I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.
There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's Wikipedia page.'
I think truth is much more important and I think what a court does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public as possible.
> I don't know enough Swedish to say for sure, but the language feels tabloidy, and there are passages with quite similar sentence constructions in articles purportedly written four-or-more years apart – so this might be one story that was adapted / plagiarised.
The fourth is https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/, which I can't identify the provenance of, but doesn't cite any source for its claim. The Swedish Wikipedia article has some kind of edit war, but the edits are all redacted, so I can't see what the edit war is about. (The revert comments look like "Tar bort icke källbelagt påstående.", so maybe it's about this.)
I'm not wholly sure that this story is true: it could be a smear put out by this journalist's enemies. I see little reason to believe there was even such a trial, unless someone can find court records.
While Flashback is a 'random forum' to some degree, it is extremely reliable, since anyone who disagrees can simply post. I don't think its crime forum users would be interested in fake stuff because they want to be in the know.
It would also be an obvious libel matter if Samnytt etc. had libeled Wallner. Wallner would almost certainly have sued them, which has not happened.
What my comment is really about is how courts should be and what they should be-- the idea that their judgements should be as public as possible, because I believe that going before a court should be going before the public, only with the public having set professional experts as representatives, with those still being only representatives of the public, so what they do must be inherently public, i.e. it should be on the internet and completely accessible, forever.
To continue the discussion about court judgements being public: sometimes that is not in the best interests of the victims. (I don't know how it works in Sweden, but I've heard of court records being sealed for that purpose.)
Yes, it would obviously be against victim interest in some cases. However, since I see courts as I do-- i.e. as people going before the public and laying out something which is intolerable, I feel that incomplete alignment with victim interests is something one must accept.
Instead my view is that the public must become accustomed to that is is a court, and to behave reasonably with regard to those who have brought cases to them.
Does the victim have a name, or was that memory holed too?
You could have looked this up yourself.
With the death date I was able to find https://sv.metapedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Wallner and its references including http://web.archive.org/web/20140428113854/http://www.natione... which is a detailed review of the whole affair. These are far right / nationalist sources but I don't see that as a reason to disbelieve them, the whole thing sounds a lot more plausible if you are one to believe that a court would let a guy off on self defense if the eyewitnesses painted the victim as a nazi who picked a fight.
If it's misinformation I guess I'm participating in resurfacing these sources on a highly indexed website, but I don't mind being able to add context to somebody's accusation of murder. Nothing catches my interest more than a good wiki edit war.
> Vad som däremot är märkligt är hur händelsen beskrevs i en av våra största kvällstidningar, nämligen Aftonbladet. Rubriken dagen efter löd 'Jag är fascist' – då höggs han ner.
Allowing for some hyperbole, we're looking for Aftonbladet headlines on (or shortly after) 1982-03-19. I'm again suspicious that the author made a more concrete reference to an article that doesn't support the claims, but superficially appears to:
> En av många artiklar om våldsamma skinheads som publicerades under denna tid (Aftonbladet, 20 juni 1982).
But they recover some of my respect by finally providing concrete court dates:
> Den 11 juni, efter knappt tre månaders utredning, föll domen i tingsrätten.
> Hovrätten dömde Jacques Wallner till 18 månaders fängelse den 17 december 1982.
These dates might help relocate the court documents (which were online, but have since linkrotted). Lots of things claimed at the beginning of this article that seem as though they would be "facts of the case" (e.g. statements about what testimony was given) are later described as the claims of an unnamed family member of Magnus.
The truth is the most important thing there is. The problem is newspapers are so far removed from the truth it's not even funny. Journalism and truth do not even belong in the same sentence.
Especially today where they engage in shameless rage baiting for engagement and therefore have every incentive in the world to defame someone who might very well turn out to be innocent.
Even the most tyrannical court in the world cannot repair a destroyed reputation. It takes a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy.
Journalists should not be condemning anyone before proper judgement is rendered. Courts staffed by fallible and corruptible human beings are enough of a necessary evil. We really don't need journalists profiting handsomely off of the court of public opinion.
