In my native Norway, rehabilitation has been the focus to such an extent that foreign media come to do stories on the 'holiday camps' prison time is served in.
It somehow works, though. Recidivism is very low. Here's a few examples on how inmates do their time
-Education is encouraged - whether it is to a learn a trade or getting a degree (presumably lectures are mostly followed via teleconference).
-Counselling is available to help you deal with whatever issues landed you in prison in the first place.
-As you near the end of your sentence, restrictions are gradually lifted to ease the transition back into society - lower-security units, daytime leave to report to work, halfway houses where inmates can live a normal-ish life in the daytime but need to observe a curfew in evenings/nights.
-After you get out, you have regular one on ones with the social services, helping you find a place to stay, work, family counselling if required etc.
-Companies are offered part of your pay refunded by the state for a limited time if they hire you.
All in all, I guess it can be argued that our pendulum has swung too far towards rehabilitation - but if the point of prison is to reduce the long-term risk and cost of crime, we're doing reasonably well.
If I think "it's one of those people from the other side of the tracks" it won't feel like a person with whom I could have a close connection. I might not care as much.
Not saying it's a good thing, though.
I'd say you would care too much! (abstract/general 'you', not @CalRobert). The problem any sort of reform faces is antipathy, not apathy.
Often, you'll hear people say something like, "Norway did X and it works, so we should do X in the U.S." These are typically fairly naive claims. Regardless of the normative dimension of the claim (whether X is worth doing in the U.S. in the first place), there is a non-trivial amount of complexity that is swept under the rug. For instance, NYC has twice the population of Norway. The U.S. really is significantly more demographically diverse than Norway (or, if this claim isn't good, then we can just say they are equally diverse, but at the scale of the U.S. this diversity increases complexity a non-trivial amount). The U.S. has a more fragmented legal system. Etc. Etc. Etc.
If a Martian were asked which nation would be easier to implement new policies in, maintain those policies, and have them bring about the desired end, which do you think they'd choose? I wager they would immediately choose Norway.
We also have a much more diverse population than Norway, so if anything, US should be looking towards us for inspiration.
Or you could say that it's an appeal to numerous studies (psychological and sociological), most of human history, and prudence...
Instead of using race as the example, let's use language.
You have three people. Two have spoken English their entire lives. The third grew up speaking French and learned English later.
They need to do something really hard to get right, something easy to mess up. Mistakes come at a high cost.
When the two English speakers work together, things work. They go smoothly. They can manage to overcome challenges and meet goals.
When they try to work with the French speaker, you see a lot more problems. It's frustrating. He does things they didn't expect. It is easy to feel like he's intentionally screwing things up.
Homogeneous demographic groups have an easier time all being on the same page. They spend less time and effort trying to bridge differences in experience, attitude, etc.
You get ugly terms like Mansplaining and Whitesplaining because "privileged" people -- people for whom life has tended to work -- often feel that their life works because they were taught the right information and if people who are having a hard time just had the same info, their life would also work. And then the person getting the info gets mad because they feel like they are being treated like they are stupid and not trying rather than like their life actually works differently because they are different and the world treats them differently.
It's all white people.
Sorry to be so glib, but I don't think I've ever seen "homogenous" used by someone who wasn't engaged in at least borderline racist dog whistling. The entire idea of it is based on the notion that people cannot successfully mix together, and therefore should not try.
Frontline did a report on people on parole. It’s a punishing system, even when you’re out of the systems you’re usually one drink away from being thrown back in
It’s a very good example of something where all the individual players are trying, but so much of how the system works makes results be harsh and cruel
-former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
https://www-m.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-ri...
As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:
>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).
If the quote was said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
http://www.samefacts.com/2011/06/drug-policy/who-started-the...
High recidivism (shows it's at least a failure), focus on punishment (mandatory minimums, etc...) for things like drug possession, cruel bail system, "tough on crime" judges, legalized prison slavery, heavy use of solitary confinement, outright criminal levels of cruelty, normalized prison rape, stigmatization of felons, etc...
They had prisoners fight california wildfires for slave wages. They justified it as it was voluntary and they were learning a skill.
