In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs
mainepublic.org
mainepublic.org
We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.
Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated.
Whenever a read a story about someone who's been to prison and then ends up a solid, productive member of society, I can't help but think: "This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.
This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.
This is literally what rehabiliation entails. Convincing criminals that they have better options than crime.
It doesn't work for everyone. There are absolutely bad people who will just violate social contracts, or who can't control their rage turning into violence. Those people need to be incapacitated. But for the vast majority of criminals, particularly non-violent criminals, crime is an economic cost-benefit exercise.
I think some people just haven't been exposed to the benefits of taking a path to life that doesn't involve crime. Some people also need to be convinced that there are viable alternatives to crime. And as someone else said, society needs to give them the chance to redeem themselves and pursue those alternate paths.
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A42e604d8-31d0-4067-a08c-...
Agree, but do we have experiments trying Nordic models in America to see what aspects of their model work here (and which may not)?
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-will-little-scan...
Sounds like Oregon started but hasn't gotten very far:
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425946/how-norway-helping-...
Getting policy right under adversarial conditions is really hard - even harder than the already hard problem of identifying and testing good policy.
Just like Swedish-American homelessness rates are comparable to homelessness rates in Sweden, etc.
...are they? (Serious question.)
(Note: "There was no significant difference in rates of lifetime adult homelessness between foreign-born adults and native-born adults (1.0% vs 1.7%). Foreign-born participants were less likely to have various mental and substance-use disorders, less likely to receive welfare, and less likely to have any lifetime incarceration. The number of years foreign-born adults lived in the United States was significantly associated with risk for homelessness" [1])
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00333...
There's lots of evidence that maintaining connection to family, and providing skills training reduces recidivism. You should be asking for studies proving that what we're currently doing is effective or humane.
As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll a 1 at birth on many attributes at once, and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. They will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely, with dignity and compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.
And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.
In short: humans are not inherently good 'uns or bad 'uns. The social interventions made by friends, families, community, state-run programs, have a discernable effect on reoffending rates.
I think it’s logical that you’re both right, with the disagreement being in the ratio. If you honestly think all humans are born equal, I suggest visiting a mental ward, or more relevant here, watching some interviews/analysis of mass murderers. There’s a well accepted, by the medical field, by objective metrics, spectrum of self control, awareness, autonomy, and intelligence, expressed in humans. We’re not all the same. You typing here suggests you’re on the relatively extreme end of the “genetic luck” spectrum.
I don't. But in addition to genetics, babies pop out of rich and poor vaginas. Socioeconomic status is a much stronger indicator for being incarcerated than genetics (not counting "male vs female"). There is also the theory that the children of prisoners grow up without fathers and are more likely to go to prison, thus perpetuating the cycle. Children that lose both parents (to imprisonment, drug addiction, abandonment) and enter foster care or become wards of the state have terrible life outcomes. Not genetic, but familial due to disrupted social support networks.
I also think that if, for example, you get addicted to heroin, and you don't have a good support network, that will be your only life until you're dead. But if you do have a good support network, you have an better chance of getting clean and staying clean.
But they’re also correct. There will be some subset of the population that will be, and remain, harmful to society. This isn’t even a purely human concept, and can be found in all species with collective/social behavior.
Most likely it's a combination of genetics, cultural expectations, social support networks, and a litany of other elements that all come together to affect the ultimate outcome. Which aligns with your thesis around one's support network making a huge difference. But it's just important to point out that poverty by itself is not causal of crime, it simply makes it more likely given many other factors such as culture and community. It's mildly predictive, but up to a point.
Funnily enough, as a side-note, the stats show that most white-collar crime is committed by well-educated and affluent white men in their forties or older, causing a lot more financial harm than your everyday street crime added up.
Assuming the certain % is something meaningful and not like 1% then:
Yes, given that America and the world has run the largest ever social experiment, America imprisoning a higher percentage of their population than any other country and most other countries continuing to thrive with lower crime numbers than America (in cases where countries do not thrive obvious external and environmental factors are seen) it follows that America, a nation of immigrants with higher heterogeneity of the population than other nations of the Earth, does not have a population with a greater percentage of the population genetically predisposed to anti-sociability.
America has a population where 1 in 3 adults has a criminal record. If criminality was in any significant way genetically hard-wired in Americans it seems difficult to believe the country would have lasted as long as it has, although I admit my argument here may be slightly weak given the current state of things, but I think one can argue that is not the fault of the anti-social population.
