The Constitution says you can be made to do labor if you’re imprisoned, but voters in five states will decide whether working prisoners are actually slaves. Should we put an end to prison industries, or does having a job in jail teach the dignity of work, and prepare convicts for return to the free world?
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24 replies on “Slavery Abolition on the Ballot in 5 States: Are Working Prisoners Actually Slaves?”
“does having a job in jail teach the dignity of work, and prepare convicts for return to the free world? ”
You mean, prepare them to be wage slaves to the patriarchy? Never! Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but you’re chains!
(and your iPhones, electric lights, decent food at affordable prices, gas powered cars…)
Heaven forbid that prison prepare criminals to be productive members of society. That would go against every tenet of the
Democra(ptast)tic Party!
Seems like a no-brainer .
Steve forgot to list the most important constituency in the Demonrat coalition: the cadaver vote. That DID provide their margin of victory in 2020.
And their ranks grow everyday.
Yes. That’s why the Demonrat Coven is the party of death. Everything they believe in and stand for promotes death. From abortion, to euthanasia, to pro-criminal, to the pervert deathstyle, to environmental whacko extremism, to the genital mutilation of our teens, the Demonrat Coven celebrates death. They are mass murderers (and natural liars), just like their father, the Devil.
Requiring work while incarcerated is not illegal.
My experience in interviewing and general conversations with prisoners and ex-cons is they want to work for several reasons. Prison is boring, having a prison job helps pass the time. Very few prisoners have friends or family on the outside that can send them money to buy things from the commissary. Work gets them a little bit of money to buy things they want.
Wages, tiny wages, (5 – 25 cents an hour) are paid to prisoners to do work the prison needs done, work that can be done by prisoners without having to pay someone to come in and work at union scale wages (most guards, teachers, electricians, mechanics etc. that work in prisons are union).
This amounts to a considerable savings that offsets the cost of incarceration. A savings that evaporates if prisoners are not required/allowed to work.
So I can’t help but think that the majority of prisoners themselves are more apt to want some sort of prison job than not. No matter if that’s making license plates, working in the laundry or cafeteria, or anything else. This idea of ‘freeing’ prisoners from labor is ‘maladaptive behavior’ as I explained in another post on this page.
I think this can be expanded to the general population of homo sapien. We are both social and active people. Most people, even when they reach a point where they don’t HAVE to work, will still do something. Retirees will do something to keep busy (volunteer at church, WalMart greeter, etc.) We have a drive within us to DO, not to be idle. Even when most people go on VACATION, they DO stuff.
No one is truly fulfilled by a life of leisure. I would contend that those who say that they are content to hang around in mom and dad’s basement all day are doing SOMETHING, even if that is playing call of duty or on-line troublemaking or something else unproductive (like commenting on videos 😉 ). Very few are vedging out all day and those that are doing so are likely depressed or some other mental condition.
My point is we are meant to DO.
Taking that away from someone; well you can make an arguement that that is a type of cruel and unusual punishment.
That is why working in a prison situation is an earned benefit. And one of the first things taking away for poor prison behavior.
Exactly so. Forced idleness is worse than forced activity. Prisoners in solitary confinement are the apex of forced idleness. The’re allowed out of their cells for a very brief period every day for ‘exercise’. It’s not that solitude is such a terrible punishment, it’s the idleness that comes with the solitude that makes it a significant punishment. They’re kept by themselves, true, but they’re fed the worst stuff that will still sustain a human being, denied any commissary or personal possessions and denied books, television or any other source of distraction. I’m not sure but I don’t think they even let them have a Bible to pass the time with. They pretty much get to sit in their cell all day and contemplate whether whatever they did was worth the cost.
I don’t know about criminal minds but I know my mind would hate that really, really badly.
On the other end of that spectrum it was well known in Kalifornia when I lived there that “Fire Camp” was the very best possible way to do time. Prisoners at Fire Camp get fed much better, live in barracks instead of prison pods, get outdoors to do things all day long whether there is a fire to fight or not, and generally are on their very best behavior so that they don’t get ejected from Fire Camp and sent back to a cell somewhere.
Thus the epitome of productive and preferable prison time is to get into Fire Camp and work at arduous, menial labor all day every day but (Sunday? Don’t know, just assuming.)
