Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to popular food brands
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
I've been reflecting how this and similar prisons all (AFAIK) elapsed into the same dismal hellholes that 19th century sanitariums did. Eventually reformers die and are replaced by politically driven, officious beancounters.
Are these standardized exchange rates, Labor for [product]?
Does a South Carolina Felon have more buying power than a Nebraska Felon?
Whats their labor exchange?
A particular guy stood up and pitched his company solution. That company was called Unicor. The spokesman was well-spoken, had clear points, and was African American. The pitch essentially was, use prison labor for E*Waste, contracted via Unicor.
A second person stood up in the audience and called it what it was, in front of everyone. Privately, the two nearly came to blows back stage out of sight, shortly afterwards.
this is not fake in the USA, and even more not fake elsewhere in the world.
https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2016/12/01/federal-pr...
“All day long they work so hard Til the sun is going down Mending all the highways and byways And wearing, wearing a frown You hear them moaning their lives away Then you hear somebody say: That’s the sound of the men Working on the chain / gang.”
Sam Cooke, 1960 https://youtu.be/zBn5aIfZElE
My my my my my my my my my my my my My work is so hard Give me water I’m thirsty
I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.
People argue that what we currently have isn't the same or as bad, but present-day prisoners would point out that the current system is a form of eugenics: We keep a large percentage of reproductive-age black males locked up where they can't father or raise children. Back in the slave days, owners often chose who breeded with whom. Both are reprehensible, but you could argue either situation is worse than the other. At least the old policy didn't have the effect of slowly reducing / diluting out the black population.
Anyway, the US should ban slavery.
From the 1860 census [1]:
Total Number of slaves: 4m
Total Population: 31.4m
Percentage of population as slaves: 12.7%
From the 2010 census [2]:
Total Population: 309m
Total Incarcerated Population: 7m [3]
Percentage of population incarcerated: 2.2%
OP is absolutely not correct, even if we are generous and assume every incarcerated person is forced into labor.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_census [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Wikipedia says
>According to the latest available data at the World Prison Brief on May 7, 2023, the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 531 people per 100,000
531 people per 100,000 works out to about half a percent. Meanwhile during slavery in the US, wikipedia says
>The slaves of the colonial era were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31 percent of the population.
Even in low slavery areas, the slavery rate is higher than current incarceration rates by several fold.
>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.
It's explicitly talking about "percentage" at the start. It would be weird if they silently switched to absolute numbers afterwards.
Whether false by percentage or not, I'm not sure relative percentages are of that much importance. Surely the hundreds of thousands of american soliders dying in the US civil war wouldnt be relieved to hear that perhaps more black people were enslaved today, only to feel their sacrifce justified when hearing it was a mere 0.5%
The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.
There are about 1.9 million people incarcerated in jail or prison in the United States today.[2]
The scale of incarceration in the US today is mind-boggling, but is itself under half the number of people enslaved at the height of the Southern slave economy.
[0]https://usafacts.org/articles/the-1860-census-counted-4-mill... [1]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.h... [2]https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
As for it being eugenics, most prisoners are in for violent crimes or property crimes. Imprisoning people for stuff like failure to pay child support (modern debtors prison) is shameful, but not the sort of thing most US prisoners are in for.
To tie this into eugenics I think you'd have to make the case that black people who aren't criminals are being unfairly targeted for imprisonment. Otherwise it's just a side effect of criminal behaviour, and criminals end up in prison regardless of ethnicity.
I'm not suggesting it would be difficult to make that case. But some people tend to disregard systemic bias, so it would seem that everything is fine. If you don't want to be imprisoned, all you have to do is stop acting like a criminal.
this is a fairly easy case to make, see, for example the reason for the current distribution of race in us prisons
there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves, we need not pretend we live in some world where society operates on egalitarian principles. The last slaves died in the 40s, 50s; institutional racism as an explicit policy of the state and of core economic and political institutions carried on until at least the 90s.
this isnt speculation
Is this calibrated per severity of crime? The statement as it stands seems to general to support this case.
Then wonder why we have such a high rate of recidivism.
It should also not be for the profit of private companies. They are maintained by our tax dollars, and the public should reap that benefit.
I couldn't find any studies that specifically focused on involuntary labor; presumably some of the people in the linked studies were willing to work and not forced.
Work programs aren't magic, and they're certainly not going to cure sociopathy. They're a means to train and habituate people whose criminal behavior may have been significantly affected by their inability to maintain gainful employment. Of course we should continually try to improve them for relevancy and effectiveness.