If this were true, sociability wouldn't be so incredibly overwhelmingly correlated with trauma, and to the extent that trauma & poverty are related, poverty. This is a full and utter complete fact, it is foundational knowledge to social science, psychology and psychiatry.
People. Are. Not. Born. Bad. They're born to traumatized parents raised in a society that squeezes them for all they're worth.
> many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social
The vast, vast majority of people absolutely could be, but they will never receive the resources (time, attention) to be better. It is not that we don't know how to help people, its that its /expensive/ and we /would rather punish them than help them/.
Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.
They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.
It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.
I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).
Yep. Everyone's heard about private prisons and their pet judges, but few know anything about Bob Barker or VitaPro. Their are deep and very murky waters here.
Are a red herring to distract from the real issue. The industrialist complex around prisons that do in fact profit from prisons. Like all gov contracts are also highly inefficient by design.
But yes, the ones really profiting are those making deals to service the prison. Those who bring food, or repair the infrastructure, or custodial duties. A lot of seemingly unrelated industries have every reason to lobby in the background to focus on "hard on crime".
[1] https://truthout.org/articles/immigration-detention-has-beco...
However, currently only 8.5% of people who are incarcerated are held in private facilities.
Despite the significant amount of economic and political power held by private prison corporations, it is imperative to understand that private prisons are not the only force at work in the Prison Industrial Complex.
Exclusive focus on private prison corporations as the lynchpin of the PIC ignores and overlooks the variety of other players and systems at work.
For example, there are thousands of companies and a wide range of contracts in both private and public prisons: it is a whole network of parties with vested interests.
In Are Prisons Obsolete, Angela Davis explains that,
“…even if private prison companies were prohibited – an unlikely prospect, indeed-the prison industrial complex and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively intact.
Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corporations that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect”
(Davis, 2003, 99-100).
It's the same as paying someone to dig a hole, then paying someone to fill it back up. The money might as well have disappeared, as there's nothing to show for it (for the taxpayers that is - the hole digger is happy to have been paid)
> cost the government $65k to imprison someone, but that money isn’t disappearing
which is wrong, because it _is_ disappearing.
Your argument is unrelated - it sure would be good if people didnt commit crimes for which incarceration is required, but it doesn't mean the cost has benefits. It simply has to be done; i would liken it to getting sick, and the healthcare costing money. That money, as far as you are concerned, disappeared, as it brought you no lasting benefit, even tho you must spend it.
~ https://abcnews.go.com/US/top-private-prison-companies-profi...
Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics
Two corporations, GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, Inc. (CCA), manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US.
These contracts are extremely lucrative; in the 2017 fiscal year, GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined revenue of more than 4 billion dollars.
Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are invested in mass incarceration because incarceration is profitable for them.
Such corporations ensure that correctional facilities are in demand through a variety of techniques, including minimum occupancy clauses and political lobbying efforts.
https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/the-economic-impact-of-pr...
private prisons make money for their corporations. Look up Wackenhut.
Places with a greater population tend to get more representatives in a state or federal legislature, all else being equal.
This makes sense for minors (part of voter-households, to be voters later) and noncitizens (either in voter-households, or at least with freedom of travel) but it becomes a perverse-incentive when we start talking about people forced to be in a specific region by a government that put them there and won't let them leave.
> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons
"Free persons" in this case meant those not enslaved for life, so it includes incarcerated people. Representation apportionment also includes illegal immigrants under this clause.
The only ethically-hard problem is which jurisdiction their vote should count in, since they cannot demonstrate it by choosing where to live. Perhaps a choice between:
1. The location of the prison, if their main interest is the conditions of their detention rather than anything outside.
2. The location of their property or close family, because they're still paying property-taxes or school levies etc. and they will be returning there later.
Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.
The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.
The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.
Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.
It's weird because your argument doesn't seem to disagree with the notion that people should stay enfranchised, other than you saying specifically people should be disenfranchised for breaking a law. But you're now discussing lines so I guess you mean, literally any crime means no more voting.
A good democracy, and by that I mean useful for humans, isn't good by trying to be perfectly virtuous, it's good because it has recursive mechanisms to maintain its usefulness to humans. The primary mechanism is voting. For that reason I personally believe nothing should be allowed to remove the ability to use that primary mechanism, since the obvious outcome is a fascist is elected, and begins seeking means to strip the right to vote from his opponents, ensuring his perpetual rule. Modern example: I have a little antifa flag on my backpack, and therefore am now considered a terrorist in the USA, and can be arrested and have my right to vote stripped (other democratic mechanisms might prevent this, for now).