So what the hell are these idiotic legislators thinking by taking away work because it’s “slavery”?
Well, just like everything else those people do, it’s not for the benefit of the ‘victim’ they’re pretending to champion. It’s for their own benefit and no one else’s.
Really hope that is a rhetorical question. The only thing most of them think about is how will this help me get re-elected.
Which is exactly what I said in the last paragraph of my post. We are in agreement. They have no desire to improve anything at all, they only want to maintain their political power by offering America maladaptive behavior disguised as kindness.
There’s a better solution: BANISHMENT.
Institute a point system – more heinous crimes earn more points. After the criminal reaches, say, 100 points they’re banished from the country. After a trial we don’t have to provide for the inmate’s needs in jail. No – the judge simply informs the criminal how many points they now have. When they reach 100 points they need to find a country that will accept them. That would be more terrifying than three hots and a cot. Their problem is no longer our problem.
Yeah … We already discussed that. There’s no place to banish anyone to. There’s no such thing as an escape proof island that isn’t surrounded by mines, guards and wire — Which is just another sort of prison by definition. No other country is going to take our criminals, we have some of the worst criminals in the world and the world would just ship them right back to us.
The Brits tried to use Australia for that very purpose. It got to the point of shipping first offenders to Australia (they were called “Transportees”) for something as simple as stealing a loaf of bread or even less. Some were sold into indentures from workhouses in Britain so that wealthy landowners in Australia had virtual slaves. Transportees were transported to get rid of them in Britain and supply forced labor in Australia.
Britain didn’t materially improve and the forced labor didn’t labor worth spit. Crime wasn’t substantially reduced in Britain and Australia had a serious criminal problem for a century afterwards.
Pretty much any sort of power that absolute is going to be abused. Badly.
Can you imagine if we had banishment where Donald Trump might be right now after a Democrat takeover of our government? The Left would LOVE banishment, they would do their best to send all of us there if they ever amassed enough power to make it happen.
It’s a pleasant daydream to think of dumping society’s worst somewhere else to fend for themselves but it’s just not feasible to do so and it’s a huge risk for the biter to be bit.
If it was fair and just and infallible I’d be OK with a capital punishment system that ended in death after a certain score plateau was reached but … There’s no possibility of “fair and just and infallible”. I have no problem with people dying as long as it’s the right people but there is no way to ensure that. Dumping someone off where they have no resources is simply a slow death sentence which assures only the very worst of the worst will survive to become even worse monsters.
Might as well just kill them and be done with it rather than some dangerous banishment scheme.
People get sentenced now to ridiculous prison terms because the prosecutor’s are highly incentivised to go for “strikes” whether the intent of the law is satisfied or not. One guy in Kalifornia was sentenced to life in prison because he took a slice of pizza off the table of some people who had paid for the pizza. He had two strikes already and that was his third. For a slice of pizza. Because “we can do that to you and you can’t do a thing to stop us”.
He appealed his sentence, btw. Appeals are concerned with what’s legal, not what is fair, just and reasonable. He lost.
Yeah, he shouldn’t have taken that slice of pizza. Yeah, he shouldn’t have done whatever he did to get the first two strikes. I’m not taking his side, he’s a POS. I’m saying if they can send someone to prison for life over a slice of pizza they can find ways to do the same to you or me for whatever justification they are able to drum up.
Be careful not to mix up justice and meanness. One of the biggest mistakes the Democrat Left makes is forgetting that eventually the tables will be turned on them. I.E. Harry Reid’s ‘nuclear rule’ in the Senate is what made possible a Conservative SCOTUS. If we indulge in the same shortsightedness, we’re arming our political enemies for our own destruction. Better they do that so we can use it against them than we do it so they can use it against us.
The Patriot Act is another fine example of stupidity. It worked OK, not well but just barely OK, as long as conservatives who respected the intent and spirit of the law were in power. As soon as Obama took office he turned it into a legal weapon to use against his political enemies. Which is exactly what I and a lot of other people warned would happen if we gave the government that kind of power. It’s still being used as a partisan weapon today. That’s one of the things that has totally corrupted the FBI and the intentions were good. The real life practice turned out to be not so good.
Banishment is a pipe dream at best and could turn into a monster at worst. For the sake of everything Holy don’t give them something like banishment to use against us.