Between racially-biased mandatory minimum sentences, forced prison labor, and the fact that felons lose their right to vote, the United States prison industrial complex is a system that truly isn’t far off from slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe...
That’s odd, because the countries with the lowest rate of recidivism don’t have forced labor. “Lack of discipline” isn’t the reason most of them are in prison, it’s lack of skills and opportunity. Nothing about the prison industrial complex is fixing either of those problems.
It is subjecting them to a dog-eat-dog culture of violence though. Not exactly surprising people generally come out even less able to productively participate in society than when they go in.
Not really.
I hope you or your family are never hurt by a criminal. However, if that does happen, I assume you will be okay with the criminal going to a summer camp where they sing songs, play games, and eat bonbons. ;)
Well, I won't call you a liar. I've seen people do this before, and I've always been just... confused.
> I want what is best for my community, and retribution is not.
I think this is the crux of the disagreement.
My belief is that retribution is the immune system of civilization.
Have you engaged with any justice system that isn't based on retribution? Have you seen the results they achieve? Norway is the classic example. They give more lenient punishment for crimes, their prisons are vastly more comfortable, and actively try to educate their prison population. All things Americans (as a general point) would scoff at.
The result? Norway has a vastly lower recidivism rate. 20% vs 75+% in the US. Norway is a uniquely good example, but similar results play out across Northern Europe.
Most people here who live in SF have done just that, not by their own choice - and the results are not pretty. "Restorative" justice might or might not work in places like Norway, but let's just say other implementations have been quite bad.
That compassion and concern for the wider community is this alien to you is sad.
I haven’t been, but I’ve been close with multiple people who have been wronged personally (near-deadly assault, unprovoked, all cases unrelate) and they all came around quickly to not wanting any vengeance on the assailant, legal or not. I was surprised, frankly.
In all cases survivors just wanted to move on, and simply not hear about the perps.
We can discuss the negative incentives of having them do labor and how that might pervert our legal system (companies that benefit lobbying for harsher penalties on victimless crimes), but they are still denied their freedom regardless of which way that discussion goes.
But is such a distinction really helpful to the discussion? If someone owns another person and forces them to work but doesn't force them to obey them, does it technically count as not a slave because it doesn't meet all three requirements of Oxford dictionary's definition. Will it really help if we then start comparing dictionary definitions of "forced" or "owned"? Or even what counts as work. A prisoner required to clean their cells and return their trays after lunch are forms of labor that could be done by janitor... is that work?
I don't think these matter once you have locked someone in a cage, even if it is a slightly gilded. Metaphorically speaking, no actual gold leaf or gold paint in use.
> But is such a distinction really helpful to the discussion?
Yes words have a meaning, changing the meaning of words is often used for dubious ideologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_–_Lingua_Tertii_Imperii
Something can be bad and not an "holocaust", someone can be abused an not a "slave", someone can be racist and not "literally hitler", this modern perversion of language doesn't do anything besides discrediting the person who uses it.
We already have very specific words for very specific situations, we don't have to reuse loaded terms
Prisoners should be denied as much freedom as is necessary to protect the rest of society and no more. Forcing people to work against their will does not protect anybody. It is not legitimate to say that if we deny one freedom we might as well deny all of them, they aren't free regardless.
I think many of those prisoners are already denied far more freedoms that necessary to keep them safe, so would that mean they are already worse off? The added labor is even worse, but I don't find that as the tipping point of good to bad yet a lot of the past discussion I've seen on if prison is slavery or not does seem to treat it as the tipping point. Getting past how we are naming things, my disagreement is that forced labor isn't what tips us from having a just prison system to an unjust one, and instead that we are mostly already over that tipping point even without forced labor being included.
Yes.
I agree that forced labor is not a tipping point, I haven't seen it described that way but I wouldn't agree with someone who said that everything we do up to forced labor is fine.
If people outside those prison walls are forced to get a job, then the people inside those walls should be no exception.
This is an industrial complex and they are the product.
There are exceptions of cause, see Norway.
The question is, what is prison supposed to be? Punishment? Reintegration? Deterrence?
Correctional Officer unions are among the hardest lobbiers against ANY decriminalization of marijuana, or any general "reform" to our criminal statutes.
That blows my mind. "Keep more things illegal so we have a job".
As for victimless crimes, do they really deserve prison to begin with and wouldn't we do better with alternatives, or perhaps even removing some of those laws entirely?
