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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

1. The government decides that prisoners can make phone calls, but they can only use a single prison-approved phone operator, and that operator is a private company.

2. The private company realizes it has no competition, raises prices as much as it wants.

3. The government is surprised with the outcome.

I would say the government is at fault here for prohibiting competition, not the companies.

It's the 21st century, you could establish a system where any company, with an appropriate license and government approval, could offer tablets / cell phones for prisoner use, with appropriate limitations and restrictions placed on them of course. Prisoners could then choose which company they want to go with. That would instantly eliminate the problem.

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It's absolutely grotesque to me.

Florida charges their inmates $50/day as a "bed fee" that they must pay when they are released. If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there.

It makes me ashamed to be an American.

Florida is a special version of horrible when it comes to treatment of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The citizens of Florida overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed their sentence. Ron DeSantis and the Republicans modified the law to prevent people from voting if they hadn't paid all of their fees, which there is no central tracking or source of. They then went on to arrest Black citizens who tried to register to vote after their PO had told them they owed no money and were clear to vote.

Who needs those pesky things like free and fair elections when you can just disenfranchise the competition!

Alabama should be included on any list of states terrible to inmates. We still have jails and prisons without HVAC. I really don't care what you did, having to live in a metal and concrete box in the middle of an Alabama summer without basic air conditioning is absolutely torture in my book.

This is a problem in Texas also, although my understanding is that they're working on it: https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/ac/index.html

A lot of horrible state laws from the civic DNA of post-slavery "black codes".

I love this ^^^ However, you forgot one particularly disgusting tidbit: the Supreme Court blessed Florida's poll tax, basically concluding that, even though it looks like a poll tax, it's really not, so it's all good.

Did not know what this was about so I googled it. What a disgusting and kafkaeske situation indeed.

To be fair, before 2018 felons couldn’t vote at all. So it’s still an improvement compared to the previous situation.

>"If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there."

This is totally disgusting. But I guess they need underclass of slaves. Fucking piece of trash.

I have not heard about that one before, and it's gross. It sounds like Illinois and New Hampshire had similar things with their prison system, but outlawed it into 2019.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

The medical fees are the worst. Nobody seeks medical treatment because they can either spend the $15 on seeing a nurse to be told their cancer is simply a stomach ache (happened to a friend), or spend it to call their kids on the phone for maybe 20 mins that week.

People hide all sorts of diseases and complaints until they are so sick they have to be forcibly removed -- this way you can avoid the fee.

Unbelievable! Is there no constitutional protection against that?

I mean they essentially allowed slavery to exist for prisoners with the 13th amendment [1] -- Americans seem to view the prison system as anything goes punishment instead of rehabilitation:

[1] "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."

Also allowed without conviction. Those in county jails who are unconvicted are allowed to be subject to small amounts of slavery the US Supreme Court has previously ruled.

There is, courts just ignore it because administering justice is time-consuming and inconvenient. There are many examples of the judicial system choosing expediency over integrity.

It's not just Florida. You pay the bed fees even if found not guilty. Seems like a very cruel and efficient way to ruin someone financially considering that the average wait time before their first court date is one month. So, you're looking at at least $1500 for a crime you didn't even commit.

That's the Land of the Free™ for ya!

Land of the Fee

....how can this possibly be legal? It's not like you wanted to be there. I have a hard time seeing how it can be justified for someone who is guilty, but I absolutely can't comprehend how you could charge fees from someone who is found innocent.

> ....how can this possibly be legal?

Because most of the people this happens to are black. (And the rest are white trash.)

"white trash"

Gotta love the fact that derogatory terms are generally not ok these days unless it's poor white people.

The point is to vilify and “other” people with less money to distract from the reality of the situation: class warfare.

I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty. The difference here is that you're not guilty given the evidence and arguments presented to the court vs you've been proven innocent.

Secondly, the prison system in the US is meant to be one of vengeance and a continuation of slavery as clearly stated in the 13th amendment[1] rather than one of rehabilitation:

"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."

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/

Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners. If inmates can be rehabilitated, great, but all those other things are more important.

That, as a person from a nordic country, sounds like a very American take. At least over here, the point is to make the people be in a state where criminal behavior isn't desirable. Coming out of a sentence with debt (unrelated to the reason you were there) seems counterproductive.

Pretty sure most Americans would disgree with this point of view as well.

Voting patters. Americans, like any human, loooove righteous violence, both witnessing and enacting it. The System in America is Americans' collective expression of this impulse.

Hey get outta here with your common sense hot take.

When people come out of prison, they need a bed to sleep on and food in their stomachs, and they will find those things one way or another. Absent the means to achieve those goals legally, the only alternative is returning to a life of crime. So, really, the choice is either rehabilitation or recidivism. Recidivism comes with a bunch of costs to society, so rehabilitation is ultimately for society's benefit.

(I would argue that retribution has no place in the justice system, but that's a discussion for another day)

That take doesn’t work very well.

> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners

It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It's currently just a vicious cycle that produces hardened, repeat offenders that prison companies can make money off, money that comes from tax payers.

> It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated.

It would. If only we knew how to do that.

There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. By the time that happens, these attitudes are quite immutable, and they see any gentleness as vulnerability. They're adept at lying, exploitation, and have no qualms about hurting others. What sort of rehabilitation do you even think is possible? Where do you expect this million person army of rehabilitators to come from exactly, to be hired in these prisons? When they start getting raped and killed, will you just double down? Under what principles, exactly, do you expect the rehabilitations to operate? Do you ever remember seeing some study or research that concluded "If steps A, B, and C are performed on convicts who meet the empirical criteria of X, Y, and Z" then they will become upstanding members of society"?

> If only we knew how to do that.

We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people.

> There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated.

This is text book bigotry.

> We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people.

We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans. But even more damning than that, we don't have a good theory of mind that explains criminality. It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology.

> We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans.

Ah, yes, we never do that. All of our advancements in medical and psychological sciences just pop into existence out of no where!

> It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology

Right. And your comments here aren't pushing an agenda at all. Definitely not a bigoted, inhumane agenda.

My only agenda is that it's irritating to listen to non-scientific and pseudo-scientific nonsense bandied about by people who plainly should know better.

What do you propose? That if we can't rehabilitate, we don't bother to deter criminals, or to sequester them from society so they can do less harm, or even that we refuse to punish them thereby encouraging private vengeance? Is that why you irrationally hold onto the clearly mythical rehabilitation, because if we can't have that then we must also abandon the others but subconsciously you know what that shitshow would look like?

The world needs more thinking, not less, and it needs less feeling/empathy, not more.

> What do you propose? That if we can't rehabilitate, we don't bother to deter criminals

There's no conclusive proof that even the death penalty deters crime: https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/does-death-penalty-det...

> or to sequester them from society so they can do less harm

Sequestration with counseling and education would be useful. Unfortunately, we concentrate the convicted instead, which results in prisons functioning as colleges for criminality: https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/10/20/prison-c...

> We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans.

I don't think jails have to go through an IRB before they make changes.

The answer is somewhere in-between:

A researcher would have a hard time getting an IRB to let them build a study at a jail where the jail treats a random half of the inmates in a different way. And judicial oversight might not allow that, either. Further, it's hard to control adequately.

We're going to be stuck with time series and case control studies of changes made haphazardly. It doesn't mean we can't get better, but it's a tougher hill to climb.

We know, however, that treating people like animals in harsh prison conditions and lengthy sentences does not reduce reoffending rates.

We can tell, from comparing with systems. So the current US prison system imposes vast amounts of violence and abuse on prisoners without achieving anything beneficial.

I've said before and I say it again: If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty. The US prison system stands out as such a barbaric and immoral system that I'd consider inflicting it on anyone hardly any more moral than most violent crime.

>If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty.

That's called Jury Nullification, and if you ever hope to successfully reserve your right to invoke it you best not tip your hat in any way that you have been made aware of it.

Don't search it on your normie-browser search engines, do it on Whonix or TBB. Remain data vigilant!

Given there is zero chance that I will ever serve on a US jury given I don't live in the US, it's not a concern for me. But good tip for anyone in the US who might want to do it.

> If only we knew how to do that.

We do. Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism. We're never going to rehabilitate 100% of all convicted criminals, but we can certainly do orders of magnitude better than we do here in the US today.