What crime would I have committed? Declaring an ideology a terrorist group is nonsensical but possible. Me suddenly being a terrorist crossed that line for you though.
So does speeding. So does operating your motor vehicle without checking your brake lights and turning indicators, every time. So does riding on a horse backwards in a specific town in Texas (don't forget local jurisdictions have their own laws, often insane!)
This is a personal decision, but would you say the same about someone with a small Nazi swastika on their backpack?
However, under liberal democracy I personally don't believe the wearing of a swastika should be a crime, though I don't mind if people wearing swastikas are rejected from every interaction they attempt to have, denied business everywhere. The simple banning of nazis memorabilia doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop the rise of nazism in Germany so it seems pointless overall. The Germans had their opportunity to actually apply this anti-nazi law when banning the AFD came up, and they failed to act, so it seems the only thing the law is good for is preventing people from playing Wolfenstein.
Under other forms of society I think the wearing of a swastika should result in the ejection of someone from society entirely.
You are in principle no different to the people you're complaining about. You've just got a smaller set of symbols than they do that you don't like.
Nazis should be ejected from society. Liberal democracy shouldn't have laws that allow arresting people for speech. Those aren't mutually exclusive concepts, that's just an anarchist explaining to you their ideology as well as how they apply their values under the current system.
Tell me, straight faced, that displaying a pair of antifa flags is as bad as displaying a swastika.
By contrast, if you lump in people convicted of things like drug possession, that is enough people to change the outcome of some elections. And in general it's a strong heuristic that if huge numbers of people are committing a particular crime, it's a result of flaws in the law or society rather than flaws in huge numbers of different people.
So the only time disenfranchising felons matters to the outcome is when you get the line wrong, implying that it shouldn't be done because it shouldn't affect the outcome unless it's being done improperly.
That way you can have pleasure of mistreating them and also prevent them from voting.
But once it's determined that the debt has been repaid and they're free to live outside and participate in society again, it seems hard to justify them not also participating in the democratic process.
I know people say this, but I think this framing likely generates anti-prison arguments because it basically doesn’t make any sense. How does being in a cage for X years repay society? It doesn’t. It does keep the harmful person away from society though, which is a very different and useful thing (in many cases, obviously imprisonment for some crimes is dumb).
How exactly is taking away an inmates vote "paying me back" for a crime in my community? "Society" isn't actually benefiting here.
Let's go down the list of justifications:
1. Is disenfranchisement rehabilitative justice? No, if anything it's the opposite, preparing them to fail when they get out, promoting ignorance and helplessness instead of engagement in the political process.
2. Is disenfranchisement punitive justice? Not usefully, because the worst criminals won't care anyway, instead it tends to hurt the people who deserve it the least, the people who would otherwise try to work through "the system."
3. Is disenfranchisement a deterrent? No, LOL. Nobody goes: "OK, I was going to commit the crime and risk being caught and shot or jailed for many years, buuuuut then I realized I wouldn't be able to vote, so I'm out."
What's left? Bad reasons, like helping politicians get away with abusive policies.
No, the principle underlying imprisonment is to protect others and rehabilitate the criminal.
It's literally unconscionable in any kid of democracy to me.
To be clear, I'm saying it's garbage, but it's garbage very much on purpose.
>> Section 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.
The person occupying the Vice President's chair stated clearly [1] "Medicaid cuts in Senate tax bill 'immaterial' compared to ICE increases".
They aren't building all those for-profit prisons for nothing.
Beware.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/01/vanc...
But I think the laws in some U.S. states do actually allow felons to vote under certain circumstances.
Yes. Why shouldn't they?
1. Declaration of Independence versus Constitution. Not the same in terms of legal weight.
2. You're implicitly combining "representation" with "voting." The writers of the Declaration of Independence believed (even if we dislike it today) that those are separate. You can tell because all their wives and daughters were still prohibited from voting for generations.
3. If what you're suggesting applied, then wouldn't that mean everybody who hasn't registered to vote, or noncitizens and those under 18--are all exempt from sales tax and income tax?
It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.
[0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/florida-bans-vo...
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...
