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A comment on National prison strike launches over underpaid labor and prison conditions. Parent comment

Re:National prison strike launches over underpaid labor and ... by philwelch on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @06:57PM (#17814615)
> For-profit prisons, a multi-billion dollar business, are precisely incenctivised to bring and keep and many prisoners inside as possible.

For-profit prisons are obviously a bad policy, but only 8% of America's prisoners are incarcerated in them (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...) and it's not clear that they are either necessary nor sufficient as a cause for these problems.

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Re:National prison strike launches over underpaid labor and ... by andrepd on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:57PM (#17815924)
Not the only cause, no, but their impact can be felt far beyond those 8%, via their intense lobbying for e.g. mandatory minimum sentencing, making life tougher for convicts after they're freed to maximise recidivism, etc
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Re:National prison strike launches over underpaid labor and ... by philwelch on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:07AM (#17816217)
As long as there's a corrections officer union you'll have the exact same lobbying.

Most of these policies were enacted during the 1960's-1990's crime wave as a response to it, and not as some sort of special-interest conspiracy. It turns out that unintended consequences are a lot more common than sinister special interest conspiracies.

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