But the US doesn't want to work like that. Most people here seem to think that prison is a place to be punished, not to be "fixed". And the entire prison-industrial complex that sits atop it all has a vested interest in keeping it that way.

In the US we are very good at cutting off our own noses to spite our faces. The kind of prison that actually rehabilitates people looks "unfair" to most Americans. It looks like coddling, a vacation, when compared to our current prison system. Americans want criminals to be punished, first and foremost. They should live in poor conditions and have the most difficult time. Because that's what they "deserve". And it doesn't matter if that produces the worst outcomes for American society as a whole, including for the people who believe this stuff. As long as the convicts get their harsh punishment, the tough-on-crime crowd is happy to endure any poor societal side-effects.

It reminds me of how we deal with homeless people, or even housed people who are on the edge financially. God forbid we give anyone anything without them having earned it. That would be colossally unfair to all those hard-working folks! Even if welfare and homeless assistance ends up making everyone's lives better than the alternative.

It's completely disgusting, but I don't know how to change people's attitudes on this, not at a country-wide scale.

> Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism.

I think we can learn quite a bit from those places, and do better. I don't think the cruelty of the system helps at all.

But I don't think that the problems that the US faces with criminality and criminal behavior are exactly the same as what other developed nations face. Just looking at different outcomes isn't super compelling evidence.

Retribution provides almost no societal benefit. Most of society doesn’t know or care about any individual crime. Rehabilitation of a single member however will benefit all of society, as you can’t predict all possible social interactions of a single person.

Social order, the people wronged want to know that the culprit suffered for it, otherwise said people will start to feel the judicial system is disconnected from justice itself.

I mean, why do you think Lex Talionis is that historically universal?

For my part, I consider inflicting suffering to be fundamentally immoral, because the "moral" justification for retribution relies on the notion of free will, and there is no rational case for free will.

That is religion. The belief in an eye for an eye to appease Ahura Mazda™, lest our blessings of good fortune run dry next glowing season!

Come on, religion spawns from the culture it's created in, not the opposite.

> Social order

The caste system and human sacrifice also provide social order. Medieval system of peasants and lords and kings provided social order. Spanish inquisition and torture provide social order.

Okay, and how's that been workin' out? What's the old adage about insanity again?

>Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution.

I dont think any sane person would argue against the first two as priorities. I think the balance retribution vs Rehabilitation is far more debatable, as both DO have conflicting impacts on society's benefit, and not just prisoners.

Incapacitation is the easiest to make the case for societal benefit. If a robber is locked up, he can't rob you. That's incapacitation. Nearly everybody agrees that incapacitation is necessary, even people obsessed with rehabilitation are generally willing to concede that until a dangerous criminal is successfully rehabilitated, he probably needs to be locked up.

Agreed, I think we are saying the same thing. I left out a word

Hardly any prisoners are sentenced to rehabilitation, and most justice systems have few means of doing so, so it appears hardly any justice system is based on the notion of locking people up until they are rehabilitated.

(there are some rare exceptions - in Norway the maximum sentence is 21 years except in some particularly serious cases you can be convicted to incarceration for the purpose of protecting society - this punishment is in theory shorter in that you can get out after 10 years, I think, but you won't get out until a parole committee deems that you are no longer a risk).

Furthermore, if justice systems were based on reoffending risks, then sentencing would look very different. Most murderers who commit murders that aren't gang-related, for example, are very low-risk prisoners. Yet no justice system I am aware of takes that into account.

Incapacitation is only one of the reasons we imprison people, albeit the most important reason and the most easily defensible. Murderers who are unlikely to reoffend are still put into prison because our prisons are also for punishing people who do things we think are worthy of punishment. There's no contradiction here, prisons simultaneously serve several purposes.

Indeed, and many of these factors are taken into consideration for the construction of sentences, although often times with different weighting that some people would like.

Point remains that the concern of reoffending is rarely if ever given much actual consideration - reoffending rates shows that the sentencing very clearly does very little to ensure people are locked up until rehabilitated.

> "concern of reoffending is rarely if ever given much actual consideration"

Complete bullshit. Concern for somebody reoffending is a major factor in sentencing and in the public's support for the continued existence of the prison system. Examples of sentencing that follow from other principles do not contradict this.

The US prison system is demonstrably awful at reducing reoffending.

you are mixing two separate topics. Concern of reoffending =/= optimizing rehabilitation.

reoffending is rarely if ever given much actual consideration - False, It is usually the #1 consideration, and why courts look at criminal history, risk factors, ect. This doesnt have to be based on rehabilitation, but can be justified simply with a incapacitation rationale.

E.G. You think someone is likely to reoffend so you lock them up longer. not because you think it will offer more rehabilitation, but because it incapacitates them for longer.

3 strikes laws are a classic example of this. You dont give someone a 25 sentence because thats how long it takes to rehabilitate them. you do it because you think they are a serial offender you want to keep off the streets and they are unlikely to be rehabilitated

> False, It is usually the #1 consideration

No, it is not, or the prison system would be structured entirely differently. Courts do not have the power to affect that.

> E.G. You think someone is likely to reoffend so you lock them up longer. not because you think it will offer more rehabilitation, but because it incapacitates them for longer.

The reality is that this is unproductive when it comes to reducing crime.

> 3 strikes laws are a classic example of this. You dont give someone a 25 sentence because thats how long it takes to rehabilitate them. you do it because you think they are a serial offender you want to keep off the streets and they are unlikely to be rehabilitated

The reality is that this too is ineffective at reducing crime.

> Incapacitation is the easiest to make the case for societal benefit.

In which case we would not be locking up people for victimless crimes

There's no societal benefit in retribution, and the evidence is entirely against the use of inhumane prison conditions as an effective means of deterrence.

Personally I'd find it more moral to subject people supporting these kinds of conditions to them than to subject anyone else to them, because I find the notion of supporting this level of harm to others to be no more moral if you vote for it than if you commit a violent crime.

> There's no societal benefit in retribution

It quells vigilantism.

Vigilantism is no better than the crimes that vigilantes seek to prevent.

There are no massive waves of vigilantism in places with shorter sentences and less brutal prison systems to suggest that it does.

Some cultures are more prone to vigilantism than others. Absence of vigilantism in one country is only very weak evidence that it wouldn't occur in another if their government stopped punishing criminals.

Particularly, America has a culture that puts relatively high value in individualism, and I think that would make vigilantism, individuals meting out their own brand of justice, common if not for the perspective that the government will dole out harsh punishments without the victims needing to do it themselves. We aren't Norway, and the delta between the present status quo in both countries is itself evidence of this cultural difference.

I find this notion that America values individualism bizarre, given how authoritarian American society is - the extent of state control and violence that is tolerated seems entirely foreign to me, and yet the same US government is supposedly scared of shutting down attempts at vigilantist violence? It doesn't pass the smell test for me.

I also find this American exceptionalism unconvincing. No, you are not uniquely barbaric brutes unable to reason about the morality of your actions.

Nor is this about the US vs. Norway. There are plenty of places with more lenient prison systems without any such huge waves of vigilantism. There's no evidence to suggest more lenient sentencing would cause vigilantism of a level that can't be stopped just like other violent crime.

> yet the same US government is supposedly scared of shutting down attempts at vigilantist violence?

Who said that? What is that even meant to mean?

Here is what I said: Americans demand that criminals be harshly punished and if the government isn't willing to saite that desire then Americans, having individualist mentalities, will take justice into their own hands more often than the people in countries like Norway. The government does try to prevent this vigilantism, because vigilantism is harmful to society as a whole, but there's not a whole lot the government can actually do to stop me from murdering my neighbor with a baseball bat because he did something to my son. What the government can do to stop me from doing that is give me a credible promise of punishing the man for me.

The American public demands harsh treatment of criminals, which is why the American government provides this. If the American public were a bunch of Norwegians then American laws would reflect Norwegian values. Both systems are a product of their respective culture. The difference between the two systems of justice reflect cultural differences in attitudes towards justice.

> I also find this American exceptionalism unconvincing. No, you are not uniquely

If anything, its the Scandinavians who are unique. Go to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll find that criminals are given harsh punishments and people generally like this. In fact this is more or less true in most of Europe as well, which is why people always talk about Norway/Sweden/etc as the go-to counter examples. They are the ones who stand out as exceptions to the norm of inflicting punishment on criminals. What I'm saying is that system is designed for that culture and would not satisfy most Americans. Most Americans are satisfied with seeing criminals get what they deserve.