Felons can't become firefighters in california.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so consistently that I've banned this account until we get some indication that you sincerely want to use HN as intended.
(I am black)
And even if some revolutionary discovery was made to help treat stunted IQs, prisons are probably not the place one would want to start. The IQ gap holds between populations of all classes and socioeconomic condition. You open yourself to missing the true effectiveness of such a monumental discovery due to confounding biases within the prison population. The possibility, if not probability, of coercion upon experimental "treatment" towards prisoners is also probably something we ought probably prefer to avoid.
Said a different way, is IQ relevant to the discussion? Why do you keep bringing it up?
I still can't see where you've presented evidence that IQ measures have an impact on a prisoners ability to be rehabilitated. This is the crux of your entire argument.
Or you know, you could use a reliable source of information to counter their argument instead of using the same crap to try (and fail) to prove a point..
Also keep in mind that troglodytes like the racist in the room exist to waste the time of decent people. Doing actual research to beat on them means that they win.
Fight the welfare state and toss black moms into prison because they lied to send their kid to a better school (IIRC, 5 years. for lying about her address). Meanwhile rich white people are photoshopping their kids faces onto athletes.
Fund schools with property taxes. Oh look, those mcmansion filled suburbs have better schools.
Fight bussing (thanks Biden). Criticize the south for resisting integration while NY has the most segregated schools in the country.
Extol the virtues of the great charter schools and lottery systems, while the rest of the kids are stuck in shit.
Different actions can be criticized for different reasons. A quick google search shows that nobody is ignoring the segregation in NY schools [1]. In fact, how did you find out about it if it is being ignored?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=segrega...
People don't commit violent crimes for weed. The crime is having weed. And things that are not weed are not being legalized state-by-state.
So I'm saying that it in many cases, the problem isn't so much that prison is a failure as a rehabilitation center and we should focus on rehabilitation elsewhere, it's that people are in prison for things they simply don't want to be rehabilitated for and have strong influences to continue doing. The culture is inherently resistant to being rehabilitated from things that it doesn't consider harmful.
To use an example that might be more neutral, what if copyright enforcement was more severe and we had half a million people in prison for watching unlicensed YouTube videos? We might analyze the failure of the prison system in rehabilitating people from watching the wrong streams and focus more on education so that people could identify properly licened content before they watched it. But unless the people actually considered this behavior harmful, it would be an impossible task, and we would see ever increasing numbers of people in prison for watching the wrong videos.
But we also have very high recidivism rates for stuff like "armed robbery", independent of social-issue crimes like marijuana possession. And society generally has an Opinion about armed robbery. (It's bad!)
Go to prison for weed. Get out. Realize how fucked things are now that you're a felon on parole.
In my view, these are the real dynamos of the 'criminal world', where predatory traits are baked into their behavior patterns at a lower level. There are compelling opportunities for more research here (https://modlab.yale.edu/news/can-psychopaths-be-cured) and isolating variables is a good way to help move things forward.
This is very true. As an example, recidivism in Sweden is around 40%[0], compared to around 68%[1] in the states.
[0] - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...
Anders Breivik got 21 years for killing 77 people. Are you worried about when he gets out in 2033?
Norwegian law opens for in essence indefinite terms for inmates deemed a lasting danger to society.
ABB was sentenced under this statute and may well be locked up for the rest of his days; he may, however, at regular intervals apply to a board for release. He must then convince this board that he is no longer a threat to society and good luck with that.
Focusing on what (to you, as an outsider) seems to be outlandish is honoring the breach rather than the observance.
And unlike, say, the United States--there's only been one of him. This country has folks trying for high scores on a very regular basis. (Remember Las Vegas? That was 18 months ago. 59 deaths.)
Perhaps it is worth looking at trends and impacts rather than media splashes.
He'll also be under close supervision.
Steal items worth 12 pence? Hanged. Lesser amount? Cut a hand off. If lucky, commuted and deported for indentured servitude in the colonies. Treason? Hanged, drawn and quartered.