There are "victimless crimes" that are only victimless because everyone was lucky: a 3rd DUI, firing a gun in a crowded area but not hitting anyone, etc. Then there are crimes that have millions of potential victims: dumping toxic waste in a river, etc. It'd be an entire extra enigma the courts would have to figure out with every case. (I do think a big percentage of the "victimless crimes", like personal drug possession, should not even be crimes at all, but that's beside this point.)
Some even do so when there has been no conviction.
Also, I recognize that there are a lot of people in prison in the U.S. who shouldn't be there. I think our the way people end up in prison needs reform, of course. However, once there, the point is to punish people for doing something wrong, IMHO. "Rehabilitation" is not the point of prison.
Probably because satisfying your want for revenge isn't a good enough reason to have the big expensive system that is prison.
Presumably prison should be solving some wider societal problems.
Retribution is an important component of justice [1]. Its utilitarian purpose is to prevent out-of-the-law reprisal.
You see it on HN, where certain topics attract someone who will be “sickened” or “disgusted” by some thing or other, and reflexively want something horrible to happen to everyone involved. (If you’re honest, you’ve done this too. It’s a childish impulse inherent to being human.)
[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reasons-...
Retribution is deserved punishment. Revenge is the infliction of harm or hurt on someone, and to me is "above and beyond" justice retribution, remediation, and rehabilitation.
Neither is a practical or morally justifiable answer, of course. Other than cases where defendants are sentenced to life without parole, most of the people incarcerated in the United States will eventually be released from prison (whether it be through parole or because their sentence has been completed).
A purely punitive prison system does nothing to prepare prisoners for their eventual release back into society. Which, again, will happen for most prisoners. Even setting aside the moral questions with that approach, you merely increase the odds of re-offending. How is that better for society?
Funnily enough, studies of families of murder victims where the murdered was sentenced to death show that they tend to disagree with you.
It "satisfies" for some very brief moment, but the loss is still there, and it doesn't make anyone's life better. It doesn't improve anything for anyone.
I'm reminded of American History X. A character is raging against everyone and anyone he has perceived has hurt him, his family, his home, his country. Immigrants, POC, whatever. He has responded with hate crimes, destroying grocery stores, forming groups of likeminded (or white) people.
His efforts end him in jail, and he's still raging.
And then a teacher asks him, says: "There was a moment, when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me, that I saw happen to my people. Used to blame everybody. Blamed White people, blamed society, blamed God. I didn't get no answers 'cause I was asking the wrong questions. You have to ask the right questions."
Like what?
"Have any of the things you've done made your life better?"
They give voice to anger, rage, revenge (that's honestly a more honest word, in your case - you don't just want them punished, you want revenge on them). But none of those feelings improves anything.
MW definition:
"to seize and detain or carry away by unlawful force or fraud and often with a demand for ransom"
So no: Lawful imprisonment is not kidnapping.
It’s hard to put into words how destructive your line of reasoning is, and the confidence with which you express it frightens me that others might even share it with you.
I would argue that the private prison system is in fact designed to do exactly this, namely to put people in prison and keep them there for profit.
You could argue that my claim that their intent is nefarious is speculation and I’ll grant you that, because I am unfamiliar with any private prison owners or the people who came up with the idea, but by that token you’d have to grant your opinion about the intent behind private prisons is also purely speculative, and I would add more damaging than my speculation.
> The charges outlined in the information[23] described actions between 2000 and 2007 by both judges to assist in the construction and population of private juvenile facilities operated by the two Pennsylvania Child Care companies, acting in an official capacity in favor of the private facilities over the facility operated by Luzerne County.
Your attempt at logic somehow leads you to tell the victims over a 7 year period ~“look, you won, now stop bringing attention to this issue, the system is designed to do something else, who cares that it is capable of being exploited in this manner”.
If everyone had your perspective those prisons would still be doing this, but thankfully in that 7 year period of “the system working as designed” activists speculated that something nefarious was happening and brought attention to how it actually works.
> It shows the opposite.
This is incredibly naive. When has one entity getting caught ever been a legitimate excuse for everyone else similarly situated to be free from scrutiny?
What is “the opposite” in this context anyway? Do you believe private prisons exist to empty themselves and “give cash to kids”? How does a private prison sustain itself with a population of 0?
With imprecise communication there is always the danger of misunderstanding, and that can lead to devastating consequences.
You say I misunderstood your comment, that’s fair, but I have read and reread it many times and am unable to interpret it elsewise.
