On the one hand, prisoners being coerced to work is payment for their crimes. On the other hand, that job would have gone to someone else at market rates. This kind of thing drags down the market rates.
We really need to get rid of the exception in the 13th amendment.
>prisoners being coerced to work is payment for their crimes. On the other hand, that job would have gone to someone else at market rates. This kind of thing drags down the market rates.
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.
It was not. Working in prisons started as part of rehabilitation, so the prisoners could learn life skills to survive. Now it devolved to power tripping and control.
As intended, companies will do everything to lower wages and have borderline slaves work for them, either through immigrants, hiring mostly co-op workers, and now prisoners, and a lot of people are okay with it for some reason, so gullible! The "engineer" job in 2025 is like sewing in a prison a couple of decades ago, crazy.
> Costa says he was also surprised to learn that Thorpe was eligible for remote work while he was in prison. He hired him in June. 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.
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!
> boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process
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!
If we get serious about actual rehabilitation in prisons instead of punishment there’s never been a better time to be able to learn just about anything on your own time. But we’d have to stop dehumanizing criminals. Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.
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.
If you want rehabilitation then you should ensure that they're working for more than slave wages and that money is set aside to be available to them upon their release.
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
> Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.
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.
Not a fan of private prisons, but prisons (public or private) don't make money. They are a massive cost to the government. Incarceration is expensive (Google gives me a median of $65K per prisoner per year), and the percentage of prisoners that are able to earn more money through labor than the cost to lock them up is probably very low.
There are also perverse electoral incentives to having a prison in your voting district. Generally the prisoners count toward your population numbers but they can’t vote. No pesky three fifths compromise.
Yeah, I think the if at the beginning of your comment is doing some very heavy lifting.
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.
What a criminal record does to your ability to get a job these days, as compared to the past is pretty harsh. Back in the 80's and prior, you could work at a smaller place that didn't have the capability to do background checks. Now, it's $20 or less and ANY employer can do it. You have to specifically find some place that has deliberately chosen to take the risk.
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).
One of the overlooked purposes of imprisonment isn't revenge or rehabilitation, it's just letting the rest of us be away from that person for a while, removing them from society.
> Preston Thorpe is only 32, but he says he's already landed his dream job as a senior software engineer and bought a modest house with his six-figure salary. It was all accomplished by putting in long days from his cell at the Mountain View Correctional Center in Charleston.
Wow. Just wow. The US really is on a trajectory back towards slavery between this and re-legalizing child labor in some states.
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.
This... seems like it has the makings of a really great idea. So often prisoners are repeat offenders because they have no skills, no support system after getting out of prison so they revert to their old ways. Imagine already having a job and a large nest egg in your savings account because you got a remote job in prison. Or imagine going to prison as an 18-year-old, learning some skills through a prison educational system, and then getting a remote job and actually start contributing back to society. I'm not sure about Maine's implementation specifically, but something about this idea resonates strongly with me.
When I visited a local prison through the https://www.douglassproject.org/ I had this exact thought: why not allow remote work? I'm glad it is being done somewhere! I hope it becomes more commonplace.
This program sounds great and I think we should incentivize it. Unfortunately, I think it requires a constitutional amendment to work. We can’t rely on well meaning administrators to overlook the slave labor exemption for criminal punishment; these things will be exploited.
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.
I always wonder why didn’t we ever do something like this with something like Amazon Mechanical Turk? Use prisoners for small frequent human cognition tasks. I guess with AI that ship has sailed though…
Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!
Remember when Pennsylvania judges took kickbacks to send teenagers to for-profit detention centers? They ruined thousands of people's entire lives, but hey they made a quick buck!
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.
This is still slavery. Not chattel slavery, but the same thing that came up in reconstruction where minorities and poor whites become indentured servants
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] threadWe really need to get rid of the exception in the 13th amendment.
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?
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 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.
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
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 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.
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).
Gives new meaning to working in Mountain View.
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.
Especially with all the race issues in imprisonment.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45340442
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.
Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!
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.
So I searched and THEN I found the blog of the inmate from the article! https://pthorpe92.dev/