As we remember from history classes, stealing, murder and other crime ceased to exist by the 17th century. Oh, hang on a minute. It was so ineffective that juries started nullifying and deliberately under-valuing property to avoid the incessant death penalties. It was just yet another means to oppress the lower orders. Unsurprisingly much of the 18th century consisted of successive legal reforms.
What works? Not prisons, not punishment, but rehabilitation. proven time and time and time again. Not very popular with the hang 'em and flog 'em types on the right though.
And the left. Tough on crime gets any politician elected.
Prisons & harsh punishment seems to work quite well in Singapore; they have one of the lowest crime rate in the world.
It makes a difference when comparing justice systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_the_Legal_systems_...
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It was laws falling into disrepute with both the profession and juries, and transportation becoming the majority that led to much of the 18th century legal reforms that removed nearly all the capital offences.
WHAT!
> Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?
WHAT! Mind sharing some sources?
IMHO you have it completely backwards.
I can point to plenty of European countries (Norway, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) that focus on rehabilitation, not punishment.
Their recidivism and overall crime-rates rates are significantly lower than in the US and their prisons don't look like 3rd world shitholes.
They blow the US out of the water on every metric. If anything has failed (and spectacularly so), it's the idea that focusing your prison system on punishment works.
I can't fathom what gave you a different idea.
It has not failed, because it is not, and has never been, in any meaningful sense, the goal of any of the American criminal justice systems.
Specifically, none of them have been in any substantive way been designed around any evidence of what does or does not work in terms of rehabilitation.
The US criminal justice systems focus on retribution and demonstration of moral outrage, not rehabilitation.
This is a blanket statement and not realistic. I've been through the system and knew a lot of guys who abhorred becoming institutional criminals.
Please cite sources to support your claim.
Not really true:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/
Totally comparable to the US, Norway being an exception (as usual).
> They blow the US out of the water on every metric.
The US is a very large and diverse country and it's not structurally comparable to Germany, Netherlands and much less Norway (with 22% of GDP being oil exports). That would be cherry-picking. To draw any conclusions on the effectiveness of incarceration would require more careful analysis.
> I can't fathom what gave you a different idea.
Crime statistics and crime aren't the same thing. The point of prison sentences is no just punishment, it's deterrence. If you rarely convict anybody, your prisoner's rate is low, but the criminals are out on the street knowing they have nothing to fear.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/16...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-traffickin...
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/finance/gangsters-paradis...
Let's fact-check some of their numbers.
Spoiler Alert: Their cited sources have completely different numbers.
EDIT: I removed some examples that are probably correct according to their definition of recidivism (they only looked at prisoners -> offenders).
Table 2.
Germany 35% (them) vs 23% (source)
They may have linked the wrong source here, since the source they provided is specific to people with psychotic disorders.
So let's assume this is their source (the one they linked for Germany in Table 1): https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Publikationen/DE/Legalbewaehr...
According to them the re-imprisonment rate is 35%, though the source says it's 23% (page 9, first paragraph).
The re-imprisonment rate for juvenile offenders is 35% though and mentioned in the same paragraph. It's likely they just confused that.
> Netherlands 48% (them) vs 27.6% (source): Fact Check Failed
They picked the number of "ex-prisoners" that become prisoners again (i.e. actual reconviction), you picked the number of "adult offenders" that become prisoners for the first time. You literally just picked the lowest number in the table without comprehending it. The correct number (48.5%) was right above.
> Germany 48% (them) vs 35% (source): Fact Check Failed
35% is the average including fines (recidivism: 29%) which make up for the vast majority of sentences. For adult prison sentences the recidivism rate is 45%/39% and for youth prison sentences it is 64%/62% (without/with parole).
Though I added something I previously excluded for Table 2, which I'm still unable to find in their sources.
About your reading of the sources though:
> They picked the number of "ex-prisoners" that become prisoners again (i.e. actual reconviction)
No that would be Table 2, not Table 1. Table 1 is about "ex-prisoners" that got convicted of any offense again, not necessarily a prison sentence.
> you picked the number of "adult offenders" that become prisoners for the first time.
