just because they go to prison doesn't mean they have to stop contributing to society. There are probably a good number of such individuals that need the chance and encouragement. Idle minds serve no one
You're right of course, but we have to be careful about unintended(?) side effects. It's a very short road from prisoner development to the state having an unhealthy economic incentive to lock people up.
OR: An unhealthy economic incentive to release [made-for-prison] software onto the public writ large. (And if the software isn't sufficiently modular, what kind of unwanted surveillance comes "for free" – or "batteries includes"?)
A dialogue:
A: "What did you do in prison?"
B: "Started a hacker school that wrote the surveillance program which monitors this very traffic intersection."
A: "What were you in for?"
B: "Drunk driving; caused an accident."
A: "Does it see my concealed metals?"
B: "If you move fast enough. We had to make first launch!"
Will this tease out public opinion on "rehabilitation"? Or will it show how we really feel about "bootstrapping"?
I understand your point, and this might just be speculation, but I would assume (with zero constructive knowledge on the subject) that prisoners would have to present the card in order to get food.
At least, that's how my daughter's school lunch-line works.
If possession of a card determines whether and how much one eats, then in violent environments we would expect some to eat a great deal and others to go without completely.
> The software showed that Sysco, which supplies food to the state prison system, was charging the state different prices for the same food item sent to two different facilities,
From the linked Oklahomian article:
> “In some cases an exact same item might arrive at Lexington (Assessment and Reception Center) and Harp at the same warehouse, and one has a different price than the other,” Murphey said.
Was that a deliberate underhand move by Sysco, or is it normal expected part of contracting the job out? Or is it even more mundane, and just a price break for ordering more?
It's nice to think that there's a prison where inmates are not just allowed to rot. Here's another story where inmates get to do challenging, rewarding work looking after inmates with dementia. Warning: It contains graphic accounts of horrible violence.
It's nice to think that there's a prison where inmates are not just allowed to rot.
That how our prisons should work. It may not satisfy a human being's need for retribution, but when did inflicting harm more than what's necessary to keep humans safe ever did for humanity?
Anytime you jail a human being, you're using up resources to feed them, shelter them, and protect them from dangerous human beings. That cost taxpayer money. Why not get something out of the condemned by fixing them and studying them and making them better so that the prison system will collapse because it's so effective at repairing? (Of course, there are human beings that may be unfixable, but the vast majority probably are)
> Why not get something out of the condemned by fixing them and studying them and making them better
I understand your point--prisons can be rehabilitative or educational institutions rather than fulfilling a purely retributive function--but your language is setting off some alarm bells for me. We ought to shift from using the language of "fixing" people to helping people or, in many cases, fixing the system.
The justice system in the United States used to try and "fix" the poor and the "feeble-minded" by sterilizing them. Men and women sterilized to "protect" society from them, and produce a more wonderful race.
Or perhaps we could look back to the electro-convulsive therapy and forced hormone treatment used to "fix" gay men (Alan Turing, for instance).
Turns out that sometimes it is the societies need fixing rather than the people.
Prison food contracts are usually awarded via a bid process. If the two facilities are included in different contracts, which is not unusual, then the price bid by Sysco could very well be different just based on market conditions at the time of the bid. Also, when Sysco and competitors enter their bids they take freight and delivery conditions into account. When I enter similar bids, I sometimes charge a little extra to cover the drivers' time when a particular facility takes too long to unload. Some places just aren't run as well as others and it costs more to deal with them.
I don't believe the maths for this story fully adds up.
Back of envelope calculation: prison population of Oklahoma:25000. Cost of meals per prisoner per day: $10. (UK hospitals budget £5 per patient per day so $10 per day is probably accurate to the nearest power of 10...). Days in year: 365.
Hence, it should come to ~$91 million if all prisoners are getting all their meals.
So we have $20 million saved by removing the greedy ones, greedy ones defined as stealing an extra meal for brekkie, din-dins and tea. So $111 million is my guestimate of how much the food bill comes to because of them scoffing their way to add $20 million on top. That would be equivalent to ~30.5k prisoners, therefore one in five of the in-mates is massively stealing extra portions every mealtime, every day.
Realistically is $10 spent per day per prisoner in Oklahoma? Sounds high to me. Would a prisoner that steals take 2 * of everything all the time, at every opportunity? They could steal more or they might steal less. So there may be more than 20% on the take for it to come to $20 million. A third of them could be habitually getting more than their allowed mealings.