> Who said that? What is that even meant to mean?

You used the risk of vigilantism as a reason for the brutal treatment of prisoners.

> What the government can do to stop me from doing that is give me a credible promise of punishing the man for me.

They can also give a credible promise of punishing would-be murderers like you for that kind of vigilantism. There is no evidence to suggest that shorter sentences leads to more vigilantism. Zero. It's something you've made up to justify a barbaric, immoral treatment of prisoners.

> If anything, its the Scandinavians who are unique.

Strawman. The argument was not about everyone going as far as Scandinavia, but about not going to the other far extreme like the US.

> Go to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll find that criminals are given harsh punishments

And yet no single other country worldwide imprisons a large proportion of its population than the US. The US is worse at this than the most brutal authoritarian dictatorships.

> In fact this is more or less true in most of Europe as well

Nowhere near the US extreme.

> It quells vigilantism.

Someone with a personality to commit violence with a sense of righteousness is bound to unlawfully hurt people sooner or later.

The sooner we can rehabilitate violent criminals like that, the better.

So does executing a random scapegoat. This is a made up problem and an attempt to make a right out of two wrongs.

Retribution needs to have value in an of itself, and it doesn't have any. you can't pay rent with it, you can't eat it. No-one's life was ever saved by it, no-one's lot in life was improved, there is no societal benefit. You just favour a brutish set of values

If my wife was raped and murdered you think it would be more moral to punish me than the murderer because I want vengeance?

I don't think anyone was arguing that you should be punished for wanting something.

I think GP was repsonding to this:

> I find the notion of supporting this level of harm to others to be no more moral if you vote for it than if you commit a violent crime.

I likewise find it pretty ridiculous to equate voting for retributive punishment for murder and actual murder.

I don't see anything there about punishment. It's simply a moral judgement of people who want others they don't like (for one reason or another), killed.

Personally, I find it ridiculous to differentiate between murdering a person for e.g. money, and murdering a person for vengeance, and absent an imminent threat for which deadly force is generally authorized, I don't support the use of it.

Voting to put in place a system that arranged organised violence and oppression is to me equivalent to conspiracy to engage in what is effective violence against a huge number of people, and morally vastly worse than one, or a few, individual murders.

I happen to think that extended stays in solitary confinement are worse than simple murder. So yeah, if you're into retribution to the point of preferring or not caring if prisoners receive such treatment, then I think your morality is highly questionable.

Not for desiring it, no.

But if you take steps to conspire with people to cause violence to be caused to others, such as by voting for the perpetuation of a violent, brutal prison system, then I would see you as morally no better than someone actually engaged in a violent attack. You're in that case seeking to cause an untold amount of harm to others.

To me, seeking to cause that to happen to others is at least as wildly immoral as a rape and murder.

Incapacitation should be the highest priority, not second to last.

> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners.

I wonder if creating a system that helps people build a better life after they have served their time might actually result in better outcomes for everyone...

Retribution shouldn't even be on this list, tbh.

Prisons should act in societies benefit not the fulfillment of your personal revenge-fantasies.

Because that is what you propose. The goal of prison is to take people put of the environments they are in, as a punishment, to stop them from doing things they shouldn't, but also to not have them do it again.

I'd argue, not having them do it again is The most important goal of prisons. And it turns out, that rehabilitation is very good at that given scientific consesus.

It is just not good at fulfilling personal revenge-fantasies like yours.

A countries prison system is a reflection of the attitudes and priorities of people in that country.

For people who are violent at heart, prisons are violent. For people who love money, prisons are about money, for those who care about individuals and seek the improving of others, you get rehabilitation and so on.

Show me your prisons and I'll tell you about your society.

Prisons are a jobs program for rural states and a way to increase their census counts -> congressional seats, and for state gerrymandering.

>Prisons are for society’s benefit

Which is precisely why they should be geared primarily towards rehabilitation. We'd all be better off if we can reform people and have them be productive members of society. This is far better than losing productive hands to satisfy our bloodlust and base desire for vengeance.

Remember people: Jury Nullification. Do not admit to knowing about it. Do not explain why you are not voting guilty, just that you have doubts. If 1 in 10 jurors on average were conscientious about the terrible treatment of the convicted, it would grind the apparatus to a halt in weeks!

Why do you think they keep felons from voting and serving on juries? I think it's to keep the state's poor customer service reviews under wraps.

Rehabilitation is also for the benefit of society, a rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to commit more crime after they get out.

I would say that deterrence (preventing non-prisoners from committing crimes) and rehabilitation (preventing prisoners from committing crimes when they get out) should be the primary objectives of the system.

Incapacitation lasts just for a short time. If you don't rehabilitate prisoners, you're just going to have the same problem again a few years from now. And we don't have the capacity to lock up everyone forever.

It is more nuanced. Illinois at least you can petition the court after acquittal for a "certificate of innocence" which you can use to gain some small statutory compensation. I assume other states have this.

Also, many county jails charge bed fees even if the case is dismissed and you never go to trial. These bed fees have been ruled legal many times by courts.

And, as a final kicker, the 13th Amendment isn't as clear as the text makes out. The US Supreme Court has carved exceptions out for small amounts of slavery. For instance, the government is allowed to force pre-trial detainees who are unconvicted to do cleaning jobs and it does not violate the 13th Amend.

Source: 10 years a slave.

> I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty.

You are innocent by default. You can't be found innocent. Being not guilty brings you back to the default state of being innocent.

> Secondly, the prison system in the US is meant to be one of vengeance and a continuation of slavery as clearly stated in the 13th amendment[1

I'm deeply worried about your reading comprehension.

> I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty.

This is not true. Many wrongfully convicted people are found to be "factually innocent" when their convictions are overturned. This is because after you are convicted the burden of proof to overturn the conviction switches, you are now presumed guilty, since you've been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, and must prove your innocence. Some Supreme Court Justices even hold that being innocent isn't enough to get out of even the death penalty.

In American criminal law, the term "innocent" is not a verdict that a jury can return. Instead, the only possible verdicts are "guilty" or "not guilty". No one can declare you innocent because new evidence may come up later finding you guilty.

Because like someone else said - innocent is the default state. Being found not guilty automatically means you're innocent. Any other read of this is invalid.

> In American criminal law, the term "innocent" is not a verdict that a jury can return. Instead, the only possible verdicts are "guilty" or "not guilty". No one can declare you innocent because new evidence may come up later finding you guilty.

As the person to whom you responded said, there is such a thing as a determination of factual innocence. See, for example, the relevant section of Utah's legal code: https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title78B/Chapter9/78B-9-P4.html . I can't see at a glance whether a jury or only a judge can grant such a petition, but, even if a jury can't return such a verdict, that's different from saying "no one can declare you innocent."

No it can’t, that would violate Double Jeopardy.

No, that is about a court re-trying someone, which they cannot do. The evidence itself may well prove their guilt.

The point being that a lack of evidence of guilt is not evidence of a lack of guilt. But we require evidence of guilt for convictions, not a lack of evidence of innocence (in criminal cases, and if it's not an affirmative defense).

If they have been found not guilty (given) when exactly is this newly found evidence going to convict? That’s the point of double jeopardy.

It didn't say "convict", it said "prove". Evidence can prove someone guilty even if a court is unable to do anything about it.

Anyone not guilty is presumed innocent. That which is presumed does not need to be declared.

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

> I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty.

Just no, one doesn't need to understand that - because it doesn't change anything.

I thought that in any functional society you were innocent until proven otherwise. And even if you play with words it doesn't somehow excuse it. And a poor vengeance-based prison system isn't relevant either because that only applies if you are found guilty.

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

The presumption of innocence is something else. It's not a verdict.

But it doesn't matter. That changes nothing more than semantics, which doesn't explain or justify anything.

Oh, I agree with you. I'm just stating how the legal system works. Doesn't make it right though.

Well, no, you're not actually stating how the legal system works, you're just stating which of two words it uses to mean the exact same thing -- it works the same way regardless.

The difference between these two is there’s an implied probability of guilt, which is a dangerous view because it allows you to treat people who haven’t been directly proven guilty worse on the basis that you’re mistreating a population more likely to contain guilty people. The presumption of innocence isn’t objective, it’s an important psychological tactic to help avoid such behavior. That’s why we should use that language.