That's not what Table 5.1 [1] is at all: "Reconvictions as a result of any crime, not disposed of through an acquittal, a dismissal by reason of unlikelihood of conviction, or any other technical decision."
> 35% is the average including fines (recidivism: 29%) which make up for the vast majority of sentences. For adult prison sentences the recidivism rate is 45%/39% and for youth prison sentences it is 64%/62% (without/with parole).
Yes. This is where I messed up. Though note that that recidivism rate (45%) is "ex-prisoner" -> any conviction (incl. fines). Which likely fits what they wanted to show in Table 1.
[1]: https://www.wodc.nl/binaries/factsheet-2011-5a-def-4apr2012-...
The source given indeed seems to be incorrect.
> No that would be Table 2, not Table 1. Table 1 is about "ex-prisoners" that got convicted of any offense again, not necessarily a prison sentence.
Fair enough but that was my mistaken wording, the table in the source still correctly differentiates between conviction and re-imprisonment.
In any event, I remain unconvinced that these rates are substantially better compared to the rates in the US, especially considering how difficult these numbers are to compare.
Peter is imprisoned in the NT c.30 CE.
Perhaps you meant incarceration with a view to rehabilitation?
Egypt would be in a good situation for that given seasonality and nile flooding giving better yields.
Newer evidence strongly suggests the exodus took place during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (c. 1450), dating Joseph’s deportation and rise to power at roughly 1900 BCE.
One developed PTSD from it and has had major issues since he was released 15 years ago. The other one hasn't quite came back mentally either, will not talk about it and is so much worse off now than ever. After he was released, but before his court date where he knew he wasn't going to have to go back, he was contemplating suicide.
They all said they would rather die than ever go back for any significant time. I'm not sure what significant means in that respect, but dying seems to be the general theme they share now.
After working at a jail for a bit, I'm not sure I blame them at all. I like to think I'm mentally strong, but I don't know how long I could do it. I am sure I would have the same mentality they do now after spending time in jail / prison.
I spent 7 years in prison, most of it in a maximum security facility. I once spent 3 straight weeks on 23 hours cell confinement - no tv, no books, no other people aside from a guard walking by doing rounds. The other 1 hour was allowed in essentially just a larger cell.
I've known many other inmates - before, during, and after incarceration. No one was keen on going back, but I don't know anyone who developed any significant PTSD from their experiences, and no one who would choose literally death over re-incarceration.
I did know one guy who got PTSD after being shot 7 times by the police for trying to drive away from them. None from being in jail for a few months, though.
So which punishment is more humane? Turns out we are picking for the experience of "the innocent" not for the rights of the "guilty".
In these lines I have commented before: the main moral issue of modern prison systems is that they don't value liberty, so merely taking away someones liberty does not quench the thirst of revenge that pays off for the politician rhetoric.
I absolutely believe that there is room for something innovative to be done here, but I don't think it has anything to do with incarceration.
I do think a UBI (basic income) would reduce crime enormously, if it were confiscated when they are in prison. It would be a powerful economic incentive.
Done properly, it could provide a strong incentive not to commit crimes. I have little faith that it would ever be done properly.
Remember most petty criminals make less than minimum wage.
Which direction is the causation? Do they steal because they are poor? Are they poor because they have bad behavior, such as stealing? Or is both stealing and low wage caused by a common factor, such as mental illness?
https://outlookzen.com/2016/06/18/we-need-cruel-and-unusual-...
I thought the goal was to make the most money off of minorities?
America is pretty close to the bottom of the pile when it comes to their justice and incarceration system, to the point that their allies are actually refusing extradition requests on account that "US prisons are unconscionable and medieval." [1]
The very idea of locking someone up for more than 10-15 years is crazy enough. Add in the bail system, plea bargains, elected judges, understaffed public defenders, civil forfeiture, private prisons, prison labor, disenfranchisement, onerous and obtuse probation conditions, pre-trial incarceration (this is the absolute worst), and you have a system that actively causes injustice at every turn, and ensures high recidivism by producing a population with nothing to lose, nothing to live for, and the sword of Damocles ever hanging over them.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/british-hacker-wont-be-extradited-to-the...
