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Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better.

2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.

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Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary.

Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.

Would it be better if you could only do the former then?

Also, if you worked 8 hours you'd be able to buy a lot more than a single pack of ramen.

> While ramen costs about 35 cents at Target, prison commissaries charge between 24 cents to $1.06 nationwide.

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...

It would be better if they weren't treated like dogs to begin with and they shouldn't be allowed to undercut local labor costs. Nor should the jail receive 75% of their wage on top of the 400% markup on commissary items they already take. Thats ends up with about 6% of the wages value going to the workers on top of their wages being 3x lower than local workers.

We incentivize creating the conditions of the former, and increased incarceration, by making the latter profitable.

The uncomfortable part of that is the involuntary part, not the work.

Prison is not voluntary.

> "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant"

Isn't that not the actual choice though?

Like for a prison with monetary advantages to the inmates working don't they actually send you to solitary for refusing work detail?

It’s even deeper than this, because in some states, like Georgia, you’re “rewarded” with good time and a higher chance of parole.

Good time means you get to exit the prison for things like visiting family.

The prisoners are coerced to work for sub-human wages because, if they don’t, they stay in prison longer and can’t see their loved ones.

Prisoners in most states are literally underfed, and then "allowed" to buy more food, like a single packet of ramen for a whole dollar.

This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.

When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"

> In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.

This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alabama-prison-meals-la...

https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2024/title-14/chapter-6...

The commissary markup is absolutely true, but "deliberately underfed" is as far as I can tell, completely untrue. Most states actually have calorie minimum rules. Arkansas is 2300 per day. Kentucky 2400 per day. Both states mandate annual menu reviews by a third-party dietician. New York state's guideline is 2800 per day + 90g protein. California 2500 per day. The Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities additionally states there are to be at least 3 meals per day, two of them hot, and no more than 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.

These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.

It's possible that some of this is down to the "Prison" vs "Jail" distinction?

But I can't source what I said.

What I can source is that prisoners largely report going hungry. That's a completely different problem though.

I cannot remove or edit my comment. Thank you for the push back.

Illinois County Jail Standards[1] provides that:

"Food must be of sufficient nutritional value and provide a minimum of 1,800 to 2,000 calories for adults"

Which is one of the worst written statutes I've ever seen. How do you have a range for a minimum? Of course, the jails aim for the lower end, which in theory should be sufficient for a sedentary population, but protein is highly expensive and most of those calories are cheap carbs which don't satiate the prisoners.

Also, the Jail Standards are not enforceable by the courts as Illinois courts can only enforce laws which have a punishment for non-compliance and are therefore deemed mandatory. Otherwise they are just directory. People see the word "shall" in statutes and assume that government officials must comply, but that is not the case in many states.[2]

Food for prisoners is really back-stopped by the 8th and 14th Amendments and their requirement is simply that you don't die of malnutrition.

[1] https://www.ilga.gov/ftp/JCAR/AdminCode/020/020007010001100R...

[2] https://www.isba.org/committees/governmentlawyers/newsletter...

It isn't voluntary and is slavery. Stop justifying it, when the parent clearly mentioned ICE detaining random people off street.

> 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.

That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.

I'm on board with that.

But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.

Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.

It's not voluntary. They're required to work. It's literal slavery, made legal by the carveout for criminal punishment in the 13th Amendment.

The reality is in a lot of prison situations the people are bored and the money is going to non-essentials from a commissary.

It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.

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