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Comment by waciki | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if you're being good faith, prisoners are forced to work

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm

No US prisoner is forced to work in any meaningful sense of the word "forced". They can just not work, they won't get beaten for it, they won't get killed for it. In some states, they are required to work. It's not the same as being forced to work. Being a criminal does not entitled them to free room and board on the taxpayer dime, in fact in a just world, society would be entitled to restitution from the criminal.

There is no better time and place to be a criminal in the US than today. Criminals are being coddled, which is why most Democrat cities are so crime-ridden.

> No US prisoner is forced to work in any meaningful sense of the word "forced".

"Refusal to work can be met with solitary confinement and physical beatings"

https://web.archive.org/web/20240224172720/https://www.washi...

Corporal punishment in prisons is not legal in the US[1][2][3].

Prolonged solitary confinement is being used for people who do not refuse to work as well, even for people who have not been convicted[1]. You may think it's inhumane, but it not slavery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_v._Pelzer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._McMillian

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estelle_v._Gamble

[4] https://eu.recordonline.com/story/news/local/2021/07/19/capi...

>In some states, they are required to work.

>It's not the same as being forced to work.

That's exactly the same thing.

No it's not. There is no physical or legal coercion, i.e. no force, i.e. not forced.

What happens if you refuse?

They may lose privileges and good time credits, and it may impact their parole. They do not lose rights as one may happen when one is convicted of a crime.

> They do not lose rights as one may happen when one is convicted of a crime.

So you get more time in prison, losing all rights, which is what happens when you're convicted of a crime? Just because you don't want there to be legal slavery doesn't mean there isn't legal slavery.

Incorrect. You don't get more time in prison. The sentence is the sentence, and refusing to work does not increase the sentence.

You're playing with words. Early release means less time spent in prison.

In what world is "work or we'll make your life even more miserable" not coercion?

> The study examined 62 private prisons contracts in 21 states. It found that the majority of these contracts guarantee that the state will supply enough prisoners to keep between 80 and 100 percent of the private prisons’ beds filled.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/do-p... (2013)

The US does not falsely convict and jail innocent people en masse as policy. If anything. A much bigger problem is that the US does not convict and jail criminals en masse as policy.

There is no better time and place to be a criminal in the US than today. Criminals are being coddled, which is why most Democrat cities are so crime-ridden.

> Official misconduct contributed to the false convictions of 54% of defendants who were later exonerated. In general, the rate of misconduct is higher in more severe crimes.

> We tried to determine whether official misconduct that contributes to false convictions has become more or less frequent over the past 15 to 20 years. For most types of misconduct, we won’t know for years to come, but we already see strong evidence that a few kinds of misconduct have become less common: violence and other misconduct in interrogations; abusive questioning of children in child sex abuse cases; and fraud in presenting forensic evidence. On the other hand, the number of federal white-collar exonerations with misconduct by prosecutors has been increasing.

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Gove... (2020)

> According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

— Stafford Beer (2001)

> It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

— William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England book 4: Of Public Wrongs (1768)

Morality is not defined as things that come out of William Blackstone mouth.

That's true. (Commentaries on the Laws of England summarises a tradition older than the United States, but your point still holds.) Maybe falsely imprisoning innocents en-masse is okay, provided that (for example) the false imprisonment ratio is low enough and it could not easily be lowered further.

But it being okay isn't the same as it not happening. I'm not sure why you asserted that it doesn't happen, when it's a well-known problem. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal (2003–2008), though it's rarely that blatant.

There is no US jurisdiction with a policy of falsely imprisoning innocents en-masse.

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