In the late 70's my Uncle had a run of bad luck and a dubious business partner basically sink him financially. After some discussion, he made a plan. It was simple:
Uncle goes back to Virginia to lay low in one of the back hollers.
My mom gets his mail, due to him living with us for a while[1], and writes "Deceased" on it, and "Return to Sender"
5 years pass. Maybe 4, I can't remember.
Uncle shows up, everything is fine, and he and my aunt live out the rest of their days in a small comfy trailer no worries.
[1] Living and other time with this Uncle was a great time in my life.
Edit due to device change: My uncle had one eye, the other lost when he was young and unlucky in the woods. He read everything and acquired a great many skills which he proceeded to pass along to me: lock picking, electronics, engine rebuilding and a ton about autos, working with wood, metals, tools... He is probably still doing that in his afterlife. Good soul who I treasure having known.
So, he took advantage of that by essentially living out of range. Once all the companies charged him off and basically moved on, he was free to come back and pick up where he left off with few worries.
It turns out that in a world of "people forced to leave the village to live a new life free from the consequences of their prior deeds", the main reason people would try to start living in a new village was because they had done something that made them no longer welcome with all the people they knew before.
One oft-understated advantage of an explicit noble class is that it provides a medium for verifying "this person really is traveling for legitimate reasons".
But there are many more people and organizations there that benefit from fewer prisoners.
For most purposes, a country is not a singular thing.
Outside of a few non-profit orgs I suspect there aren't a lot of dollars lobbying for fewer prisons, it's not a great look and it's easily to spin as "company X doesn't want to lock up violent criminals!
On the other hand that's really the only agenda item private prison operators put their lobbying dollars toward.
So do public prisons! Their employees — and those employee’s unions — want to make money just as much as anyone.
I don’t think that public vs. private is material here.
The main difference I've seen, though, is that private prisons will sell you a lot more stuff for your cell. They generally take a more measured approach to security risks and allow you to buy steel-stringed guitars and PlayStations because there is enormous profit in those. The public jails and prisons won't allow as much stuff like that as it makes their employees' lives a lot harder from a security perspective.
It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
This is the top comment in a chain of siblings that are dogpiling on the parent for no good reason. I'm replying because I think it's a case of pointing out a distinction without difference, which is a low value response up there with "But correlation isn't causation!"
In this case there are many different groups that benefit from a higher prison population. Private prisons are perhaps the most commonly cited, but they hold a tiny percent of the total prison population.
But there are many, many private businesses that sell to prisons. Sudexo-Marriott makes millions selling services to private and public prisons. I once toured a "super max" prison in Ohio and saw that they had tens of thousands of dollars in commercial Hobart restaurant equipment.
The knee jerk response here is, "Of course a prison pays for commercial dining services and equipment! That's not surprising, it's inevitable!" But that's my point. It's inevitable that there's billions of dollars being made off the US's prison population. And that's not including industries based specifically on exploiting prisoners, like prison phone and teleconferencing services that overcharged the incarcerated and their families by billions of dollars.
There are many utterly conventional businesses that use slave labor from prisons. This is not hyperbole -- prisoners are often forced to work for $1 a day or less. They are punished with solitary confinement or even additional prison time if they refuse.
The final rebuttal would be, "Well not everyone in America benefits from a large prison population!" But if you read carefully, that's exactly what the parent comment is saying. But enough different and powerful stakeholders do benefit from a large and growing prison population that it's difficult to enact reforms to make that number smaller.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffa...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business...
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v...
It’s completely unfair to express surprise that Americans would come up with a way to reduce their prison population because of the notion that they’ve all been captured by the private prison industry.
This is a straw man argument, which is also discouraged on HN. Literally no one -- besides you and the sibling comments below -- has suggested that everyone has been captured by private prisons.
Instead there are businesses all along the spectrum of those that incidentally do businesses with prisons to those that exclusively do business with prisons to those that are (private) prisons. And that doesn't even include police and sheriffs departments or politicians who benefit from prisons.