Years ago an associate of mine said he thought we should pay Mexico to take our prisoners. We could empty our prisons and pay Mexico far less than what it costs to house, feed, and clothe our inmates during their incarceration. It sounds like a win-win, but I’m sure that friends and family not being able to visit would be considered “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Mexico is thoroughly corrupt. Mexico would gladly take our money … and let the ‘prisoners’ escape — With a cartel recruiter (or one of their cartel buddies) waiting for them outside the prison gate as they ‘escape’.
A very significant percentage of our prison inmates are already Hispanic gang members with their gang’s actual command and control structure in Mexico.
Mexican prisons are very different than American prisons. There are very few criminals that had they enough money couldn’t buy their way out of a Mexican prison. Short of the rather large sum of money it would take to buy an escape, anything a criminal might want can be had in a Mexican prison including food, drugs, cell phones, prostitutes and guns. For the right price.
We can’t keep Mexicans and other Hispanics out of the U.S. as it is. Mexico refuses to keep its borders secure either from intrusions of people heading for the U.S. or from people crossing into the U.S. from Mexico. Those ‘prisoners’ would be right back here before you could say “killer”.
I mean you nor your associate any offense but the idea of paying Mexico to take our prisoners simply exhibits a lack of understanding regarding how things work in Mexico. I could say a lot more on that topic but you’re smart and I’m sure you get the idea.
There just is no reliable way to ‘throw away’ our society’s criminal element and be rid of them. Except execution* of course. Which is a lasting solution but one too many Americans would not support. Anything else pretty much amplifies the problem rather than ending it.
*(Back when a really good horse could be bought for $50 — and that sum was worth a lot more than today — we used to hang horse thieves. Not because of the value of the horse, rather because stealing a mans horse could easily lead to his death or destitution. This and other capital offenses that were not related to the actual murder of a human being had the effect of drastically thinning out the criminal element in society. If a man would steal your horse, he would kill you if he felt he had to. Because he was already willing to risk hanging to procure an animal it’s not much of a stretch for him to kill you and risk hanging too. The idea back then was to set tripwires in the law that would expose a person’s antisocial behavior and punish him severely for it, or remove him from society altogether. I think we made a mistake moving away from that sort of thing.)
Of course, you’re right again. He told me this idea about 30 years ago and I thought it might be a sufficient deterrent to prevent would-be criminals from committing crimes. Who would want to risk serving their sentence in Mexico where they would have few, if any, rights? If anything, the cartels’ influence and Mexican government corruption have only intensified. Naw, it wouldn’t work at all.
Sorry, didn’t mean to pop any bubbles but this is something I’ve put considerable thought into.
I watched the movies “Escape from New York” and “Escape from L.A.”, read Heinlein’s “Coventry”, read Rachel Cusk’s ideas on the subject (not very relevant) and everything else I could find on the topic of abandoning or designating an area as a place of exile or banishment, walling it off and leaving those behind the wall to fend for themselves. Then tossing criminals in there as a punishment. It just won’t work. Neither will sending our bad guys to any other jurisdiction on the planet.
It’s a fun thought experiment but an unworkable concept in real life.
At the end of the day execution is simpler and perhaps kinder. You wouldn’t want to send anyone to Coventry that you would feel a death sentence is inappropriate for. It just ends up being a way to kill people without having to do the killing ourselves directly.
Those that are not killed end up worse monsters than they started out as.
As far as shipping our criminals elsewhere around the world goes …
Sitting on a beach in Southern France many decades ago I had a conversation with a very intelligent impressive young black African man from Kenya. The subject of Abraham Lincoln’s effort to repatriate Africans and the creation of the nation of Liberia came up. This guy was pretty solid on his views regarding sending malcontent black Americans back to Africa. He said …
“Africa has enough problems without that. The last thing we need is your American (this guy was black remember, he used “the ‘n’ word” here) adding to the troubles we already have.”
The young man and his words impressed me enough that I’ve never forgotten him or them.
It is my informed opinion that if you substituted criminals for black Americans the attitude would be the same anywhere in the world. No one is interested in having our social trash dumped on their hands. I can’t say as I blame them one bit for that.
Also —
Bear in mind that criminals don’t think that way. Very, very few criminals factor the consequences of getting caught and punished into the decision making process for whether to commit a crime or not.