I guess state laws vary a lot, but are you sure that’s legal? You probably are required to have your address updated, even if moving within the same precinct. If they then allow you a choice of locations, sounds fine, but your wording sounded like maybe you don’t tell them you moved, which is probably not legal.
It's the racism. It's why the 13th amendment allows slavery for criminals and why Black people are disproportionately targeted and imprisoned.
If we're on the democratic reforms train, then this is all a silly discussion we're forced to have because the US doesn't have proportional representation.
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/20...
I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab. They seem viscerally invested in the concept of a prison as a place to store/segregate violent people, but have no interest in either helping those people learn to live safely in society or to have any advantages that the poorest non-prisoner gets.
Before we can jump straight to pointing to successful prison labor programs, I think we need to figure out how to message to those voters that it matters how we treat prisoners.
I think they exist quite widely among the population. Old, white republicans want more people in jail. Young, non-white democrats think we jail too many people.
50% of the country thinks we jail too many
s) https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/45975-what-americ...
Compare to Australia, where the employer doesn't see detail. They file the background check, but only get a "yes" or "no", based on that specific job and past offenses (if any).
"He figured Thorpe might have trouble clearing the company's background check and he says he prepared himself for that. But since it only searches back seven years and since Thorpe has been in prison for more than a decade, "He is actually our cleanest background check," Costa says."
"He doesn't have a parking ticket." What does a parking ticket, let alone a criminal conviction have to do with programming?
Let's just go ahead and get to the exploitation, the corporate scum offered him minimum wage and are taking advantage of his situation.
1. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...
This just makes me feel like the entire modern process of matching workers to employers is a kafkaesque hell that has negative value.
The boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process. Stay in jail long enough and you’ll pass one of our arbitrary steps!
What's the intent of the process?
I remember hiring a few years ago, where a deep background check uncovered an assault charge on a candidate I liked. The charges had been dropped. But they were violent in nature, and this spooked my team.
Fortunately, our GC once did family law. Between me pointing out this was a remote position and our GC showing that the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce, we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
>we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
Did you try firing her just to be sure?
Within the default biases of the american law enforcement and court systems an assault charge on a woman in divorce dropped usually means almost the opposite of assault charges on a man in divorce being dropped.
Gives new meaning to working in Mountain View.
So I searched and THEN I found the blog of the inmate from the article! https://pthorpe92.dev/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
How many others are profiting from keeping prison populations topped up? Perverse incentives, ensuring the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with only the People's Republic of China rivalling it for prison population. Make slavery legal again with this one weird trick called the 13th amendment's "except as punishment for a crime"
I am OK with prisoners being rehabilitated, this includes them working. I am not OK with their jailers profiting. Nor am I OK with employers profiting by having unfair power over pay and conditions they wouldn't have with free citizens.
And one of the judges [0] in the “kids for cash” scandal had the remainder of his federal sentence commuted by President Biden before he left office.
Especially with all the race issues in imprisonment.
So they take a cut of your pay. Totally not profit? They deserve it? Why not 20% why not 95%.
Also this headline is yellow AF. "Prisoners are thriving" oh yeah? "THRIVING" In f-ing prison? I bet if you asked them 100% would rather not be doing their full time job in prison. I'd stake my life on it in fact.
They also have to volunteer, what are you even saying
1) it can be both
2) I don't see the economic value here. If a prisoner software engineer can make 80k and can instead make 200k if they weren't in prison, what would make the state more? the garnished wages on a prisoner that need to partially go into maintaining the prison, or the taxes on the free person who's paying their own bills? (this isn't rhetorical, I think it's closer than what first blush tells us).
> "Prisoners are thriving" oh yeah? "THRIVING" In f-ing prison?]
Given the context of the article, I take "thriving" as in "being rehabilitated". Which should be the goal of the justice system, but it's been clear that is almost never is the result.
If there's anyone wrongfully imprisoned or otherwise having the book thrown at them, that's a different matter.
Do you have knowledge of, eg of New Hampshire (which is mentioned as a counter example in the article?)
https://www.criminon.org/where-we-work/united-states/new-ham...
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-states-use-private-pr...
I guess with knowledge work there is some protection because it’s hard to force. Though, it would be desirable to extend such programs into other forms of work.
> "We had 87 assaults on staff in 2017. Last year, we had seven assaults on staff [...] the officers that go to work everyday and don't feel like their life is at risk."