Articles like this with lofty claims should have some numbers on there, rather than just pure story-interpretation. I suspect that Sysco charge a lot more than UK hospital contractors do and that they deliver a lot less. Numbers please!
Was this software vetted by security experts to make sure it wasn't being used behind the scenes for anything nefarious? Like say, exploitation of prison computer systems etc.?
They didn't actually name the person, so that is unknowable.
My uninformed impression however is that while many people may unjustly get the "sex offender" label (for example, somebody who got caught pissing in an alley behind a bar), the people who receive a "sex offender" label and jail time skew towards the "did something that actually has a victim" crowd.
the people who receive a "sex offender" label and jail time skew towards the "did something that actually has a victim" crowd.
To give you an idea of what can also satisfy this group of facts, they could also have been urinating in public, which in many places earns the offender a place on the sex offender list for life, then resist arrest with a conviction for assault on a police officer due to a lack of funds of a lawyer. So, y'know, it's good to keep one's moral panic gauge calibrated according to the current state of the law.
Under current law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exception are required to work, either for UNICOR or at some other prison job. Inmates earn from US$0.23 per hour up to a maximum of US$1.15 per hour, and all inmates with court-ordered financial obligations must use at least 50% of this UNICOR income to satisfy those debts.
I think work and education/skills are key to being a healthy human. I just worry that prison labor could easily cross over from being rehabilitative to being exploitative.
>I just worry that prison labor could easily cross over from being rehabilitative to being exploitative.
I think we've already crossed that line. As far as I know, they don't do it directly, but prison lobbying groups have worked hard to increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, make sentencing harsher, and keep the war on drugs going.
To me the line is where prisons go from making use of a labor pool that already exists, to actively trying to increase the size of that labor pool.
I see where you're coming from, but I disagree that the degree to which prisons campaign to increase the size of the prisoner labor pool is indicative of exploitation.
Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a prison teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit. If demand for programmers was high, this prison would be heavily incentivized to lobby for more prisoners, but you'd be hard-pressed to call the nature of the work "exploitative".
That can only work if, on average, prisoners in prisons are innately better at programming than programmers in offices. Otherwise there may not be a competitive advantage, there may even be a competitive disadvantage.
Maybe, but the point of my hypothetical isn't to prove that prisoners can be good programmers. It's to show that lobbying for more prisoners doesn't necessarily mean that you are exploiting said prisoners. It simply means they are helpful to you.
That can only work if, on average, prisoners in prisons are innately better at programming than programmers in offices.
It's been made abundantly clear in the "10x programmer" threads that there is no valid way to measure programmer productivity, so from where exactly does the speculative average here derive?
Are you kidding? Have you ever been inside a prison? No good can come of this idea.
Imagine, just as every other time it has ever been tried, the cheap labor underbids the free-world companies that have to air-condition their offices, and control/prevent worker-worker violence, (raping, killing, and stealing) in order to attract talent. Imagine what that will do to the job market for programmers.
Also, isn't the gov't kind of forbidden to compete with private enterprise, especially the skilled labor markets?
You (and every other responder) have taken my comment completely out of context. Read the post I'm responding too. I was putting forth a hypothetical situation to prove a very specific and explicitly-stated point, not suggesting that prisons should enter the tech industry.
No, I'm not. I replied to your post in the context you provided with your hypothetical example. I stand behind my point for whatever (profitable) industry you wish to apply it to. Or in other words. If a prison seeks to expand its inmate population for any economic reason, that, in itself is exploitation.
You're still arguing against a strawman. The conversation isn't simply about whether or not what prisons do is "exploitation". It's more specific than that. Not is it about whether or not prison lobbying is sending undeserving people to jail. If we were to have that discussion I would likely agree with you.
What we're talking about here, however, is whether prison work programs themselves are rehabilitative or exploitative for the prisoners themselves. My claim is that prisons lobbying to get more people into said programs is irrelevant when considering the quality and fairness of the programs themselves.
I happen to agree, and haven't said anything to the contrary. My point is that forced labor isn't fair, and it wouldn't magically become more fair if prison management neglected to campaign for more prisoners. They're two separate issues.
You (and every other responder) have taken my comment completely out of context.
If your point is so difficult to discern, maybe you haven't made it very well. I think I've deciphered your meaning now. You contend that a non-exploitative prison owner might earn such profits from non-exploitation that she would seek to increase the multitudes upon which she inflicts her non-exploitation.