They don’t believe they will be caught and if they did they probably wouldn’t do whatever it is they’re doing in the first place. They always structure the perpetration of their crimes to avoid the possibility of capture and punishment to the greatest degree they can manage. Then they act on that plan with the assumption they won’t be caught.
Deterrence has very little effect on such thinking. Right minded upstanding law-abiding citizens think that way, not criminals. You or I might see an opportunity to gain by some illegal action and then pass it up because the risk of being caught and punished deters us. A criminal mind just does not work like that.
If you’re going to fight criminals and criminality you have to understand your enemy. Locks only keep out honest people.
All of us Heinlein fans are familiar with Heinlein’s “Crazy Years”. Science Fiction writers John C. Wright and Sarah Hoyt summed up the “Crazy Years” phenomena as described by Robert A. Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt very succinctly. See if this sounds familiar —
“Craziness can be measured by maladaptive behavior. The behavior the society uses to solve one kind of problem, when applied to an incorrect category, disorients it. When this happens the whole society, even if some members are aware of the disorientation, cannot reach the correct conclusion, or react in a fashion that preserves society from harm. As if society were a dolphin that called itself a fish: when it suffered the sensation of drowning, it would dive. But a dolphin is a mammal, a member of a different category of being. When dolphins are low on air, they surface, rather than dive. Putting yourself in the wrong category leads to the wrong behavior.”
And hey, Scott Ott? Yeah this is one of the reasons to read and be familiar with Science Fiction. Reading non-fiction is important too, but reading speculative fiction is also a vital part of educating yourself.
Years ago a friend of mine once asked me how many books I thought I had read. At that time I did a shirtsleeve estimate and came up with the figure of around 25,000 books. That spans the gamut from Readers Digest Condensed Books to an entire encyclopedia. (My parents had a hell of a time keeping me in reading material and subscribed to the Reader’s Digest Condensed books as part of the solution. I couldn’t wait for that new book to arrive every month.) I’ve read many more books in the intervening years. There’s just no way that you can read that many books and not learn something. A part of what you learn is to recognize and anticipate trends and where those trends might lead to.
I am what is known as a ‘voracious reader’. I read non-fiction for information. I read speculative or Science Fiction for entertainment. The fiction has the added benefit of educating me while I’m being entertained. Non-fiction gives you hard data, fiction broadens your horizons and the scope in which to apply that data. Science Fiction broadens your horizons in all dimensions of space and time. One sort of reading compliments the other.
I have often wonered if Coventry were a possible solution. Don’t want to be a contributing member of our society; here’s the door.
Just so many ways to abuse it.
And isn’t that essentially what Britain tried with Australia?
Yes, Britain tried that with Australia and it didn’t materially improve the situation in Britain at all. Australia wasn’t a true “Coventry” because there were British troops and officials making a rigorous attempt to keep order in Australia. In an actual true Coventry there is no one to maintain order other than the most ruthless, powerful residents. Somalia is a good example of what you get under that kind of system.
Essentially every modern day prison is a mini-Coventry. With a minimum of supervision in most cases. There are two kinds of prison. There are the hard core full security penitentiaries where prisoners have little hope of ever seeing the outside again and there are the ‘go home yards’ with medium and low security.
When most people think of prison they think of the hard core penitentiaries. Those are nasty places. The guards turn a blind eye to much of the violence in those prisons as long as it does not threaten prison security. Meaning it does not threaten the guards or make escape possible. Those prisons are sub-managed by prison gangs delineated by race. The Hispanic, White, Black and “Other” gangs all vie for power with many of the guards taking payoffs from those gangs from outside sources. That’s how cell phones, drugs, weapons and other contraband get inside prison walls.
A common problem there is that inmates are forced to do things to survive that increase their sentences or at the very least reduce their time off for good behavior. Once an inmate hits one of those institutions it doesn’t take long for him to realize he may never go home again. Indeed, if he doesn’t do as ordered by whatever race gang he is forced into by the color of his skin he may not only never see home again, he very well may not survive the coming days and weeks. The latest statistics I could find puts the prison murder rate many multiples above the national average. Penitentiaries are a good place to go if you want to die.
Real penitentiaries thus have the problem of behavior not being based on the idea of completing a sentence and getting out but rather surviving the day-to-day prison environment.
