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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero.

This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety.

There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).

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Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.

Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.

Sure, the idea of revenge is attractive to me as well. But I really don't want the legal system to operate at the level of my base emotional desires. If a crime is bad enough that there should be no second chance, segregate them from society safely until they die. I don't see how the justice system hurting/harming/torturing people does anything other than normalize hurting others when you feel wronged, and therefore normalizing more criminal violence.

This seems like an orthogonal point, and one that I mostly agree with.

But the question is: just because some perpetrators don't deserve second chances, why does that mean that McDonalds and Raytheon get to be the beneficiary of their free labor?

And more importantly: with a huge economic incentive to enslave ("imprison"... eye roll) these people, can we ever actually have a system that properly selects people who actually need to be removed from society?

If prisons are actually a viable mechanism for public safety, let's amend the 13th amendment to prohibit all slavery, instead of allowing it to exist in prisons, and then we'll get a clearer picture.

That too. The check of "without due process" did not undo that rebranding or its many modern forms.

I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”)

To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.

Is aberration for the ground you claim? My understanding is that in the west up until recently prisons were uncommon due to cost. The courts either fined you or they killed you. You might’ve been part of a Work gang, but the goal was to kill you.

I don't understand your question or your comments. I have not considered the relevance of execution to this discussion, but I do not see fines and imprisonment as the same categories of punishment/correction at all.

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