This proposition has at least a couple of problems. First, a good measure of whether a practice is exploitative or not is whether people would freely choose it, so it's a bad sign when your SOP requires locks on the cells. Second, from a purely commercial perspective, we would expect a "just" prison owner to be indifferent (in the long term) to how many are imprisoned. That is, she would charge society a suitable administration fee, and transfer most resources directly to the charges in her care. A "kind" prison owner would lose money on every prisoner, so she would actually lobby for fewer of them! Then we come to the sort of prison owners we actually have, and it's no surprise they want to transform the nation itself into a vast prison.
These jokers call my home a few times per year. They use inmates on work release, who often try to give you the impression that they are affiliated with a church/charity/etc. They sell normal household products at outrageously inflated prices. http://www.americanhelpinghands.org/ Also Known As U.S. Disadvantaged Industries, Inc.
Manipulating the laws to generate more captives so that you can force them to work for you so that you can make more money is...totally exploitive. That you've thrown in higher pay doesn't change that; it just means they'd treat their slaves better.
It's also a silly hypothetical, in that it misunderstands the motive for prisoner labor. Replace "prison" with "community center":
> Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a community center teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit.
Compare potential outcomes. Wouldn't that be a lot easier to run and couldn't you expect much better outcomes? Of course. And it's also true for any other kind of labor; equally paid non-criminals with specific inclinations to the work doing it by choice are going to outperform prisoners if you're paying them equally. Which leads us to the actual reason why prison labor is even a thing at all: because it's coercive and thus artificially cheap. There's no other reason to do it! If prisons had to pay prisoners market wages, there'd be no reason to employ them at all; they could just employ other people. It's just not a valid hypothetical.
It's like saying, "we could get rid of traffic problems by not allowing any vehicles on the road."
Slave labor isn't exploitative simply because slave owners campaign against anti-slavery laws. It's exploitative because the slaves themselves are being forced to work against their will. Slavery would not suddenly become more justifiable if its practitioners adopted a vow of silence with regard to its legality.
The same applies here. Whether or not prison owners campaign for policies that would put more people in prison is irrelevant to the question of whether those prisoners are being treated fairly.
They're not prisoners until they're captured and put in prison. Thus lobbying for more prisoners is a way of exploiting more people, especially the poor, young black men who are most likely to end up in prison. Similarly, lobbying for the capture of more slaves on the west coast of 18th century Africa is a way of exploiting Africans.
Additionally--and I suspect this is what the GP was going for--the lobbying effort clarifies the underlying intentions. The people demanding that prisoners work are doing so not under the banner of exploitation, but under rhetoric about prisoners "giving back to society". That prison organizations are lobbying for more prisoners reveals their real intentions, which is why it's used as evidence of the exploitative nature of the penal system.
You do have a point. I think the lobbying to increase the number of slaves makes it more exploitative, but the line really is at the point where working in prison is required. And actually, there's an even more precise and similarly distasteful word that describes it perfectly: "forced labor camp".
Some might object that the term invokes a comparison to the forced labor camps in countries with much worse human rights situations than our own. But that seems a lot like saying that house slaves didn't count as "real" slaves, because their lot was much better than those forced to work in mines.
Quite right. In fact, you don't need to look any further than the first section of the 13th amendment to find recognition of the fact that there is little to no distinction:
"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."
In calling out prison labor as an acceptable form of slavery, the 13th amendment implicitly declares it a form of slavery.
I wouldn't say that a loophole needs to be unintentional. I would describe a loophole as a deliberate or accidental ambiguity in a law that allows others to circumvent the intent of the law.
Either way, I don't think it is technically a loophole. Exception is a good word for it.
Fair enough, may not be the best choice of words. I was thinking about it from the perspective that everyone is a lawbreaker to some degree or another; and imagining a situation where detection becomes trivial for all of the minor offences we commit on an ongoing basis.
To add to what you wrote about the fine line, slavery as punishment is permitted by the 13th amendment:
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.
Interesting story. I say give these people resources to be productive and a certain number of hours a day. Let them own their own IP. The point of prison shouldn't be to punish, but to rehabilitate people, if possible, and if not, to keep other people safe from them. Either way, if people have the capability to contribute to society while behind bars, why not let them? (As other posters have noted, it's important to make sure the prison/industrial complex isn't being incentivized to increase prisoner count in all this, as they are today.)
71 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadHey, aren't you? I do believe we call that a "draft".
http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/are-mexico-drug-ga...
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/09/18/rsa-russian-speaking-...