I sincerely suggest that you engage with the discourse at hand rather than dismissing it with straw manning and other logical fallacies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42596079 says:
> “I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.”
A sweeping statement about the entire conceptual space of a huge country based on ideas about the private prison system manipulating an entire country.
Please do a better job of close reading and critical thinking. Especially with “now you’re strawmanning,” the rhetorical equivalent of “I know you are but what am I?”
It's likely automated systems building up these profiles too so what if you happen to just have the same name as someone who was convicted of something in a news article?
In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in a graveyard, and can’t find a job years later.
It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and ostracising them.
Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.
People are extremely forgiving, to a fault, for those in their in-group.
If the reason he couldn't get a job was that every employer googled his name, discovered what he did, and decided not to hire him, then clearly his actions were something that most people would want to know. If it was as inconsequential as the journalist claims, then why did his actions disqualify him from employment? Without details of the case (which would likely reveal the man's name), we can't decide whether memory-holing his past was beneficial to society or not.
And that's exactly my point: People want to decide for themselves whether a person's past disqualifies them from becoming an employee, a friend, or even a lover. There are some crimes that most people are willing to overlook, especially if they happened long ago and the perpetrator has turned their life around. Nelson Mandela is an excellent example of that. But there are some crimes that most people are willing to shun someone for. The actual harm inflicted doesn't matter as much as how the actions reflect upon the person's character. For example: If you knew someone had been caught keying cars on three separate occasions, wouldn't you be a little hesitant to associate with them? The harm they did was minimal, but such actions say something about that person's psyche. Should their actions be googleable for all time? I don't know, but I know that I want to judge for myself whether those actions can be overlooked or if they're beyond the pale. I don't trust others to make that decision for me.
Most importantly, if people realize that they can't trust public information, then they will be less trusting of strangers who can't prove their bona fides. They'll revert to how people solved this problem before the internet: preferring to hire relatives, former classmates, people who go to the same church, friends of friends, relying on stereotypes, and so on. It will become harder for someone to without the right connections to get their foot in the door, and it will hurt social mobility.
1. https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_ho...
The US has such a patchwork of reporting systems around crimes and convictions, and there are several workarounds to avoid having bad things surfacing. So there are likely already people around you who have secrets but are living decent lives now. We all have those things about ourselves we don’t discuss and this is the social lubricant that keeps our relationships going.
If employers still care... is a red flag. The case tells about a person that 1) has anger problems, 2) never mastered any skills valued by employers, and 3) never cultured friends wanting to vouch for him.
In sum, not the type that employers enjoy as coworker. Newspapers aren't necessarily the problem here.
If someone does a crime, goes to jail or does whatever punishment is mandated by a court, have they not already “repented”?
It really boggles my mind that so many people have difficulties understanding this concept, and prefer it when the general public wants blood. Peed in public? Capital punishment it is.
journalists have different incentives than private prison operators and tend to be more progressive for whatever reason. they often are activists.
it should not be surprising that journalists might take a softer view and than prison industrialists in a country with free thought and expression
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the enslavement?
Colorado voted to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime in 2018 (though enforcement is reportedly poor). [2][3]
In other states voters have upheld forced labor[4] but sometimes it's because of issues with how it's worded[5].
You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery but to most people that's a meaningless distinction. Especially while they are being beaten for not working.[6]
[1] https://action.aclu.org/send-message/congress-end-forced-lab...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/07/665295736/colorado-votes-to-a...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...
[4] https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california...
[5] https://lailluminator.com/2022/11/17/the-story-behind-why-lo...
[6] https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?
by which definition of slavery do we have “purchase and sale of humans” as part of that definition?!
Article 1(1) of the 1926 Slavery Convention: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”
just because you are not purchased/sold does not mean your condition cannot be defined as slavery
"Chattel slavery".