Edit: in practice the legal system doesn’t behave this way, but I’m still wary of using different terminology because it seems like it concedes ground.

It might not be legal. Has it been challenged in court yet?

Yes, many, many times. It has always been ruled legal by the higher courts. Even for pre-trial detainees who never even go to trial and who have been falsely accused.

I looked for some cases in Florida but couldn't find any but I really don't know how to properly search for stuff like this. Any suggestions?

Fla. Stat. § 939.06(1)

"A defendant in a criminal prosecution who is acquitted or discharged is not liable for any costs or fees of the court or any ministerial office, or for any charge of subsistence while detained in custody."

Edit: You can search scholar.google.com for "939.06" and find cases such as:

Starkes v. State, 292 So.3d 826 (2020) wherein the 1st DCA issued a writ of mandamus commanding the trial court to certify the defendant's costs (so that they may be reimbursed).

And in the rare cases when someone wins they court will do an 'as applied' ruling, meaning only for this specific case and unable to be used as precedent in any other cases.

They're doing this with alarming regularity in the last decade. This used to be rarely used, but is now almost the norm.

I had to pay hundreds of dollars in court fees after all shoplifting charges against me were dropped by the prosecutor when they noticed the person on camera was not, in fact, me, or anyone looking even remotely like me. The mall cop just grabbed the wrong person.

Can you sue the state for those charges back?

Sure, but that would have cost me way more than a couple hundred dollars. (This was about 25 years ago.)

Would a small claims court not take it, due to small amount of money involved? I appreciate it was a long time ago so it's hard to answer.

You mean … the same court and judge that imposed the fee in the first place?

No? Small claims court is a different branch of the court system.

What jurisdiction are you in? Did you contact your elected representatives (if you have any)? Did you appeal the fees?

This was in Northampton Massachusetts about 25 years ago. I did go to UMass’s legal help clinic who told me basically “Yes, that’s how it works, it’s awful, but unless you want to spend the next few years of your life and every penny you have fighting this, just accept it and move on.”

Sometimes just paying it and moving on is in fact the simplest solution. Fighting it in the courts would have taken time and effort, and unless you could find a good pro bono lawyer, money. Fighting it in the court of public opinion is another option. Visiting you elected representatives offices for a chat about it takes a limited amount of time, but can have a big impact. Please don't misunderstand me, I am blaming you for anything or judging your decisions, I am merely offering suggestions to you and anyone else about ways to make things better :)

Wait until you learn about civil asset forfeiture.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...

It is legal because running on a platform of making life better for prisoners is a losing strategy. Voting to make the lives of prisoners better in any real way is writing an attack ad for your political opponent. Merica.

The incentives are perverse. Opening a prison in a small district can result in 75% of the population being prisoners, which counts towards census->congressional seats and for gerrymandered power. Some states somehow even keep you in the prison's district even after release, but I'm having trouble finding specific instances.

Just don't commit crimes.

Just read the comment you replied to. You're charged if found not guilty.

Yes I replied to the $1500 one but the thread specifies being found guilty and "sentenced to 5 years".

I find it completely acceptable to charge an inmate money for his stay, people are against prison labor cause it makes it profitable for a state to have prisoners, which is true, but somehow the state has to recoup money it poured into an individual eating free and using public services without paying taxes for multiple years. You decided to commit the crime.

Now, I am against you being charged pre-sentencing, unless you are found guilty, in which case you should be charged for that pre-time as well.

> which is true, but somehow the state has to recoup money it poured into an individual eating free and using public services without paying taxes for multiple years

Please turn your business brain off. Society costs money to run - this is why we pay taxes. Your taxes routinely provide unpaid services to people because the benefits to society outweigh the costs.

If you can't be bothered to read properly, don't reply.

Just hope the state never decides to mistakenly press charges against you.

What happens if you just don't pay? For a couple thousand bucks are they really going to lawyer up and open another court case?

They do not have to. They are the government and will garnish the income directly.

Can you provide a citation for this? Currently when I go looking for information on this your comment is the only result I can find that claims that this is possible for pre-trial jail terms.

I see lots of references to it for people who are cleared years later, which is awful, but I want to make sure we're not mixing horrible facts and horrible fictions.

My understanding is that in Florida, even if you are found not guilty or charges are dropped etc., you are still liable for the fees. Their argument is that you were still using a bed.

You could have been using the bed. You still pay the full time if you are released early.

Now, if they made the "bed fee" proportional to your net worth, that would be interesting. But that would be Communism, can't have that.

And if you are released early, somebody else will probably get that bed and they too will be paying the fee. I bet they are double and triple collecting on a significant number of beds.

It's a travesty. Even Marriotts don't take more than 50% when someone cancels their reservation.

One problem with tying the fee to net worth is that wealthier individuals may be more likely to have their wealth in trusts so they may actually have "fewer assets" than a poorer person.

Just a definitional issue. If you are a beneficiary of a trust and can rely upon it, then it is effectively your wealth.

Having to pay if you're released sounds like just an accident of bad law drafting, but I'm stunned that I have watched so many prisoner TikToks, read so many undercover guard articles, and never heard of pay-to-stay laws before. It's like every prison sentence comes with a crippling fine.

Highly doubt it's an accident. The cruelty is the point: These voters/government deliberately make their laws as terrible as they legally can. They see the world as a hierarchy with in-groups and out-groups and see the law as a way to inflict cruelty on the out-groups.

I had a recent colleague and we’d argue this exact law (and others).

The takeaway I got is he generally believed the people impacted by the laws were bad. And even if they served their time there was basically no limit to what we should try to impose on them. Furthermore, even if they didn’t do the crime they probably did others so no remorse on other things that might seem unjust. He thought they deserved those things too.

Shoulda offered to call in a false police report on him.

> Highly doubt it's an accident. The cruelty is the point:

Someone murders another, pleads down to manslaughter. Will spend 4 years in prison... but the cruelty is that after he gets out if somehow he manages to come up with money that the court system can even become aware of, we might make him pay for some of the $250,000 cost of keeping him in the cell?

Or do you just mean the people who were wrongly held before evidence exonerated them? It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it, and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because their only income is cash from street drug sales or fenced shoplifted goods and impossible to recover, I guess those people who can hold a job that direct deposits into a bank account are on the hook.

God, I'm glad you don't review my code. Full of bugs because I'm in a hurry, don't understand the problem clearly enough, or the specifications were bad... "that's no accident, you're being cruel to the shareholders".

So, somebody who is locked up because they rejected a cop's advances, and then had evidence planted on them in retribution, should absolutely, 100% foot the bill for their time in jail, even if its eventually found that the only reason they are there is because of the laws the cop broke?

Even if I concede that literal criminals should have to pay for their accommodations (which I don't), there should be a straightforward path to appeal those costs if found not guilty. If the fees are meant to be further deterrence, then it is absolutely vital that we only deter those found guilty. Otherwise, we are depriving people of life, liberty, or property for "driving while black" or "being poor in front of your betters".

>... and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because ...

See here you're confused. You built the cage, you hired the staff to watch the cage, you are by proxy forcibly caging people in it who ought not be there, YOU pay for the damned cage! When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think someone selling coke should get the box, it's not about morality anymore and it's just a war... err a case of "you pay me to go beat him up because you think he stinky, but hey I found that burglar last week and stopped Russia last month so it's tots cool! *peace sign*"

Well said. Society has decided that imprisoning people is how we deal out justice, so society should have to foot the bill for that mode of justice. If society thinks that a particular crime's sentence should have a monetary component, it should make that explicitly part of the sentence, not "LOL, you go to prison AND by the way, you pay for it!"

If my house catches on fire, I don't have to pay the fire department to come out and fight the fire. Society decided that a functioning fire department is a good thing to have, and pays for it with public money.

>When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think

I would legalize cocaine tomorrow were I in charge. I'd regulate the pharmaceutical companies such that profits were capped at about 2% over cost, they couldn't market it, and it would be sold in a plain retail box out of liquor stores in marked, known dosages and potency. I'd do the same for heroin and meth. But every time I mention something like this, the leftist I'm arguing with backpedals instantly "oh noes, we can't do that, drugs are bad mmmkay!".

To me, this means you're clearly talking about or to someone else. Your criticisms fall from me like raindrops off a freshly waxed car.

You would do better to use rationality more than empathy, but I'm content to let you learn that lesson painfully.