OR: An unhealthy economic incentive to release [made-for-prison] software onto the public writ large. (And if the software isn't sufficiently modular, what kind of unwanted surveillance comes "for free" – or "batteries includes"?)
A dialogue:
A: "What did you do in prison?"
B: "Started a hacker school that wrote the surveillance program which monitors this very traffic intersection."
A: "What were you in for?"
B: "Drunk driving; caused an accident."
A: "Does it see my concealed metals?"
B: "If you move fast enough. We had to make first launch!"
Will this tease out public opinion on "rehabilitation"? Or will it show how we really feel about "bootstrapping"?
> "Prisoners each have a bar code they can scan, ..."
> "When an inmate’s bar code is scanned, prison officials would be alerted that they should receive a diabetic meal, or a Halal or Kosher meal."
At least, that's how my daughter's school lunch-line works.
That said, she does have a card that she pays with, and it would be easy (at least in theory) to require that of prison inmates as well.
> The software showed that Sysco, which supplies food to the state prison system, was charging the state different prices for the same food item sent to two different facilities,
From the linked Oklahomian article:
> “In some cases an exact same item might arrive at Lexington (Assessment and Reception Center) and Harp at the same warehouse, and one has a different price than the other,” Murphey said.
Was that a deliberate underhand move by Sysco, or is it normal expected part of contracting the job out? Or is it even more mundane, and just a price break for ordering more?
It's nice to think that there's a prison where inmates are not just allowed to rot. Here's another story where inmates get to do challenging, rewarding work looking after inmates with dementia. Warning: It contains graphic accounts of horrible violence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...
That how our prisons should work. It may not satisfy a human being's need for retribution, but when did inflicting harm more than what's necessary to keep humans safe ever did for humanity?
Anytime you jail a human being, you're using up resources to feed them, shelter them, and protect them from dangerous human beings. That cost taxpayer money. Why not get something out of the condemned by fixing them and studying them and making them better so that the prison system will collapse because it's so effective at repairing? (Of course, there are human beings that may be unfixable, but the vast majority probably are)
I understand your point--prisons can be rehabilitative or educational institutions rather than fulfilling a purely retributive function--but your language is setting off some alarm bells for me. We ought to shift from using the language of "fixing" people to helping people or, in many cases, fixing the system.
I am also disturbed by this language. Historically, the best case for attempts to "fix" other people is that nothing happens.
The justice system in the United States used to try and "fix" the poor and the "feeble-minded" by sterilizing them. Men and women sterilized to "protect" society from them, and produce a more wonderful race.
Or perhaps we could look back to the electro-convulsive therapy and forced hormone treatment used to "fix" gay men (Alan Turing, for instance).
Turns out that sometimes it is the societies need fixing rather than the people.
Back of envelope calculation: prison population of Oklahoma:25000. Cost of meals per prisoner per day: $10. (UK hospitals budget £5 per patient per day so $10 per day is probably accurate to the nearest power of 10...). Days in year: 365.
Hence, it should come to ~$91 million if all prisoners are getting all their meals.
So we have $20 million saved by removing the greedy ones, greedy ones defined as stealing an extra meal for brekkie, din-dins and tea. So $111 million is my guestimate of how much the food bill comes to because of them scoffing their way to add $20 million on top. That would be equivalent to ~30.5k prisoners, therefore one in five of the in-mates is massively stealing extra portions every mealtime, every day.
Realistically is $10 spent per day per prisoner in Oklahoma? Sounds high to me. Would a prisoner that steals take 2 * of everything all the time, at every opportunity? They could steal more or they might steal less. So there may be more than 20% on the take for it to come to $20 million. A third of them could be habitually getting more than their allowed mealings.
Articles like this with lofty claims should have some numbers on there, rather than just pure story-interpretation. I suspect that Sysco charge a lot more than UK hospital contractors do and that they deliver a lot less. Numbers please!
At least "murderer" hasn't been hi-jacked. Yet.
My uninformed impression however is that while many people may unjustly get the "sex offender" label (for example, somebody who got caught pissing in an alley behind a bar), the people who receive a "sex offender" label and jail time skew towards the "did something that actually has a victim" crowd.
To give you an idea of what can also satisfy this group of facts, they could also have been urinating in public, which in many places earns the offender a place on the sex offender list for life, then resist arrest with a conviction for assault on a police officer due to a lack of funds of a lawyer. So, y'know, it's good to keep one's moral panic gauge calibrated according to the current state of the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNICOR ->
Under current law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exception are required to work, either for UNICOR or at some other prison job. Inmates earn from US$0.23 per hour up to a maximum of US$1.15 per hour, and all inmates with court-ordered financial obligations must use at least 50% of this UNICOR income to satisfy those debts.