I don't believe there's a need to soften language to attempt to weaken the narrative of a "prison slavery system". If one is a proponent of forced labor for convicts then just say so: plenty of people will agree (and plenty will disagree).
It's not full chattel slavery such as was legal before the 13th Amendment, but the word "slavery" has always encompassed definitions short of that, e.g. in ancient Rome.
The US penal system is explicitly a continuation of the former slave system. Slavery wasn't outlawed in the US, just made a monopoly franchise of the US government. It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black men is so high.
Penal labor is not exclusive to the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour
> It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black men is so high.
32% of prisoners are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
56% of homicide perpetrators are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
Using homicide as indicator of general criminality because it's hard to fudge the numbers or inflate them with over-policing. Granted the correspondence is surely not perfect, but given such a parsimonious explanation, we'd need strong justification to reach for conspiratorial alternatives.
The practice of "convict leasing" is modern day slavery. This system should be abolished or, at a minimum, the prisoners should be paid at least minimum wage so we don't have the state to pay to lock people up and then some private corporation to profit off slave labor.
[1]: https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...
[2]: https://innocenceproject.org/how-the-13th-amendment-kept-sla...
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-unt...
Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving aside the question whether it really does, it is the intent). The prisoner has these basic physical needs already taken care of. Therefore, it makes no sense to pay both prisoner and a free low-wage worker the same. Moreover, if it were the situation, the very next day every paper would have a headline "Workers are being paid prisoner wages - outrage!"
However, if the prisoners are allowed to work for commercial for-profit companies, the company that benefits from this work should be asked to cover a substantial part of the prisoner's sustenance bill - which also would be to the taxpayer's benefit. Of course, participation in such programs should be strictly voluntary - I imagine prison life is not too fun, so there should be a number of people who would agree to do it even for a relatively very low wage. That said, it could be incentivized e.g. by taking successful work experience into account for parole decisions, etc.
The US prison system uses "commissary" to further extract wealth from prisoners and their families. We give prisoners substandard food and (usually) insufficient calories. How do they make that up? By paying out of pocket at commissary. And of course everything is overpriced.
Prison phone companies have historically gouged prisoners to keep in touch with family.
We even give female inmates insufficient sanitary products and, to get more, they need to see a doctor. But don't worry, we've financialized that too, as many states require a "co-pay" that might be $6 to see a doctor.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot. But remember if you have a prison job, which you pretty much have to in many prisons, you might be makihng 30 cents an hour.
So on top of forced incarceration, paid for by the state, we just have all these private profit opportunities that prisoners are coerced into.
You've simply made this up. This is what you think minimum wage should be, so this is what you've decided it was meant to be.
* Many people locked up (in my country) are their families breadwinners * Many would if they could pay compensation, and victims would, if they could, receive it and improve their lives * Many leave prison with nothing. The ones not in the first clause often do not have families, nor friends left on the outside * Prisoners have, or can learn, valuable skills
Put it all together, please.
People (our fellow citizens, our comrades) should be sent to prison as punishment. Not for punishment. If they do not come out better than they went in (often a low bar) then we have failed.
We can do so much better
It occurs to me that prisoners are usually exempt from child support payments (for example), but it might be better if they could actually contribute.
> People (our fellow citizens, our comrades)
Our fellow citizens, our comrades did the crime to earn prison. Retaliatory and precautionary aspect is as important as confinement itself. Of course, it should be moderated both by the size of the crime and by the culture, but it still exists.
As I understand it, in a number of US states workers are being paid prisoner wages.
However regular workers aren't locked up in a prison and don't have to eat prison food. On the down side, they might have to pay for their own health insurance.
The question was whether or not US prisons use slavery. He answered the question of whether or not it would be legal for US prisons to use slavery. While is it legal, it is not mandated.
A proper answer would examine the labor requirements actually in use in US prisons, compare them to labor requirements in other first world country prisons (and yes, several other first world countries make prisoners work), define just what they mean by slavery, and then try to make the case that the differences between what the US does and what other first world countries with required prison labor do is enough to make it slavery in the US.
