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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

While I certainly would not support the abuses in the article, being required to work 5 days a week whether you want to or not is rehabilitative for many people who cannot hold down a job because they lack discipline and patience to appreciate that this is how productive citizens afford the basics of life. Along with drug addiction treatment, education, and psychological services, participation in labor is part of making them productive members of society again.

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.

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> While I certainly would not support the abuses in the article, being required to work 5 days a week whether you want to or not is rehabilitative for many people who cannot hold down a job because they lack discipline and patience to appreciate that this is how productive citizens afford the basics of life.

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.

Prison labor has no impact on recidivism, so it can't be considered rehabilitative in its current form: https://mn.gov/doc/assets/Effects%20of%20Prison%20Labor%20on..., https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/impact-f....

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.

Participation in prison labor significantly improved post-prison employment outcomes, but it yielded mixed results for prison misconduct and had little overall impact on recidivism. When we examined the extent to which prisoners participated in prison labor, the best outcomes were observed for those who spent a greater proportion of their overall confinement time working a job in prison. As the percentage of prison time spent working increased, we found significant improvements in prison misconduct, post-prison employment, and several measures of recidivism.

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.

Wow this comment reads like it was written 150 years ago. You should really both read the article and watch the documentary about which you’re replying to, you'll learn a lot.

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.

You're confounding a lot of issues here that I made no reference to at all. But suffice it to say, you seem to have a fundamental problem with people, as determined by a court of law to have broken the social contract (courts which could be corrupt - but again, separate issue), losing any modicum of their rights as free citizens. That is a fringe opinion.

Someone referenced a documentary claiming prison system is modern day slavery. You refuted their claims pulled from said documentary with standard prison industrial complex rhetoric, which is completely unfounded and not backed by any kind of real-world data, especially in the US. Try digging in a bit. It’s irrelevant if it’s a fringe opinion.

"Slavery as a cure for NEEThood," is an interesting (read: horrifying) proposition. Assuming that people "lack discipline and patience" is begging the question; the requirement of productivity to justify one's existence, post-industrialization, is circumspect, particularly in an economic system that relies on some level of unemployment to keep prices for even basic goods down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe...

But I assume you’re talking about being paid for that work

Otherwise it's a lovely endorsement for labor camps.

This is an issue that needs to be considered in the context of all the ways US prisons in various states are highly exploitative and abusive.

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