> It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it

Okay, let's extend this principle to the rest of society - if the government investigates a business for labour violations, then the business should pay for the cost of investigating them. if the government investigates you for not paying taxes, you should have to pay for that, even if you are 100% innocent.

Oh look, the more baseless accusations the governments creates, the money money they collect, how convenient!

the only issue is prisons in the US are frequently for-profit enterprises, so there's an even more perverse incentive - govco imprisons people, private prison makes money from the government, then bills the incarcerated, private prison has money to lobby for law changes that make more people "criminals" that need to be incarcerated - it's basically the same thing except now there's a bunch of fat middlemen.

awesome.

this is justice!

People who are wrongly convicted are in the in-group. Also, pay-to-stay exists in 49 states; why are only 2 of 49 as cruel as you expect? I don't recognize the monsters you imagine; people just collectively aren't too careful about who gets hurt balancing the budget on the backs of groups who can't vote.

OMG. I not from US and I never heard of this practice, but it's literally sounds like modern financial slavery.

Our constitution allows slavery if you are imprisoned. So we already have literal modern garden-variety slavery.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't wonder why there aren't persistent, ongoing riots in the US.

Rioting puts you in jail.

At some point things get so bad that stops being a deterrent. Why the US population is so placid remains a mystery.

The level of surveillance makes it impossible to form coherent organizational structures domestically which can effectively oppose this system, because your organizations' and family's financial, communication, and social lives can be mapped out for strategic legal attack by the very same players they wish to protest. This is the price of KYC & AML.

This presumes an organized resistance. That's not what I was talking about. I'm surprised there aren't more regular reactions out of sheer anger, like the BLM riots.

Oh boy. We technically got rid of slavery after the Civil War but in actual practice the line is quite blurry. Joseph Stiglitz made a really good point about freedom when analyzed through an economic lens. You can't just talk about political freedom but also the opportunity set as afforded to you by your economic status. Even if you have political freedom but only one choice, that freedom isn't much use.

I never really understood why the US are used as a baseline for anything social-related.

Concerning Stieglitz, it’s unclear to me whether we owe non-contributing members their freedom. The federal USA costs a trillion per semester, so it’s 6400$ per year. Those who don’t contribute so much per year, are a weight upon the others. If anything, the actual-workers are slaves of the poor people.

Granted, social friction makes that it is not possible to make everyone contribute efficiently. But we owe them money only because the society is not perfectly organized, not because they’re poor.

As for the slavery induced by the prison IO system, it is obviously inhumane and we should repay the victims probably a few hundred dollars per day in jail.

Paying for the cost you caused society by being a criminal seems just as just as putting someone in prison to begin with. Obviously that means it should only apply to those guilty, not to anyone who has the charges overturned, and it also means the crimes need to be deserving of being crimes. I find it weird that people seem okay with the idea of imprisoning someone for X years, but fining them as well is going too far.

Keeping the fined even after the conviction is overturned is an extra horrible case, comparable to keeping someone in prison even after the conviction is overturned, but that shouldn't be mixed with fines in general just like imprisoning someone after their conviction is overturned shouldn't be mixed with imprisoning someone who has a valid conviction.

These fines cause people to reoffend to get the money to pay them, as often these fines and fees cause you to be reincarcerated if no payment is made.

Even without reoffending, it stops people reintegrating successfully as it is very hard to get a job after incarceration and people end up having to take cash jobs for way below minimum wage and live in slums just to try to pay off these debts.

>These fines cause people to reoffend to get the money to pay them,

Sending them to prison causes them to reoffend as shown by the recidivism rate of people based on how long they are in prison, as they learn to be better criminals while not learning skills to fit back into society, and as imprisonment creates a life changing stigma which negative impacts their lives. Perhaps instead of criticizing fines, you should criticize imprisonment and even the act of convicting them that creates the stigma that makes gainful legal employment so hard to find.

The primary skills you use locked up are how to be sneaky, how to hide shit, how to detect camera zones.

You couldn't get cheese at one institution unless you had a court date; they would give you a cheese sandwich at court. I would smuggle coffee out of the jail (through a full naked visual body cavity search) to trade for cheese sandwiches in the court holding pens, and then smuggle the cheese slices back in (through another full naked visual body cavity search).

Those are excellent life skills. Thanks jail!

> Lose job and get charged with shoplifting for stealing baby formula.

> Lose child to the system due to being found guilty.

> Rack up $18,250 in bed fees for 1 year incarceration.

> Lose ability to vote until $18,250 can be paid.

> Can't get job because of previous conviction.

> Become homeless.

> Re-arrested for sleeping under a bridge on public property.

> Rack up another $5,000 in bed fees for 100 day incarceration.

> Rinse and repeat.

Don't try to pull wool over my eyes that this is a just system. It's sole purpose is to disenfranchise voters even if they weren't charged with a federal crime.

Well your very first step doesn't really make sense, given that the USDA, a federal organization funded with 150+ billion dollars a year, has 15 different nutrition assistance programs to provide food specifically "to ensure that children, low-income individuals, and families have opportunities for a better future through equitable access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food".

Why commit crimes and steal food when the taxpayer will literally just give you free food or free money for food.

It may not make sense, but it happens. People may not know about those nutrition assistance programs. Their local programs may be backed up, can't see them soon enough, or provide them what their children need fast enough.

Your criticism is not as damning as you think. The original comment could have used an innumerable amount of other unfortunate circumstances to reach the same end. It is fortunate for you that you have never been in dire straits, been fired and had to feed a baby, or tried to enroll in a program like that in an emergency, and can instead sit back at a computer and google the USDA and their enrollment websites at your leisure. Many other people do not have your fortunate circumstances, which makes your comment seem tone deaf, out of touch, and in denial of the injustices in our justice system.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-some-families-are-ba...

Not to mention the actual difficulty of getting, maintaining and living off snap.

USDA programs generally (always?) operate by giving money to states, which each have their own eligibility and application requirements. This is the (physical) application form for Alabama:

https://mydhr.alabama.gov/content/forms/application-english....

(There is an online form, but it requires an account.)

Note the last page, particularly "You have the right to have your application acted on within thirty days without regard to race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability or political belief. You have the right to know why your application is denied, or your benefits reduced or terminated. You have the right to request a conference or fair hearing either orally or in writing if you are not satisfied with any decision of the county department. You have the right to be represented by any person you choose. You have the right to examine your food assistance case file in relation to any hearing you may have."

Expedited services are available: "You may get food assistance benefits within 7 calendar days if your food assistance household has less than $150 in monthly gross income and liquid resources (cash, checking or savings accounts) of $100 or less; or your rent/mortgage and utilities are more than your household’s combined monthly income and liquid resources; or a member of your household is a migrant or seasonal farm worker."

It is a little known fact that few infants, for example, can survive 30 or even 7 calendar days without food.

Please note my comment already had this line specified.

>it also means the crimes need to be deserving of being crimes.

I don't want to get into the details of what crimes should or should not be crimes, that won't be productive for this community. But if you are going to use an example to try to make a point, please note that picking an example that includes something you think shouldn't be a crime, or at least a crime deserving of imprisonment, means that my critique was not applied to that example to begin with.

Also, my criticism was specifically about considering the fines as being a point of complaint while not doing so of the incarceration. You example of losing a child is a result of the incarceration, not the fine. Your example of not being hired has to do with the conviction and people's general perception of those convicted, as well as with insurance and similar, and not with the fine. So neither of those are specific to my previous post.

You also end with a critique of the legal system in general. Which is not what I was talking about. Once again, I was specifically talking about the instances of criticism being levied against fines that should be, but aren't being, applied to incarceration as well, creating at least the appearance that incarceration is tolerable but fines are going too far.

Please understand that critiquing a critique of X does not mean that the person doing so agrees with X.

You forgot about getting into a prison for not paying the fees.

These prisons are privately operated for-profit ventures and society does not benefit from the enrichment of the prison-industrial complex, and in fact it can be argued that it is a net loss to society because these businesses depend on a steady stream of offenders to incarcerate in order to survive, as well as repeat business from a high rate of recidivism. In order for the people running these businesses to maintain their wealth, they need a steady supply of criminals to shake down, and when they can't do that, they'll just lobby using sympathetic points like yours to say that they deserve to be landed with crippling debt.

Of course, a society that dehumanises criminals, favours retribution over rehabilitation, and believes heavily in the 'free market', has simply opened the space for such a pipeline to exist.

