Before Home Depot started putting tools in cages, I used to see a lot of craigslist/marketplace/etc postings for brand new and unopened tools, posted at amazing prices.
I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.
The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind. It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing. States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
There was an article on HN recently with a photo of a prison work detail in Louisiana that looked like it was straight out of Django Unchained: https://www.apr.org/news/2024-01-29/prisoners-in-alabama-and...
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.
Yes, but it's not nearly as big of a gap as the above comment suggests.
Being in prison sucks. If there's forced labor that approaches the same magnitude of unpleasantness, or even worse exceeds it, then that's a huge problem. But if it makes prison mildly worse than zero labor, that's not a tremendous issue.
> I think the sacrifice comparison wasn't to labor, but to the fact that capital punishment is still practiced in the US.
I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way, unless they rewrote part of it and totally messed up the phrasing.
> I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way
? The comment literally says:
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
They're talking about the state putting people to death. Human sacrifice is when it was done to placate the gods. Modern day capital punishment is when the state puts people to death to placate the retributive demands of the people.
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
But read the two sentences before that. They're making a complete comparison without mentioning death penalties at all, and without any placeholders that could be filled in by a later sentence. The third sentence mentioning death penalties does not retroactively change what the first two sentences were talking about.
The comment very clearly says that slavery in the prison system is next to sacrifice, not just the death penalty.
If it wasn't supposed to say that, then the original commenter needs to come here and clarify.
> Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
So there's a much bigger and connected moral hazard, that the people that are paid to run prisons want there to be more inmates, whether or not they do any labor. That's especially bad when it's third party for-profit companies running things. And they'll use prison labor to make extra money on top of what they're already paid.
We should fight against that situation very strongly.
But if we have all the money controlled by the state, and the labor merely reduces the cost of keeping prisoners, then there's not a huge moral hazard to the criminal justice system.
If prisoners actually start making enough money to offset the entire cost of the prison system, then we should intervene. But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
> But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
I can see your argument that the thing being called barbaric is the prison system in general, but I'm still pretty sure the thing being called barbaric by that wording is specifically the slavery part.
> Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
That might be best but I'm not sure if it's obviously the best option.
The sacrifice would then be laid on a stone slab, a chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. . . . The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. . . .
The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
Most places, jails are just depressing adult daycare.
Restraining someone against their will is a violent act, it's just an acceptable form of violence (that of course I agree with) used by the "Good" to deal with the "bad" (relative terms ofc)
Someone in a sister thread suggested sharia law and chopping off hands, so clearly there are other alternatives besides "society pays for prison" and "the criminal pays for prison".
And yes, I am upset that people steal and that this causes more of my tax dollars to go to heightened policing. Why wouldn't I be? Presumably the only people that are not upset about that are criminals and potentially the police.
Can’t steal if you don’t have a hand!
Not tolerating crime does not mean shooting people up or inflicting wounds on them, why should it be that extreme ? , either inflict wounds on people or let them go free with misdemeanor charges ?
It just kills the conversation and scope to actually fix this rise in crime mess, that is spreading everywhere.
Different branch of these threads:
> So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
If we’re going to make sure we get appropriate vengeance, and we’re not going to pay to incarcerate them… what do we have left? Physical punishment? Slavery? Unless bankruptcy of a person (without any assets to begin with) alone is a sufficient punishment for these crimes, I’m all out of ideas on where this could go.
You may not be who he was referring to, but the people he was referring to certainly seem to be present.
Will you be the one to deliver the violence, or would you rather someone else did that on your behalf?
Anyone who has implemented violence IRL is also scarred, for life.
Edit: I found a great article about that for the UK here: https://www.cyclinguk.org/cycle-magazine/justice-cycle-theft
> Ministry of Justice records show that in the five-year period between June 2017 and June 2022, just 159 people (out of roughly 350,000 bike theft cases) were found guilty of bike thefts and only two of these were given immediate custodial sentences.
The police could do way more, but it's easier to victim blame ("register your bike, use two locks, etc.")
Its really unfortunate but it's true, peer through the thin veneer of society and it's just violence.
"It's all violence?" "Always has been"
Violence is a universal language that the predators can understand innately.