I think work and education/skills are key to being a healthy human. I just worry that prison labor could easily cross over from being rehabilitative to being exploitative.
I think we've already crossed that line. As far as I know, they don't do it directly, but prison lobbying groups have worked hard to increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, make sentencing harsher, and keep the war on drugs going.
To me the line is where prisons go from making use of a labor pool that already exists, to actively trying to increase the size of that labor pool.
Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a prison teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit. If demand for programmers was high, this prison would be heavily incentivized to lobby for more prisoners, but you'd be hard-pressed to call the nature of the work "exploitative".
It's been made abundantly clear in the "10x programmer" threads that there is no valid way to measure programmer productivity, so from where exactly does the speculative average here derive?
Imagine, just as every other time it has ever been tried, the cheap labor underbids the free-world companies that have to air-condition their offices, and control/prevent worker-worker violence, (raping, killing, and stealing) in order to attract talent. Imagine what that will do to the job market for programmers.
Also, isn't the gov't kind of forbidden to compete with private enterprise, especially the skilled labor markets?
What we're talking about here, however, is whether prison work programs themselves are rehabilitative or exploitative for the prisoners themselves. My claim is that prisons lobbying to get more people into said programs is irrelevant when considering the quality and fairness of the programs themselves.
I do not accept the idea that by doing a crime, you forfeit your all your human rights.
If the programs are entirely optional, it might be OK. As is, it is utterly exploitative.
If your point is so difficult to discern, maybe you haven't made it very well. I think I've deciphered your meaning now. You contend that a non-exploitative prison owner might earn such profits from non-exploitation that she would seek to increase the multitudes upon which she inflicts her non-exploitation.
This proposition has at least a couple of problems. First, a good measure of whether a practice is exploitative or not is whether people would freely choose it, so it's a bad sign when your SOP requires locks on the cells. Second, from a purely commercial perspective, we would expect a "just" prison owner to be indifferent (in the long term) to how many are imprisoned. That is, she would charge society a suitable administration fee, and transfer most resources directly to the charges in her care. A "kind" prison owner would lose money on every prisoner, so she would actually lobby for fewer of them! Then we come to the sort of prison owners we actually have, and it's no surprise they want to transform the nation itself into a vast prison.
These jokers call my home a few times per year. They use inmates on work release, who often try to give you the impression that they are affiliated with a church/charity/etc. They sell normal household products at outrageously inflated prices. http://www.americanhelpinghands.org/ Also Known As U.S. Disadvantaged Industries, Inc.
It's also a silly hypothetical, in that it misunderstands the motive for prisoner labor. Replace "prison" with "community center":
> Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a community center teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit.
Compare potential outcomes. Wouldn't that be a lot easier to run and couldn't you expect much better outcomes? Of course. And it's also true for any other kind of labor; equally paid non-criminals with specific inclinations to the work doing it by choice are going to outperform prisoners if you're paying them equally. Which leads us to the actual reason why prison labor is even a thing at all: because it's coercive and thus artificially cheap. There's no other reason to do it! If prisons had to pay prisoners market wages, there'd be no reason to employ them at all; they could just employ other people. It's just not a valid hypothetical.
It's like saying, "we could get rid of traffic problems by not allowing any vehicles on the road."
The same applies here. Whether or not prison owners campaign for policies that would put more people in prison is irrelevant to the question of whether those prisoners are being treated fairly.
Additionally--and I suspect this is what the GP was going for--the lobbying effort clarifies the underlying intentions. The people demanding that prisoners work are doing so not under the banner of exploitation, but under rhetoric about prisoners "giving back to society". That prison organizations are lobbying for more prisoners reveals their real intentions, which is why it's used as evidence of the exploitative nature of the penal system.
Some might object that the term invokes a comparison to the forced labor camps in countries with much worse human rights situations than our own. But that seems a lot like saying that house slaves didn't count as "real" slaves, because their lot was much better than those forced to work in mines.
A lot of well-thought-out political ideologies maintain that there isn't a line at all.
"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."
In calling out prison labor as an acceptable form of slavery, the 13th amendment implicitly declares it a form of slavery.
Either way, I don't think it is technically a loophole. Exception is a good word for it.
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.
Might even help with the auditing process.