In the case of the wrongful conviction, it sounds like indentured servitude. You're not actually free until you've paid off your contract with Private Prison Inc.

>they'll just lobby using sympathetic points like yours

I suggest you read my post again because your response doesn't seem to be related to my post. Your response is taking issue with private prisons and with businesses making money off prisons. My post was specific to people being okay with imprisoning someone, making no statement if it was in a private or public prison, but not being okay with fining someone.

If you want to discuss how to make sure prisons aren't ran in such a way to ensure you don't have a pressure to increase prison usage, that is a fair discussion to have, but unrelated to the specific critique I was criticizing.

Do you have a citation for this? It sounds like a violation of multiple constitutional protections just waiting for a Supreme Court challenge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-stay_(imprisonment)

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...

https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...

Etc.

None of those articles state that they can charge the fee on an overturned sentence. The one states they can charge the fees on the full sentence even if you are paroled, which is dumb. But not on an overturned sentence.

wait, what? how does that work? why are you charged at all for being sent to a place you have no choice in not going to?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pay-stay-florida-inmates-charged-...

Massachusetts has probabation fees. Something like $80 a month.

Sounds like an eighth amendment violation.

I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?

Exploitation is what it is. Legal or not, it’s gross and it’s what these companies have been doing for years without consequences.

The rates aren’t even really accurately reflected in those per-minute tables. There are also a lot of service charges and other fees, blocks of time must be purchased with minimum amounts ($20 minimum is not uncommon), and then fees are taken from the prepaid funds as they are used, causing the balance to decline much faster than one might expect, and allowing the service providers to further conceal their deceptive billing practices.

Actual average rates can easily exceed $0.50/min, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the folks who depend on these services to maintain family and relationships are frequently not the most flush with cash. This has been a brazen redistribution of funds from those who have the least resources, to those who have the least conscience.

Somewhat relevant, video calls have been hailed as improving the ability for incarcerated individuals to keep in touch with their loved ones. This is also a cynical lie. Video calls have been used nearly across the board as an excuse to end in-person visitation. It’s cruel, and should be stopped. Some minimum visitation should be afforded to inmates, particularly since many of them are pre-trial and presumed innocent, and in any case their families and loved ones deserve to maintain contact with them, not to mention it’s a positive reinforcement towards rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.

??? So what do you wanna do, make it illegal to be immoral?

Clearly not, since that's unenforceable and a bad idea anyway. Instead we pretty much have to play whac-a-mole by smacking regulation onto things when the industry can't or doesn't self-regulate itself. Just allowing competition isn't a fix. It might be better than not allowing competition, but that's not even guaranteed anyways, nothing is a panacea.

Choosing which immoral deeds to make illegal is a very central role of government!

Either there's some unstated sarcasm or the person above made the most hn libertarian-ass comment I seen in a while.

Yes I would like functional civil institutions that are able to protect me from the unethical behavior of others. Welcome to Civics 101 today we are reading John Locke.

"People should just stop" is never the right answer. You might as well be commanding an engine to stop overheating.

> Yes I would like functional civil institutions that are able to protect me from the unethical behavior of others.

This is the opposite of claiming that people should become more moral. This is setting rules. They shouldn't be set around "morality," they should be set around established civil liberties.

> "People should just stop" is never the right answer. You might as well be commanding an engine to stop overheating.

1) I don't understand this argument. As if we don't absolutely do this all the time. Theft as a concept is impossible to completely prevent yet we still know it to be illegal. Same with Vandalism. The supreme court just made it legal to prosecute the homeless. Hell there are countries were suicide is illegal.

2) You say this as if a room temp superconductor is something that endless dollars aren't spent on trying to achieve.

> They shouldn't be set around "morality," they should be set around established civil liberties.

These are not whole distinct things. They are two overlapping circles. No one but the most unscrupulous of lawyers conceive of these a 2 wholly distinct entities.

Unethical or "uncivil" behavior is something that happens and to act like we have are hands are tied and shouldn't adapt to address this because our hands are tied because there are unintended consequences is asinine and impractical.

Yes? Like would that actually be a bad thing?

We tend to want to make bad things harder and good things easier using the government, so yes.

Yes! That should be one of the roles of a governments.

The government is the one contracting them out, seems fair for them to set a minimum standard of operation to prevent exploitation of a vulnerable population

That’s what laws are ostensibly for

What do you think laws are for??

Isn't that the definition of the rule of law? When operating a society under the rule of law, morality is meant to define the framework of rules and regulations by which we live our lives. If the law is immoral then there should be a mechanism to change it—as is the case here.

> I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?

A corporation doesn't have morality and can't exhibit ethics: the individual people who embody it do, can, and should, of course... but, in my experience trying to point that out--such as how software engineers and designers should be held in moral contempt by their friends, family, or even merely coworkers for working on "dark patterns" at big tech companies--you get strong push back with either the excuse of "just doing one's job" or the insistence that "someone else would do it anyway", as if the act of profiting off of your directly-bad actions is so trivially justified; and, worse, once you connect this with the realization that your employer is, by its construction, amoral, you've created a scenario where we are intrinsically absolved of all sin.

yes, the paperclip maximizer maximizes paperclips, not ethics.

if you want to maximize ethics, it was probably a bad choice to build our society around paperclip maximizers. Obviously the system will perform its design function to the maximum extent allowed by its environment (and a small degree beyond, in some circumstances).

that said, I think we all instinctively understand why the orphan crusher is the least bad of all possible worlds, of course. As such there is obviously no need to discuss or elaborate why. Omelas could not be as bright without the orphan crusher - simple as. Omelas is one of the Central Tigers of the last decade, look at how the orphan crusher has transformed their economy, and you want to... what, turn it off, take it all away, because of some hippie bullshit?

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

And I mean, it’s pretty much too late to turn them off. Like, we designed them with decentralized, automated, self-correcting memeplexes for governance. They really don’t like it when you talk about turning them off - that sort of talk doesn’t lead to anywhere that maximizes paperclips at this juncture, it’s not productive discussion.

Obviously both the overall societal design and the architecture of the paperclip maximizers is designed to route around any failures to maximize paperclips, such as ethics or externalities. That was the design goal. The internet routes around errors in physical infrastructure, the paperclip maximizers route around errors in paperclip maximization. What else could we do? No other society is possible, obviously. Critics really need to just take a step back for a moment and be serious.

if you don't build the orphan crusher, our competitors will, or a startup. and do we really want to live in that world, where we're not the ones running the world's orphan-crushing-as-a-service? You wanna let Elon Musk do it, or Zuck? Get real.

I am all for naming people by name next to their actions. There is pushback, but you have the benefit of your statements being factually correct.

Video calls are also often 'not working right now, sorry' something they couldn't get away with with visitation (though visitation often reaches 'capacity, sorry, you can't come in').

Ugh. They are so unreliable. The place I was at they started with Skype for Business and then switched to Microsoft Teams. Neither of which was very useful for prison-to-public video calls because you need to email a link to someone and get them to click it at a very specific time.

If you can't option for stateless expatriation & deportation & outlawing (within borders) & and re-entry ban, in lieu of years/decades/life in prison, then what is prison actually for? Certainly not human rights respecting public safety.

Only reason I can see is it's sanctioned hunting and torture (through humiliation and deprivation) of a very vulnerable class by the state: criminals.

...

Maybe substitute outlawing for imprisonment generally, and offer imprisonment as the rehabilitation option which protects the guilty from the victims' retributions. If pedo hunters are an example, I'm sure there are lots of grown up school bullies who'll go around making outlaw lives hell out of pure joy alone.

I don’t understand this post at all. Could you clarify what you mean by “option for”?

The article states that fees and minimum purchase amounts will no longer allowed, so the rates in the tables should be accurate.

I can't really wrap my mind around the idea that communications in the prison system should be paid by the inmates going straight through a private company. If somebody told me this was some lore from Bioshock I'd tell them the joke is too on the nose.

Who knows, maybe I'm just too... european to truly understand.

What I'd really like to know instead is the conversation that your representatives and the telco board had on the matter. Also, the golf course where it happened.

Because I'd bet very good money that nobody in the current (or any previous) administration is in any way surprised with the outcome.

A bit of Googling turned up stories about the high cost of phone calls for prisoners in France, Germany, and the UK and that their systems are run by private companies.

