Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

These articles always cherrypick the most sympathetic cases. They never say, here's this triple murderer who never worked a day in his life, don't you feel sorry for him? They also don't mention that prisons aren't free to run.

View on HN

"They also don't mention that prisons aren't free to run" - Yeah, there is no way the system would put more people in prison to make more money (especially people no one cares about, black and/or poor).

I don't think "the system" needs to put innocent people in jail in order to make a living. There are plenty of criminals to choose from. Also it's obvious that only poor criminals go to jail, black or not black. Rich criminals are busy running the world (also rich black criminals).

Black and/or poor criminals. The key word here is "criminals".

Except the rate of innocent people in prison is incredibly high. So no, they are not all criminals, many of them are, in fact, just SLAVES.

No, it's not. There are absolutely no real statistics that confirm what you claimed.

I’m about to get up, but DNA testing has demonstrated that a lot of people claiming to be innocent, had indeed not being present on the crime scene or that, indeed, a third person was also here.

And things like the ‘war on drugs’ was created to target non-white people

> Black and/or poor criminals. The key word here is "criminals".

These "criminals" were only made criminals because those in power at that time wanted to criminalize being black and against the Vietnam war - and they openly admitted to that, many decades later:

> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

"Black or poor criminal"?

WTF, seriously?

Prison work as extensively done here is unconstitutional. Period.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alabama-prisons-... https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2021/06/convict-leasing-s...

The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery unless you're a convicted criminal.

"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."

Read the articles linked: "the labor exploitation in American prisons goes far beyond even what the Constitution allows."

Are white murderers naturally more sympathetic?

https://jp.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mississippi-pardons-id...

Is it not a problem that there exist sympathetic cases at all?

This is even before starting into the many innocent people in prison.

And why should it? If one sympathetic case is found by these articles it means there are many others, why should we care about the triple murder example you just conjured out of thin air?

Prisons are not free, that's why it should be an incentive for a society to work towards not needing prisons, when the incentive is for prisons to be profitable (or at least cover their costs) you created a perverse incentive for the existence of prisons, for the punishment of crimes with prison time, etc.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but didn't you just cherry pick a case?

An exceedingly rare case, in fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com