The medium and low security institutions give a prisoner a much, much higher chance of ‘going home’ so the prisoners in those places tend to be better behaved because they want to complete their sentences in minimum time and be released. Of course the lesser risks are assigned to those institutions so if you consider the spectrum of types of offenders the less dangerous types are assigned to those facilities too. (Also some state systems downgrade a prisoner’s security threat over time and as more ‘good’ time in a penitentiary is completed the more likely that prisoner is to be transferred to a lower security facility.)
The reason I’m pointing all this out is to show why penitentiaries are actually already mini-Conventries and a banishment from society. A 5 year sentence imposed by the courts has a significant probability to be a death sentence in real world application.
Don’t think for a minute I’m sympathizing with those assholes. Most of the people in a penitentiary belong there and deserve whatever happens to them. I’m just describing the situation. If I have any sympathy at all for those people it would be for the ones who are not fully deserving of that kind of environment but as far as I know, those are a tiny minority of penitentiary populations.
The situation would be even worse in an actual Coventry where there is no imposition of order at all. You might as well sentence people to death as Coventry. The only people surviving in Coventry would be the very worst of the worst and the argument for a death sentence for those types is even stronger.
With those conditions extant it’s not at all surprising that the prisoners who survive penitentiaries emerge as full blown hard cases willing to do whatever it takes to feed their appetites without a thought given to societal norms.
Whatever manages to survive something like Coventry would be even worse. The same goes for unsupervised banishment to something like an inescapable island. Which is for all practical purposes both prison and Coventry at the root.
This discussion reminds me of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The purpose of his visit to America from France was to study the prison system, and one of the key elements in coming was that here the word used was “penitentiary”, that is, that prison was designed to create a “penitent” attitude with the eventual return to society after paying one’s debts, as Scott said. Zo also is correct in his comment on the Constitution. Slavery is distinctly different, with no goal of reincorporating a person back into society. In that situation, all that is desired is the product of work. I do not have any great idea of how to change the system to reduce the number of people returning to crime, but instilling the idea, as a parent should do, that punishment for a transgression is proportional and done simply to correct deviant behavior, may be the proper path. A child is not lost to the family permanently unless the behavior is so destructive that preservation of the family is threatened. The same ethos should be part of the sentencing: you hereby are subjected to the following “loss of privileges” until such time as the law permits a return to the fold. After that, it is the expectation of society you will understand the purpose of the loss and will alter your behavior to avoid this outcome or worse. That may be the ideal, but clearly there are more influences on post-incarceration behavior than I can capture or address here.
Noticicably absent from the Radical Left’s argument: viable alternatives.
And for tht matter, what’s wrong with criminals helping defray their incarceration costs?
Yes, this is a political move to garner party support among felons and their families. It should be opposed loudly, and this is the only place I have seen the issue raised. Nice job with that.
Completely agree with Scott, most prisons make better criminals, not better citizens. And an honest conversation needs to happen and is one of those topics that can’t seem to be raised without it becoming a skin color issue.
My BIL has been a city sheriff working quite frequently in the city jail for 25 years. It is the same people cycling through. Very few non first time inmates on a given day. They even had an incident in our small city recently where a few members of gang A got themselves arrested at the same time so they could try and get a member of gang B who was in jail. They didn’t end up killing him, barely.
Our prison system is broken.
One other thought: frequently first time offenders or people charged with “lesser” crimes are senteced to community service as their entire “punishment”. Is that lever now not available to the judge? Cmmunity service would equate to slavery?
“Most prisons make better criminals”
Exactly. They should just go ahead and publish the “curriculum” at the local ‘hoosegow’; “How to deal with snitches”, “Gang initiation”, “Choosing a tattoo”, “Staying alive in a lethal business”, “Intimidation techniques”, “Weapons 101”, “Learning your politicians, subtitle ‘who to pay?'”
Oh, that last one made me think. “Securing a nomination in the Democratic Party”, “How to ‘Jeffrey Epstein’ a captured colleague”, “Hillary Clinton, living life like a blood sport”
Too true. I am reminded that in the military there are standards (at least there used to be) of dress, haircut, etc. Would the same approach be more effective? Idle hands are the devil’s work, as the old phrase indicates. Keep a person busy all day and he will be too tired to get into more trouble.