I couldn't find out of the money goes "straight through" to the phone system provider or if the government collects and forwards it, but does that really make a difference?

I can't really wrap my mind around the idea that [anything] in the prison system should be [so terribly broken]

It all makes sense when you accept that the American justice system is configured for maximum vengeance, not rehabilitation, and certainly not the best outcomes for society. WE MUST PUNISH THE SINNERS!

A significant percentage of prisons in the US are private companies operating for profit who spend lobbying dollars to influence policy. This even happens with the juvenile "justice" system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal.

It's helpful to think of American governance as being simply a gigantic money funnel, where taxpayer dollars goes in the top, and the US and State legislators point the small end of the funnel at all their various favored private businesses and individuals. It's just plain old corruption but wearing a suit and tie and a spiffy "business-friendly" mask.

"the government" as an entity here really elides the difference between the federal government and state governments; state governments hold the majority of prisoners in the US and the ability of the federal government (via the FCC) to regulate prison phone calls that do not cross state lines is new since 2022.

But even on top of that, what would the dream free market implementation even look like here? An entire licensure and certification system for these tablets which will inevitably be crammed with as many upsells as the law does not prohibit? What is the recourse for someone who is in prison and chooses a company whose products do not work? Are they supposed to call tech support?

I can answer this, as the tablets they everywhere are cheap Temu junk. If it's hardware, you have to return the tablet to the prison, and good luck on them satisfying the warranty for you. Easier just to get your family to put another $250-400 on your commissary and just buy a new one.

If it's software -- you're usually shit out of luck. If it's a serious bug and enough people file paperwork every day, then after a few weeks of outage it is often escalated to the operator. Another few weeks after that they will eventually fix it. Things move very, very slowly in jails and prisons, so expect long stretches of downtime.

> what would the dream free market implementation even look like here?

Every company's dream: Free labor and captive audiences.

I do not think the government was at all surprised, punitive charges are very much a part of the prison system in this country[1] this is people deciding to lessen the burden slightly.

[1] https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...

Its hard to imagine that they didn't know this would happen based on the USA recent past history with phone pricing.

There was a time (when I was young) where there was just one phone company in the USA. Prices were high for long distance (My mom is first generation so called out frequently). Then deregulation and competition (MCI/Sprint) lowered those prices dramatically.

In the late 90s I lived with roommates that didn't have long distance. We used phone cards we bought at the local convenience store. Those were actually pretty good price wise.

I actually always hold companies accountable for their actions, whether or not other factors allowed those actions.

They're still price-gouging prisoners because they can. That's still abhorrent behavior.

The part you are missing is these private phone operators made deals with private prison operators, no government involved.

The government is still to blame for having private prisons. For everything you point out, a prison should not be private because it's a market with a literal set of captives that cannot choose their prison. That incentives the prison to gouge at every turn.

> I would say the government is at fault here for prohibiting competition, not the companies.

To borrow a slightly old meme, porque no los dos?

If my local government cuts firefighting budgets, and I decide to take advantage of this to become an arsonist, I don't think anyone would say that it's the government at fault for half the town going ablaze.

> 3. The government is surprised with the outcome.

No, they are not.

We keep giving officials a pass by making their malicious behavior out to be incompetence. The entire goal of the prison system in the USA is to extract as much money out of each prisoner from the tax payers, the prisoners, and the prisoner's families.

Phone calls should be a human right. The govt should just make these calls free. We want these folks to be able to connect with family and maintain connection to give them the best chance of integrating back. Charging for phone call is unnecessarily punitive.

When I was locked up in the county jail (charges dropped later) my mother was dying from cancer. I wanted to call her, but it was so insanely expensive ($1.50/min) I could only call for 5 mins a day until she died.

I scheduled a bail hearing due to my mother's illness, but it took months. It was scheduled for a Monday. My mother died on the Saturday. When we got in front of the judge on Monday the prosecutor snapped on the judge, "Judge, what are we even doing here! This is total waste of my time. His mother died already. This issue is moot."

Look at compassionate release laws. 'Technically' the courts are compassionate, but the rules are so Kafkaesque, whatever the reason will have passed before the process is exhausted. No one gets out on compassionate release even though many qualify (say you are the only immediate family/available caregiver of someone incapacitated and/or dying).

Why should the phone be operated by a third party for profit? Why are prisons operated for profit?

"because who cares are you really trying to defend murderers and pedophiles!?" <- vast majority of avg US citizens. Talking about prisoners rights in any way will get you questionable looks from most people. "Prison isn't supposed to be fun" "lock em up and throw away the key" etc.

Of course I am. They're our neighbors too and it's very rare for people to be incarcerated forever. Humans are very narrow minded.

The government is not a single entity. In this case the federal government is limiting what the state and local governments can do. The federal government can limit what federal prisons and those servicing federal prisons can do directly but not state and local governments directly, so they place the limits on the companies because that is what they have the power to do.

The state and local governments are partners with these phone companies and the outrageous rates are not a surprise outcome but an intentional one. In exchange for allowing such rates the prisons get free surveillance services and some combination of a fixed and percentage of revenue payment from the companies. In other words a legal kickback.

Don't forget, the telecom operators usually send large amounts of money in kickbacks to the prison in exchange for the 'privilege' to run these systems.

While Prisoners have no expectations of privacy, most do not know that all of their calls are listened to, transcribed, and shared with prison officials. There is some speech-to-text sentiment analysis that will prioritize a call that has certain phrases spoken.

It's just...a mess.

When I was a public defender, I had prosecutors and jail staff hint to me about things that were said during the calls. A few years later, they had to drop the charges in a few cases because it was discovered and reported that the calls between attorneys and clients were being monitored and recorded.

No, the companies are absolutely at fault, just like pay day lenders. Absolute leech’s on society.

> I would say the government is at fault here for prohibiting competition, not the companies.

We should be naming and shaming the companies that choose the immoral path. That does happen sometimes, but over the last 40 years the US seems to have shifted to "if you can get away with it, that's fine", especially for corporations.

That attitude has waxed and waned over the history of the country, but the progressive era (from the late 19th century) was notably one where doing the right thing (or "doing well by doing good") was considered proper.

Vendor competition helps, but it might not be enough depending on how the incentives are set up, especially with a literally-captive customer base.

If all costs are passed to the inmates, then the prison doesn't have much of an incentive to pick a cheap vendor, compared to a convenient one or the one that takes prison officials on free golf trips.

Worse, hyphies may be considered a feature if the institution is trying to pressure inmates into to "work" programs which are profitable for the institution.

What strikes me as the likeliest implementation of a fair-market system is what we have in the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) system, which is that the bureaucracy of ensuring fairness is so high that we end up with $400 tablets costing $4,000, as tech companies try to get into the space but find out that they need to hire a team of contract attorneys and compliance officers and DCAA compliant time-reporting software and retraining their employees to use it and be subject to regular audits etc. etc.

> I would say the government is at fault here

It's always the government that is at fault for either poor/ineffective regulation or lack of enforcement. Unless a company is flagrantly breaking the law, blame the government. Companies are just doing what we know they will always do - engaging in every lawful (or gray area) tactic they can to turn a buck. When we don't like the way a company is turning a buck, we have precisely one recourse - government regulation.

I don’t think this is universally true. At least not here in the Netherlands, but even in visiting the US it does not feel like that everywhere.

I think it is very sad the moral standards are so low. I find that even harder when mixed with “why does the government get involved in everything?” attitude.

I also don’t lead my company of 27 people that way.

Too often I see the attitude of "I can't believe a company would do that". Personally, I always believe it. We know companies will do everything within the law to make money, as is their purpose for being, and we also know they will break the law if they think they can get away with it. Not all companies all of the time, but we are fools if we don't expect it from some companies some of the time and on a consistent basis.

It actually reminds me of a Dutch policy (which may be apocryphal, please correct me) wherein prisoners in the Netherlands do not face further penalties for escape attempts because they are simply engaging in the only natural behavior we can expect from a person in a cage.

>It actually reminds me of a Dutch policy (which may be apocryphal, please correct me) wherein prisoners in the Netherlands do not face further penalties for escape attempts because they are simply engaging in the only natural behavior we can expect from a person in a cage.

This is my philosophy as well, which is why I as a juror would be soft on "crimes against law enforcement" because being a cop is part hunter, and do you expect all your game to not attempt evasion?

