs and you'll see", but it sounds like you're eliminated from the category.
Go read some theory man I'm not going to try to explain it again. I literally got a TBI in there but I'm starting to suspect that between the two of us I'm the one with less brain damage from associating with prisons.
From the article:
Bergami and Whitmore said they also tried to fire an officer who they saw on video throwing away prisoners’ mail, a possible felony. The agency also overruled them in that decision, they said. The bureau did not respond to allegations of staff destroying mail.“How do you root out the bad apples if you're not allowed to terminate those who have been recommended for termination?” Whitmore said.The two former Thomson officials and a current prison employee said the attitude among many guards was reflected by a group who refused to wear their issued uniforms. These officers opted instead for black T-shirts, many with the union logo or the skull logo of The Punisher — a vigilante comic book character popular with far-right groups. They called themselves “The Black Shirt Mafia.”
Also: Seems like they might be looking at lots of staff rotation anyway (union or not): https://www.ourquadcities.com/news/local-news/thomson-prison...
All that you need is rule of law, rather than carving out special cases for police unions.
Unfortunately, while all animals are equal under the law, but some animals are more equal[1] then others...
[1] Still waiting for a cop in my town going 50 over the speed limit, with no lights or sirens running down a woman at a pedestrian crossing to be charged. We're almost coming up to a year anniversary on it!
Unions shouldn't be allow to have management and non-management in the same union. The guy evaluating your performance (police commissioner) should not be allowed to be in the same union regardless of if you are police or tech.
You can't fix things if they'll overrule any suggestion to fire people.
At the very least, video evidence would have helped in lawsuits.
In the career of prison guard, the ideal would be 100% integrity.
I believe unions have their issues, but that in a "market" career, such as the trades or retail or service workers, the good outweighs the bad.
Unions for police and prison guards are 100% a mafia and they should not be tolerated. It needs to be much easier to fire cops.
Therefore I'm /less/ concerned about teachers, fire, post office, air traffic, etc. even though they have their issues.
We need to stop catering to them, however, and we need to make it those jobs fit for someone other than racists of fascists to do. But you can't create and uphold a racist system, and put all the responsibility on the hands needed to carry out the goals of that system. These horrible police abuses and prison abuses are usually being carried out under the oversight of hundreds of Democratic (often black) mayors and governors who love a docile and quiet minority population, but not the blame for the violent pacification that it takes to create and preserve one.
> It needs to be much easier to fire cops.
Unions don't make the rules, politicians doing what their donors say do. Giving the police unions what they want is a choice. Other unions don't get what they want.
Anyways, in cases where the employer has an unnatural monopoly and you can't otherwise address it, unions make perfect sense. The employees otherwise have no secure mechanism to legitimately and successfully negotiate their contracts.
Your only other way out is to privatize the police force to a large extent and allow competition between different agencies for different city contracts. Then you would have true market forces benefiting the city and the labor.
It makes no sense unless it is a criminal organization profiting off of the abuse.
These people need consequences.
This organization has revenue (budgeted to it).
If they perform poorly, the budget might be lowered next year. More correctly, if they are perceived to perform poorly, their budget drops. But they were in control of the mechanisms by which their performance is perceived.
> These people need consequences.
If you put people (individually or as a group) into an unpleasant circumstance, and demand performance from them at odds with the unpleasantness of the circumstance, you run into a problem. You're no longer able to insist they experience consequences for failure. When you attempt that, if they're allowed to quit, they just quit. And I know you weren't suggesting we press them into slavery.
Consequences only work when they have no leverage.
Let them quit. They were trying to fire them anyway. They shouldn't even have their jobs at this point anyway...they should be in prison.
1. You are not in charge
2. The problems are with upper management specifically condoning the behavior
"In October 2012, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) purchased Thomson Correctional Center from the State of Illinois for $165 million."