I only highlighted that decrease as counter to the false dichotomy of the parent - clearly, an improvement in our prison practices can benefit not only incarcerated people, but the wellbeing of the staff and surrounding community.
Reforms like this, however, are much more realistic.
Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
* People charged with something stupid (e.g. shoplifting) that turned into a larger problem (e.g. crossing state lines) which became an even larger problem (e.g. nonviolent, passive drug charges). One guy I worked with had lived on one side of the river in St. Lois but worked on the other side. Walmart decided that he'd "shoplifted" a $2 bottle of soda, legally he fled the state by going home, and his kid had hid a gram of weed in the shoebox by the door that nobody opened except of course the cops that flooded the house. He served 10 years after a plea deal that sunk his kid into juvie for 5 years.
* People who "did a crime" to prevent a crime. Another person I worked with shot his son 5 times in the chest after his son attempted to murder the wife. Because the only testimony they had was an asian woman who didn't speak great english and the court denied an interpreter for her native language (laoatian) because she "speaks good enough english", her description of the events was murky (having been asleep) and so he landed murder charges and a stint in prison.
* People who got racism'd into prison: Same work as the previous, the older latino guy in this group was framed for the death of a woman he spent the evening with; he had left after they hooked up and she ended up falling off the balcony of her apartment later on, but because time of death is like, +/- a few hours when it snows on top of you, he was the last one to see her. He spent 4 years in prison before he was released on a mistrial.
* Drug users of the nonviolent variety. Nose candy, heroin, weed, usually white collar or upper blue collar. Several folks like this, all who just wanted their past to be shoveled behind them.
* People who legitimately did a crime, did the time, and now they're out: Plenty of situations where legit crimes happened... Theft, assault, even a case of money laundering on occasion. They went in, did their time, and came out, and day labor was the one thing that didn't ask too many questions and paid regularly.
A fair number had degrees -- from associates and bachelor's degrees to even a PhD who was nailed for what the state called a "gambling ring" (some informal betting around the office that ended up snowballing into a massive pot). many of them could do remote work of some kind, be it customer support roles or tech work. The MBA that did nose candy? He stayed on the board of directors for a local nonprofit _while serving_ and would relay his comments through his lawyer, being entirely upfront as to why he was incarcerated, then ended up doing accounting for the day labor company after a while.
All this to say: our system is fucked up and needs rehabilitation systems for the murky area between those two extremes.
Putting aside the widespread reflexive discrimination against "criminals", I would think that most people in prison who someone might think twice about hiring due to their criminal history would get a second look if it was for a remote job.
Someone working remotely can't rob or murder you, nor can they try to sell you drugs without a much more elaborate setup.
Seems to me the only kinds of people in prison that most employers might justly hesitate to hire for a remote job are white-collar criminals.
https://www.corrections1.com/investigations/ga-inmate-accuse...
https://www.wltx.com/article/news/crime/south-carolina-inmat...
Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!
Awesome. So so so awesome
This stuff truly is a disturbing view of the future of the US.
>earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board
Yep. There it is. Sounds nice now right? Until in 5 years they decide, well it really needs to be 20%. Then it 5 more years. Well they are in prison so 30% should be resonable. Then as tax deficits grow .....weeeellllll maybe 70%..... Then it will be well prisoners shouldn't really be getting rich in prison so we take 100% but when they get out they will still have that job to fall back on. Just wait and see.
To be clear I'm not against giving people a chance to reform. This is not that. If a person is reformed enough or behaved enough at a chance for reform then they should be on probation at worst. Not propping up a industrial prison complex for nonviolent crimes like 20+ year sentence selling drugs.
Simpler explanation: "slavery" never ended, it's just called something else now
What was gross margin per average (because the cook picks no cotton) of your typical plantation?
I'd bet it's a whole lot less than the federal .gov's margin on someone in one of the 20+% brackets. State .govs are probably all over the place.
Hard to account for because the .gov "doesn't show a profit" in the same way that "we're totally a nonprofit <wink>" hospitals don't but should be a doable calculation.
Also "intent" is cop for we didn't like your face.
There we go again, and then people wonder why they can't find engineering jobs anymore, or low wage/no job security if any, when anyone and everyone can be an "engineer" when they get bored and have some time on their hands. I still don't understand why there is no collective engineering committee and effort to gatekeep the profession like literally all other professions out there, because companies will NEVER initiate that since it's in their interest to keep it as is. Why would someone spend time and money to become an engineer when he or she is competing with the whole world and prisoners now? The reward is just not worth the effort anymore, this is what will kill engineering innovation on the long term for short term gains.