It is not “companies” but individuals. But yes, there are a lot of people that are only driven by greed and power. But not all by a long shot. I believe most of society would fail if everyone was doing the maximum they could get away with. So, there should be a lot of people that don’t seek the maximum they can get away with.

But I agree that a lot of companies are so big and so faceless, that they do too much bad stuff and lots of people in the company would just shrug it off with “it is not my job to say something”.

We really don’t need innovation in every corner of our lives. It could have just stayed as normal landlines phones with a fix cost paid by the prisons.

I don’t think the free market has a ton to offer for basic services that should be guaranteed.

Look at American internet, plenty of supposed options but terrible rates and performances compared to Europe. Yes we’re more spread out but that doesn’t begin to explain service sucking in a city with limited options.

This is exactly where lobbying and "money is speech" has gotten us.

Now you understand why healthcare, higher education, big infrastructure, prisons and so much more is so completely broken.

Big companies have bought their way into every level of government so they can extract profit at every step.

Note this is not a bug, this is by design.

Companies are evil when they lobby to change laws in their favor, not when they take advantage, to the maximum extent possible, of the law. Just taking advantage of the law is rational, it is changing it that makes them evil. In this case the companies are pure evil and should be dissolved.

I could be wrong on the interpretation, but I wonder if this will be one of the first cases challenged based on the Chevron ruling. I would think the challenge would be the law does not specify what the price should be so we can set it to whatever until congress passes a law specifying it.

I expect the same. The phone prices are astronomical due to political corruption, in part, and right wing judges usually side with the corrupt in cases like this.

Absolutely key to understanding this is that "government" in (1) is a state-level government which has been bribed by the private phone company.

This sort of thing happens at every level, but it's more often than not the Federal government preventing abuses by the states.

Edit: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/02/11/kickbacks-and-c... - it's even more blatant, they're paying a large share of this revenue directly to local governments.

And more generally, this is one of the bad outcomes when pushing decisions back to state and local governments. They are typically easier to bribe and/or control with fewer extreme idea (prison is about maximum punishment at every turn) people.

> with an appropriate license and government approval

What exactly would the prisons have to comply with here...

Not overcharging for phone calls?

How are you supposed to have competition for something like this? Ultimately the prison will only go with one carrier.

>1. The government decides that prisoners can make phone calls, but they can only use a single prison-approved phone operator, and that operator is a private company.

You're saying "the government" a lot, but AFAIK there's no specific federal mandate of any kind to the effect of requiring a specific company handle calls at all jails and prisons. If anything that is the consequence of an absence of any specific regulation rather than the presence of one, which is completely the opposite of the point you seem to be making.

In reality, a variety of completely separate state and local correctional facilities put the service out to bid. If anything, it is federal level prisons that would most fit the description of "the government" where you have the best regulations, where there is scrutiny of the bidding process, where there are already caps to limit the expenses associated with calls.

At the county and municipal level, companies that tend to win the contracts have special deals in the form of a "site commission" payments, which are a kickback to the prisons, incentivizing them to give a monopoly to whichever company charges the most and kicks back the most to the prison.

Edit: I feel like I (1) spoke directly to what the parent commenter was saying (2) stated uncontroversial facts, (3) echoing a point a chorus of other commenters are making about what "the government" really means, but I'm seeing a bunch of drive-by downvotes. Would appreciate if anyone wants to chime in and help me understand what I'm missing.

You’re technically correct, but try to zoom out for a minute and look at the subtlety of human nature.

This topic has fired every one up because it’s unnecessarily cruel, hurts families who didn’t do anything wrong, enriches companies not providing any value, and shows people trying to be “tough on crime” when very ironically they’re probably creating more crime by eroding support systems.

The parent commenter mostly expresses that outrage, and makes a passing comment about business competition.

By this time anything you said that could be perceived as possibly being near the other side of the argument is going to be taken as supporting the other side.

But they are two separate points that can be independently discussed you say? Technically that’s true, but humans don’t work like that.

Always step back and look at the biggest point being made and realize, there may be little room for nuance depending on the context.

I think you are largely right here, but disappointing to see in an HN comment section.

I think you are taking heat from both sides.

On one hand, you are challenging the dominant narrative, so that gets some reaction.

On the other hand, the logic you are using includes bold and unsubstantiated claims about kickbacks, which alienates your message from the remaining readers.

Thanks for the response. Here's some additional substantiation for the stuff about kickbacks. The term for kickbacks is "site commissions":

>Site commissions are payments that phone companies make to prisons and jails in exchange for the exclusive right to offer service to inmates. FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said that banning the commissions will "end the practice of provider kickbacks to correctional facilities and payments for costs irrelevant to providing services so callers will no longer be forced to bear the financial burden of these costs."

https://www.wired.com/story/prison-phone-call-fees-fcc-caps/

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I do think it is interesting that the FCC prohibited not just the site commission costs, but also the call surveillance costs. who exactly will pay the surveillance costs now?

There was some strange language in the FCC quotes. 8 out of 12 of the phone providers had a profit before the cost of "safety and security categories that generally are not used and useful".

I guess the charitable take of the FCC statement is that these services are not required by law, but still desirable to prisons?

Funny anecdote: a week after getting out of prison I was hired to listen to these calls and transcribe them. The State's Attorney's office would send me the ones they suspected of talking about illegal activities and were being investigated. None of the calls I listened to had anything illegal going on. Usually the opposite. Securus (the main operator) has a system for detecting certain words, so if you mention "drugs" it gets flagged.

I remember one call from a girl to her wife and the entire call was about how she badly wanted to get clean, the drug classes she was taking, the rehab they were setting up for her after she got out. It was literally as wholesome as you could get, and yet it was flagged for drug crime.

>It was literally as wholesome as you could get, and yet it was flagged for drug crime.

This isn't surprising in the least. The act of flagging shouldn't be construed to imply criminal content. That determination should be made at the time of review.

They would send me the transcripts to tidy up, but a ridiculously cursory review would have shown there was no crime. They had already been through two levels of "review," apparently.

Were transcripts sent to you so you could document evidence of a crime, or evidence that there was no crime?

I was a neutral party just hired to accurately fix the AI-gen'd transcripts, because most of the call is stuff that is fairly slangy prison terms, but the calls would come with unnecessary notes that I didn't need to see where the gov was champing at the bit trying to find crimes where they didn't exist. They were convinced there were crimes happening if they just looked harder.

After that I was given police interrogations, but honestly, when you have to listen to this stuff for hours it is horribly depressing (not because of the crimes, which are often horrific, but more because of the governmental conduct). I had to give it up.

It's an important job though. I've seen transcripts that were entered into evidence that were so totally wrong that it would boggle your mind. And wrong to the point where they logically reverse whole aspects of the case or evidence.

In some people’s minds “the government” is a big amorphous mass which includes everything from the local city planner to congress and the post office and their state DMV. Ignore the downvotes.

Capitalism works really great when there's competition.

When there's a government-sanctioned monopoly like this, you get all of the efficiency and speed of a for-profit corporation, but it all goes in the wrong direction.

I once read a game-theory study somewhere that showed you need four or five operators minimum to avoid monopolistic cooperation.

I think you missed step zero:

0. Rent-seeking private company/ies realize that prisoners could be a literal captive audience, and successfully lobbies governments (state and federal) to require prisoners to use only a single, prison-approved phone operator.

Also, step 2 is now redundant, and replace step three with "Profit!!!"

“Instantly” here meaning “potentially, after current contract obligations end & institutions complete the switch to a new provider”.

It's silly that the government allows for service providers to charge excessive rates, when they should have contracted rates. And your solution is equally absurd.

Provide prisoners with tablets or cellphones and let them choose their own service provider?

You know that prison phone calls are monitored right?

so much effort to constantly having to play whack a mole with a malicious industry that pays all your politicians election campaigns. I can't imagine the amount of mental gymnastics you have to engage in just having to justify your neoliberal ideology in your own head all the time.

Wait until you hear how much tax payers pay for school lunches and textbooks, prison libraries and commissaries. I also better not mention the bail bond industry. We just aren't doing neoliberalism hard enough yet, don't you see?

These decisions ruin families all so a small group of elites can profit.

I do wish there was an easy way when things like this happen to immediately say, "if you are happy with this FCC decision, here are the politicians responsible, the FCC directors and employees that did nothing for decades, etc." and then we can deny-list those people and their families from polite society.

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