Please elaborate.
It will be best for both of us.
I will know what you truly meant, and perhaps feel better about your position, and you will be assured that your true intent is clear and fully received by your audience.
Things I didn't say:
- any value judgment about private prisons - no statement about shutting up or stop bringing up the crimes - didn't justify or attempt to justify excluding oversight of government - anything about the business model of private prisons
I think your analogy is flawed.
For it to apply there would have to have been an institution that can only exist in the presence of mass murder similarly as private prisons only exist in the presence of incarceration.
A better analogy would be Civil Asset Forfeiture. A perfectly legal act by police, but also clearly heinous. The fact that these "forfeitures" are written into the police budgets means "the system" is designed to require it, but still stops short of "advancing" the infractions where that procedure is then abused.
For instance, if I get pulled over for a broken tail light, and happen to have $10k in cash on me and the police seize the money, it would be ridiculous to then say that "tail light awareness is designed to advance civil asset forfeiture".
> Things I didn't say:
> - any value judgment about private prisons
I can accept that, but you were objecting to a example provided in a comment that was critical of private prisons. It suggests you are in support of them.
> - no statement about shutting up or stop bringing up the crimes
> - didn't justify or attempt to justify excluding oversight of government
I certainly read your comment's dismissive "It shows the opposite." to be a pithy way of trying to stop the conversation about private prisons and specifically kids for cash.
It also suggests that you think my bringing it up is superfluous anyway, and everything is as it should be, so why then would there be any need for oversight? Conversely, if you support oversight then you must admit there is a flaw in the system capable of being exploited.
If I write a strongly typed function (the system) then it would be unnecessary for me to write another function that checks the types of the inputs before running the previous function (oversight) because the types are already a part of "the system".
> - anything about the business model of private prisons
Okay, but you did say: "It doesn't reinforce the idea that the system is designed to ship people into private prisons. It shows the opposite." By these bullet points you seem to be implying that private prisons are somehow "other than" in regards to "the system". What is your definition of the system?
Because kids for cash was organised by judges and prison owners who I would say are precisely "the system".
This is the point I was making about communication. The exact words you use is only a piece of what you communicate.
And hey, if you feel I put words into your mouth then this is an opportunity for you to set me straight on how you do in fact feel about these things.
What is you value judgement on private prisons?
What is your opinion on the business model of private prisons?
Do you think that exploitation like "kids for cash" implies flaws in "the system"?
But the courts doing the sentencing and the prison owners are typically completely separate entities.
It's not just one "justice system" run by one group of people.
It may be frowned upon; but, it's legal. Even in 1865, prison labor was scene as "acceptable" slavery. It's the exemption in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "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."
Or maybe we can acknowledge "slavery" is a loaded term designed to cause reactionary thinking.
2) What is or isn't de facto slavery is worth discussing but we should certainly move towards removing de jure slavery.
3) I don't know the intention of framers of the constitution in choosing the word slavery, but it is the word they chose. So unless you mean "reactionary" very very literally, using it to describe advocates for a progressive cause interpreting a word well within its historically normative meaning is at best slick rhetorical judo. At worst an indication of bad faith.
2) Isn’t being forced to literally be in a cage for years de jure slavery by itself?
2- You are purposefully conflating imprisonment with slavery.
I think there is a difference between keeping people confined against their will and coercing them to labor for your own economic benefit. Neither thing should be permitted, but I'm not trying to solve all problems overnight. We were talking about the laboring thing, let's stick to that.
I see elsewhere that you have complete confidence in your view about this, with no room for doubt or curiosity. If you can't entertain the possibility of being anything but an adversary, then I can't justify spending more time or effort on this subject with you.
If you kill 20 people with a car into a parade, you have no chance at rehabilitation. Punishment is perfectly acceptable - especially when it is hardly brutal, we aren’t even sending the perp to an oil rig.
The sooner we stop playing games about prisons being rehab facilities, the better. I have yet to hear a successful prison rehab story, and the statistics show that doesn’t work. When punishment is the focus - look at the 80s crime wave. It worked.
I think it’s because I know that there is no way, whatsoever, to build a society without prisons, because there will always be crime.
Neat
Essentially, with the decriminalization was meant to come a whole host of support network and rehab and other programs (regardless of what you may feel about the viability of the same). Then COVID happened, everything was decriminalized, and all of the other stuff did not, or barely, got off the ground, and is playing catch up now. And the result has been entirely predictable.