Bright brains are no longer interested in investing time and money to become engineers when the reward isn't worth it anymore, even immigrants by the way. They are okay with the low wages until they get permanent residency or citizenship, then after that they would need higher wages to simply live a comfortable life with family and such, but they won't even have that, and they get to taste the outcome they caused even if they are not realizing it.
As long as they're paid fair rates i think it should be allowed.
and my definition of a fair rate for them is what people outside the prison are paid, assuming they're paid a fair rate of course.
Why aren't we all doing this?
"Lopez admitted that she waited in front of the county jail for hours, intent on assaulting an officer. She reportedly explained that her goal was to get arrested and be put in jail so she would be forced to stop smoking cigarettes."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calif-woman-allegedly-slaps-cop...
> is a certified recovery coach, a scholar and a teaching assistant who's serving a 40-year sentence for the murder of her husband.
I feel like "husband murderer" probably ought to come first in your little list of titles there.
This system is a joke. If someone's committed a real crime (with a victim), and you allow this, you're forgetting prison is supposed to be a punishment.
I guess it'd be fair if the government kept half of what they make though.... Oh wait...
We really need to get rid of the exception in the 13th amendment.
If you're interested in doing hard federal time, I would suggest you consider interstate trafficking of distribution quantities of drugs.
...there are two million people in prison. Several million more in various stages of the carceral cycle who be be easily subbed in when more labor is required.
Slavery of this variety is alive and well.
If you're white, maybe. There's still stories of some states having the book thrown at recreational drug usage.
There are always stories, but the majority are the above. If you have a state in mind we can look at the data together.
It’s just slavery with all the perverse incentives that come with it, and I think we’d all be better off if this was a lever that no one in society had access to pull on
What then? If they're not forced to produce something of value to give to you, then how can you ever be made whole again? Does the state pay? If so, why do taxpayers who didn't commit a crime foot the bill? If it's insurance, then why do non-criminals paying insurance premiums foot the bill?
If there's nothing linking the action (_theft_) to the needed outcome (_restitution_), then there's this unmoored loop of perverse incentives wherein some folks can continue to commit crimes with very limited consequences.
Doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to work while in prison. But surely for any and all crimes that have a clearly defined dollar amount, shouldn't that criminal be forced to pay that amount back? Garnishing future wages can be circumvented (_just don't get a real job when you get out, keep stealing things to support yourself_). And even at best, it's very much _delayed_ restitution. Justice delayed is justice denied.
To be clear, in the present day, when a prisoner works, how much money do you think they make, and who do you think keeps the value produced?
The parent thread we're discussing is broadly about prisoner work in the US. So we should be considering the mean and median values, not the one guy making 4 orders of magnitude more than everyone else.
Are any of these solutions that unreasonable when you consider that the state/taxpayers are already footing the bill to keep prisoners incarcerated?
How do they pay you back when employers run background checks (not to mention housing)?
What does that have to do with rehabilitation? That person can go to prison, realize the errors of their ways, and have a healthy life.I don't have to like nor forgive them. I'm not being "made whole again" no matter how long you lock them up.
> If they're not forced to produce something of value to give to you, then how can you ever be made whole again?
1) you generally don't get something "produced of value", unless suffering is a currency now. Probably is in 2025
2) insurance. not everything can be given back, but many material goods can be compensated.
>If it's insurance, then why do non-criminals paying insurance premiums foot the bill?
because that's how insurance works, in spirit. You're all pooling together a fund so that you help out some other person when they need it. The instigator is often not the one footing the bill to begin with. Shaking down a criminal with no money is as useful as yelling at a forest fire as it burns your place down.
>Doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to work while in prison. But surely for any and all crimes that have a clearly defined dollar amount, shouldn't that criminal be forced to pay that amount back?
if they have it, sure. As is, this isn't the model of the "justice" system, though. You're not getting paid back for anyone put behind bars.
by your insurance company.
Heck, this doesn't even require them to catch the perp.
That's a different problem, for different inmates -- the inmates covered in this story are paid market rates. It mentions the software developer has a six-figure salary.
Why would the prison / prisoner charge below market rates for their labor?
The prisoner doesn't really get too much choice in the matter other than taking/rejecting the offer.