An imprisoned person may or may not be enslaved as part of that imprisonment. If they get paid a reasonable wage, they're a prisoner with a job. If they're not forced to work, they're a prisoner but not a slave.
The work component only existed because why else would one want a slave?
If someone born into slavery died before they could walk, they still were a slave. If an old slave was allowed to retire without working again, that didn't stop them from being a slave.
https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
Your labor should not have financial considerations to the prison. You taking a sick day should not risk punishment up to and included increased security points and should not impact any prison employees pay/bonus (COs/AWs/Ws often get bonus' based on inmate labor metrics). Security points are the 'nice sanitized' way penal systems threaten violence on inmates. If you get points you go to a more dangerous yard where your safety will be threatened and you will get hurt. Anything that can incur security points is a implicit threat of violence against inmates. Inmates should not be threatened with violence for taking sick days/losing a non-prison job. Inmates jobs should not include the possibility of overtime because inmates CAN NOT REFUSE it. Inmates should not be threatened with violence (security points) if they do not want to work overtime of need a sick day.
Inmate jobs should not include zero hour jobs (jobs where the schedule constantly changes and you are not guaranteed any hours) because inmates CAN NOT control their schedules and it works out to be a nightmare for them logistics wise. For example leading to inabilities to file legal mail (inability to schedule around mail room hours), missed meals (chow hall hours are fixed with almost no accommodation other than SHU/medical meals), excessive isolation during transfers, missed 'move times' resulting in no personal recreation time, etc.
In prison and jail inmates work for rates like $.25 an hour. Many places in the south prison inmates are contracted out to work minimum wage jobs and denied parole.
Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release.
There are private prisons that benefit from more prisoners. In many places the jail or prison is the largest and best employer.
... .. . You can go on forever. It's maybe getting better in some places, but not where they used to have slavery.
and human rights are derived from feudal rights. okay, and? is this just supposed to make you feel bad with scary words?
> Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release.
this sounds very much like you are mixing up cause and effect. is it surprising that someone who commits more serious crimes is more likely to commit further crimes?
What's relevant here is comparing different prison systems wrt Recidivism.
eg: Nine out of 10 South African criminals reoffend, while in Finland it’s 1 in 3. This is why
https://theconversation.com/nine-out-of-10-south-african-cri...
Yes.
> I was hoping the author would posit a causal model, adjust for a few different factors, and have something robust.
They did to a degree.
> Nope, nothing
Perhaps you might click through and read again.
> just a wall of text
A "wall of text" is something, this one was broken up with paragraphs and had a number of observations regarding systems in two countries and quotes from people in several countries.
> even quoting Derrida.
Would you be kind enough to quote the "quote", Ctrl-F Derrida returns zilch, and expand on why that particular quote offends you?
> Empiricism is slowly dying, in large part due to truth seeking becoming subservient to confirmation bias.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
Where? I’m fairly facile with causal inference; this is the crudest observational “study” without even qualitative heuristics to make the comparisons apples-to-apples.
> and expand on why that particular quote offends you?
Generic low tolerance for high V, low M academics: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1
This is the paper he links to, where you can find references to Derrida: https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/Phronimon/article...
Anyway, if this is the kind of nonsense that convinces you, I don’t intent to continue this discussion. We have very different notions of what qualifies as evidence.
My point on recidivism is that US jails focus on punitive rather than rehabilitative justice.
" the stats don't indicate any persistent institutional success despite decades of effort and rotating fashions"
This is the exact problem that fuels mass incarceration and costs us tax payers and society infinite sums. In some places, even in Texas this model has been rejected because it's more expensive for tax payers to jail everyone.
Let's spell it out for the obstinate:
Jails have incentive to fill beds.
Jails have incentive to not rehabilitate.
Inmates go to jail and become worse because they're in a bad place.
Inmates are released with hostile support (probation).
Jail bed gets filled.
....
It's clear you hate people. Most people in jail haven't even been convicted of a crime. Nearly all plea, and rarely any go to trial.