> voluntary uptake of drug rehabilitation offers has been terrible as most skeptics suggested
As a paramedic who administers Narcan multiple times a week, I get this. But the rationale is "if someone is using drugs, is even a 2% (arbitrary number) entry into rehab a success? Certainly if compared to 0%".
Let's also be real, it's not the legality of harder drugs that determine whether people do them or not.
I'm entirely in agreement. Dealers and suppliers? Those are, and should (and in PDX are) be illegal still. Portland Police have to shoulder their share of the blame, too, here, not (just) the social constructs - Portland Police were some of the worst in the country when it came to things like BLM, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys and similar (and behind Seattle were one of the top per capita when it came to "number of officers who attended 1/6") and have been happy to "quiet quit" (worse, really) the last few years.
- The prisoner should be able to freely choose to work or not to work.
- The prisoner should be able to choose whom to work for and be able to quit.
- The prisoner should be making the same wage as someone not in prison. This wage may be garnished by the jail to pay for prison (separate topic), but it should still cost the company the same as a non-prisoner laborer.
The bad things that are avoided are:
- being unethical
- making sure corporations don't lobby to expand prison labor - which could have the side of effect of criminializing things that most people don't consider crimes.
to wit; how often is prison product tested or monitored for tampering or expectorative adulterations ?
I'm very much appreciative of the fact that, though not mentioned, a growing number of fire departments are willing to overlook (certain) criminal history for hiring ex-inmate firefighters.
(To be clear, they are being paid far below minimum wage; it would be illegal if they weren't prisoners)
If this makes prison labor no longer economical, so be it.
> More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that 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.
- https://www.aclu.org/publications/captive-labor-exploitation...
For example, in most of the states, there are prisons that are pay-to-stay, so prisoners basically go in debt while they’re incarcerated. This further troubles their debts, putting more pressure on them to take on work. Part of this debt can be written off by working on specific jobs that are sourced by local employers. There was a case of a woman I read about, how she’s paying off her pay-to-stay prison debt working at a wings place part time, while serving her sentence.
Since every state has its own laws and complexities, you get a bunch of scenarios that add up, which, in my opinion, are highly immoral.
But yeah, pay-to-stay imprisonment is a thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-stay_(imprisonment).
LOL no, except for some narrow definition of debt which only counts criminal activity.
Foreigners are so credulous when it comes to what they hear about the US.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797098376/investigation-finds...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/a-world-of-debt-over-300-trillion-and-... - part about the woman in Missisipi
Similar with the other example. These are people who are required to have a job so they can pay restitution, and if they refuse to get a job they can be imprisoned as one possible punishment.
Regular people who are in debt do not face debtor's prison in the US, this is not a feature of the bankruptcy courts. Debtors prisons were more common in the distant past, and especially a thing in Europe.
Everyone who benefits from the prison industrial complex has a an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.
Only about 8% of prisoners are in private prisons:
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
Take for example California. There are no private prisons. Yet CA is one of the states requiring forced labor and prisoners can earn a maximum of 37 cents an hour:
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2023/05/12/california-is-o....
Who is part of the prison industrial complex? How about the prison guard unions who directly benefit from having more prisoners?
>...Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California. The union spends heavily on influencing political campaigns, and on lobbying legislators and other government officials. CCPOA also hires public relations firms and political polling firms.
>As calls for reform of the state's prison system escalated during 2006, putting pressure on former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to take a more aggressive stance on reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...
This prison system with no private prisons is a prison system where the medical care is so bad that the system was taken over by the federal government:
>...The state's prison medical care system has been in receivership since 2006, when a federal court ruled in Plata v. Brown that the state failed to provide a constitutional level of medical care to its prisoners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_California#:~:text=....
One should care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison in CA. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles.
>...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betti...
After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corco...
This isn't to say that CA prisons are the worst in the country - likely other state's prisons are just as bad as CA. When you have the people regulating a system be the same people who are running the system, you have an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.
But it does mean that we could combat #2 by actually paying convicts working as part of a prison sentence the wage they'd get for that same job after release. Why are we paying convicts less than $0.50/hr[0] for jobs they'd earn $25-30/hr for? Because it benefits those local economies, but at the cause of driving up recidivism. Imagine if you were incarcerated, had the option of working (the majority of incarcerated workers are punished if they don't work), and if you did you'd have thousands in savings when released to get back on your feet?
> 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 may not be chattel slavery.