I've heard over and over again, in the words of criminals themselves (on podcasts, in new stories), that they got into the career part of being a criminal while behind bars.
I've heard it a lot, too. But "a lot" means still less than 100 times. There are millions of prisoners.
Not saying it isn't the case, just saying I'd like to have more data.
From comments read on the Internet it seems there are plenty of differences between American and European prisons, even more to the Northen European countries.
There they seem to be able to rehabilitate the people (most of the time), unlike other places.
I think it doesn't help the depiction of prisons in fiction as a place where the strong thrive, full of contained violence, bribes and all the debauchery humanity is capable of.
I don't think American prisons rehabilitate. Insisting that they do even less is like the extreme capitalistic measures of cutting public funding for a function, and then demand that that function should be privatized because it doesn't work.
If I had to guess, I would say that prisons, in general, don’t rehabilitate. They just isolate for society’s protection because no one has a good idea of how to fix people that has effectiveness efficacy.
My comment above did not intend to convey that the US has great prisons or that other countries have great prisons. I meant that recidivism is bad and too many criminals come back into the prison system.
Can the US improve? Of course. Can the US learn from other countries? Of course. Is rehabilitating criminals a solved problem that the US is ignoring? No.
I think 20% is too high, even though it’s better than 30%.
Citation please? For serial murderers or serial rapists - OK. Probably a screw loose. For drug abusers and the associated foibles that go with it (theft, prostitution, etc) - why would you suggest rehabilitation can't work?
That's ignoring the societal pressures of kids who have no means to sustain themselves beyond illegal activities - just assuming that they wouldn't act different if given the choice is... quite pessimistic.
I agree until this point you made.
We know the "modern prison system" is a very loose term dictated by "where" much more than just an abstract idea. In places like the Netherlands they have so few prisoners they had to close down prisons.
There are certainly a group of people who cannot be easily re-introduced to society: People who commit premeditated murder, rapists, pedophiles, serial killers, mass-murderers, terrorists. But this accounts for a fairly small percent of the prison population.
Most prisoners can fall into a few categories: Stupid, No other means of decent survival, Drugs.
I'll tackle these in order of ease:
- Drugs - This has been shown to be the easiest to solve. Giving prisoners the option of avoiding their entire sentence in exchange for rehab and support group attendance has been INCREDIBLY effective.
- No other means of decent survival - A.k.a. poverty. This feeds the drug problem too. People need: Food, Shelter, Entertainment. Boredom is the cause of too many kids, drug use, and theft of goods. Giving these people a decent base education and job placement programs can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
- Stupid - This can cause the other problems too, but I include in here a lack of self control. Many times this can be solved with education, job placement, emotional control education, etc. There are ways to rehabilitate these people into society.
Instead of everything I said, we treat marijuana arrests in the USA worse than many cases of murder, rape, fraud. We need sane laws here.
Furthermore the real criminals that cause a ton of subsequent crime is financial fraudsters. We call it "white collar criminals" who get at best a slap on the wrists -- Steal 20 mil? Go to jail for a few years. Have a bag of weed? Go to jail for 10 years. These white collar criminals are the ones that need punishment the most. They cause so much subsequent crime, and they always believe they both deserve what they do and can get away with it. These are the ones we need to lock away for the longest of times.
And finally the privatization of prisons. So much on that. But basically, if you run a prison as a business, it is 100% not in your interest to prevent future crime, but rather to ensure the prisoners (your cash cows) never leave.
Even the best examples aren't great. From random study I just googled:
The 2-year re-arrest rates ranged from 26% (Singapore) to 60% (USA), two-year reconviction rates ranged from 20% (Norway) to 63% (Denmark), and two-year reimprisonment rates ranged from 14% (USA – Oregon) to 43% (Canada – Quebec, New Zealand)
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/4-28/v1
That's recidivism over just 2 years, and I suppose some people commit crimes and don't get caught.
My point is that it seems we should be doing better. Maybe Norway is a model, maybe oregon. Anyone know what Oregon do different?
most people committing murder fall in the following categories:
- they premeditated and thought they were NOT going to be caught, so prison isn't a deterrent. They thought they were smarter than forensics.
- they were in a situation and had to kill someone due to circumstances of the other crime. Such as robbing a store, the clerk pulls a gun, now you gotta shoot them before you die. This was a massive lack of foresight and thus again punishment isn't a deterrent because they don't think things though.
- they were angry and it got out of hand. No foresight, they acted on pure emotion. This may be anger issues or other reasons. There is no deterrent here, only rehabilitation.
- political / hate-based killings. These people feel they are doing society a favor, they feel RIGHT to do this killing. Deterrent doesn't help if the political climate is empowering them and making their message amplified.
Now just imagine how much crime is in similar categories as above. The same logic applies.
So basically we need to focus entirely on prison time being a rehabilitation to: make the person understand and accept what they have done. make the person feel genuine remorse. make sure the person has alternatives in life to doing what caused the problem to begin with. Most places in the world focus more on "remove the undesireables" and "punishment is future deterrent". So really we're doing literally the opposite.
US's 60% re-arrest rate is very telling.
My ideal solution would be something like this: end the war on drugs, make community service a part of as many sentences as at all possible (and certainly all white collar crimes), then separate the component that are dangerous in such a way that they will have no contact with any other prisoner, so that they don't learn to be better criminals. These are the people which we will have to give up on.
Of course this proposal is politically impossible, as it pisses of all sides, but it should be possible to at least increase the number of community service sentences.
We could actually work towards reducing crime, but we as a society want punishment too much to allow it.
What's also funny about this is that it used to be that the colleges that cost the most money were the most prestigious. Now an inmate can claim that same level of prestige tongue in cheek.
They might not have imprisoned as many people as the US, especially for petty things.
> The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment,
> Those punishments are cruel and inhumane
The US has legalized slavery for prisoners.
> At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
Rehabilitation is not the focus.
> Prison startup?
Gross. America has too much money made off prisons already.
Other places have rehabilitation, and it appears to work.
We don't need another CCA.
[0]https://www.cio.com/article/2417888/prison-labor--outsourcin...
Calling labor as punishment "actual slavery" is incredibly dismissive of actual slaves.
All of these individually are features of historical systems uncontroversially identified as slavery. The particular form of penal slavery at issue may be unique in combining all of them, but I don't see any coherent argument why that would make it into not-slavery.
You are dimly correct in that it is not identical to every other form of slavery practiced historically. But it's close enough for me--and I can only speculate as to your motives for splitting this hair.
They used to do it in the Soviet Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka).
Not exactly aeron chairs and ping pong tables, but way better than the regular prison camp.
California paid inmates fighting fires a dollar an hour.
It depends on your definition of immoral...
People in prison eat what they're given, sleep when they're told, have (almost) no personal property and are at mercy of the administration on many other issues.
Work is one of the greatest things a human being can do. Working doesn't make an otherwise free person a slave.
You mean, people who confuse forced work with slavery.
If I stop working, I'll get kicked out of my house and will probably die of hunger. Does it mean I am forced to work?
Absolutely yes. You told it yourself, if you stop working you're going to die from hunger. In what sense can you argue "you're free not to work"?
It looks like you’re in the US. You’d have to try quite hard to die of malnutrition here.
Back to your point though: isn't it ironical then that pretty much the only place where a person is not "forced" to work is prison? How's that ever fair?
This is such a bad argument in my opinion...living is working...it might not be at a job in an office, but if you want to eat/drink/shelter, you're going to have to work one way or the other...your question kinda seems like complaining about the fact that consuming calories and water and making shelter to live is not forced already, when it is by nature...
> 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.
Prison labor is literally slavery.
I just didn't expect it to kick in so early in the discussion.
You are like the bad guy from Thor Ragnarok. "I don't like to call them slaves, they're prisoners with jobs"
Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment...
Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn't have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to "hard labour" in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes.
The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they'd rehabilitate (reform) people.
I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
We're stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?
Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts/lawyers), we can do something more useful.
Prison startup?