"If you don't work (or someone who loves you doesn't work for you), you don't eat."
The alternative is manifestly unjust: A prisoner who might have killed 20 people gets to just live life, and can't be ordered to even keep the cell doors clean.
To keep them separate from the society they're having trouble safely engaging with.
> We're restricting their right to free movement, which is de-facto slavery.
No; imprisonment and slavery are not the same thing. You can't just redefine words to make your strawman argument work.
And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" qualifies "involuntary servitude", not "slavery". And in any case, lawyers like to err on the side of ruling out any possible misinterpretation, no matter how ridiculous.
If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that. You're being either daft or disingenuous, or both.
But it is, if unpaid, slavery.
> And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" qualifies "involuntary servitude", not "slavery". And in any case, lawyers like to err on the side of ruling out any possible misinterpretation, no matter how ridiculous.
No. The distinction between the two is that involuntary servitude covers being forced to work while being paid or otherwise compensated; a slave, in contrast, doesn't get paid. Both are forced labor, but one is slavery. US prison labor may be one or the other, depending on payment.
(An English teacher would also sigh at you for your parsing of the clauses, I suspect. Your interpretation would require a different arrangement of the commas, i.e. Neither slavery COMMA nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted COMMA shall exist within the United States...)
> If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that.
Correct, because at a glance, you don't know if it's forced labor. Some states do voluntary work gangs; in some scenarios it's even considered a perk.
Do you have a citation for this claim?
> > If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that.
> Correct, because at a glance, you don't know if it's forced labor. Some states do voluntary work gangs; in some scenarios it's even considered a perk.
What if the adult in the scenario happens to know that the prisoners are not being paid? Then you think the correct answer to the child's question is "Yes, those are slaves"? With no further qualification necessary?
> The words involuntary servitude have a "larger meaning than slavery." "It was very well understood that, in the form of apprenticeship for long terms, as it had been practiced in the West India Islands, on the abolition of slavery by the English government, or by reducing the slaves to the condition of serfs attached to the plantation, the purpose of the article might have been evaded if only the word 'slavery' had been used."
If there wasn't a distinction between the two, the Amendment wouldn't need to mention both.
If I see forced unpaid laborers, I'm entirely comfortable deeming them slaves. (They'll probably learn about similar forms of slavery in history class; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome, for example. In current affairs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century)
> If I see forced unpaid laborers, I'm entirely comfortable deeming them slaves.
Yeah, you're comfortable with it because you've redefined "slavery" to mean whatever you want it to mean. But if you did a survey of native English speakers, and asked them if unpaid workers on a chain gang were slaves, how many do you think would say "yes", without qualification? I would be shocked if the answer were more than 20%.
By the legal definition of kidnapping, putting someone in jail could be considered to be kidnapping yet everyone knows very well that it just isn't the same
We don't force deadbeat dads to work; we force them to make payments. You can sell assets, use savings, beg/borrow/steal, but you're obligated to make the payments.
If we assigned a job to deadbeat dads, that would be involuntary servitude. (Certain levels of avoiding child support payments being a crime, this is currently Constitutionally permissible, but uncommon.)
> By the legal definition of kidnapping, putting someone in jail could be considered to be kidnapping yet everyone knows very well that it just isn't the same
No. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1201
The second word in the definition is unlawfully. Putting someone in jail via due process is not unlawful. I know we all like to think of Congress as entirely feckless, but the interns writing the regs typically aren't idiots.
> With the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865, slavery was deemed unconstitutional. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, was still explicitly allowed.
The wrong part is when you connect "X loses many of their civil rights" to "Y makes a greater profit", and now Y has a lot of money and an incentive to spend a fraction of it on lobbying for legislative changes that will send even more people to prison... which means even more money for lobbying, etc.
A few iterations of this feedback loop and you get a system which routinely sends people to prison for trivial things, which routinely sends innocent people to prison, heck even a system where the innocent people are officially advised to "confess" and accept a plea bargain rather than insist on their rights and risk 10x greater penalty if they are falsely convicted.
The US 13th amendment says,
> either 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.
"Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". Ie, you're in prison, and required to labour. It's slavery. It's right there in that US consitutional amendment.
There are different types of slavery. You may be thinking of chattel slaves, where a person is owned. A prisoner is not owned. That does not mean that someone who is not owned by another human, yet who is forced to labour, is not a slave: it's called de facto slavery or state imposed forced labour slavery.
See https://www.antislavery.org/what-we-do/state-imposed-forced-...