> If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.
Don't you need a judge to determine that?
Don't you need a judge to determine that?
The sentence you receive from a judge is probably not anywhere close to what you will actually sit in jail for. Probation, parole, double time, triple time, good behavior, trustee status, all affect the outcome.
For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? Very commonly 366 days, though it may be as much as a year and a half. That is if you don't get into any other trouble in jail. After that point you will be released on probation.
What the previous poster is likely stating is that if you willingly agree to be a slave for the state you get all the benefits of early release. The defectors that do not want to be slave labor are not given said benefits. An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court.
You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something.
>An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
This is an interesting observation, but here is how thats dealt with; anyone whom discusses a general purpose strike against working is charged with a serious felony "inciting to riot" and is given an "outside charge" and is probably spending years more in prison.
That's how they do that.
Do you think it's appropriate to call out someone for using "jail" instead of "prison", when the meaning is clear, and you made the same mistake just 5 minutes prior?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497654
and in your original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14496609
For example in Texas, you've sat in jail for 6 month and receive a 1 year sentence, you will not be sent to prison, you will remain in the jail for the next 6 months. You can remain in 'jail' for years sometimes before being sent to a prison facility, even after sentencing.
Yes CCDC aka Clark County Detention Center (aka Las Vegas County Jail) is a jail in downtown Las Vegas where I did my kitchen slave labor recently on a 90-day sentence for basically jaywalking.
If I were to be sentenced for more then a year, I would have been sent to a prison somewhere in the boonies of Nevada away from Vegas.
The OP discussed a "3-year jail sentence", and I simply explained that would not be possible as jail and prison are significantly different institutions with very different implications.
I don't think I am wrong to continually express the difference between the two.
Can you elaborate?
Those who support the war on drugs should think about his point:
>...Was this the outcome society wants me to have? To wreck what small success I struggled to get over what amounted to an illegal search and seizure (that's my PD talking, not me)? Who was the victim of my "crime"? ...
The war on drugs is just a war on people.
Excuse me?!
So if I wait for 1 year in jail waiting to go to court and later I'm sentenced to 1 year in prison, I get to serve another year?!
I took that to mean that while you are in jail you burn down one to one days which is not as fast as the bonus or "gain time" you would get in actual prison.
He may or may not be correct and my guess is it depends on where you at since state and local laws will be applied but... As for knowing what he is talking about my guess is many prisoners are experts in the system of trying to reduce their stays in prison.
As the other poster actually has first-hand experience of being incarcerated, your dismissive tone in response to some loose phrasing comes off as both nasty and ridiculous.
Source, was a CO in Texas, also: http://law.justia.com/codes/texas/2005/gv/004.00.000498.00.h...
If you follow the link, you'll see that participating in work or educational programs can improve one's good time earning class, allowing an inmate to earn an earlier release date. In contrast to the other poster, Texas requires good time for time served in county jails. Also notable, educational opportunities have been severely curtailed in TDCJ over the last decade.
Let me give a concrete example here, direct from experience.
Florida DOC mandates you must do 85% of your prison (not jail...all jails have different gain time schemes just to make it really confusing) sentence, so that is roughly 5 days a month.
Lets say you score out to 22 months like I was many years ago...thats a total of 110 potential gain-time days off my sentence...great I think almost 4 months!
BUT...let's say I did 13 months in jail waiting for sentencing so I only have to do 9 more in prison.
In most prison systems, I would NOT be able to recover all my potential gain-time because the 13 months county-time did not count for my prison gain time, and perhaps I would only get 9*5 or 45 days gain-time against my sentence.
Get it?
I think 'score out to' was 'sentenced to'.
If I read it right they are saying (mostly) the time spent in jail does not accrue days off a sentence like the time spent in the prison would.
The scoring system is byzantine as all hell and I challenge anyone to figure it out.[1]
"Scoring out" is simply a term used by Florida convicts to explain how much time they got among themselves I guess. Maybe it was inappropriate to use it here.
Gain-time is a sentence reduction scheme where people get time off their total sentence for staying out of trouble.
[0] http://macklawpa.com/criminal-defense/felony-score-sheet/
[1] http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/sen_cpcm/cpc_manual.pdf
[edits]
You have no idea what "time served" means at sentencing. You can get released on the day you are sentenced if you have already served more time.
Also, if you are willing to take a ungodly amount of probation, it is quite possible you will get time-served on your felony charges as well.
I am talking about serious felony offenses where people get sent for multi-year prison sentences, and in those cases, time sitting in jail waiting to get to prison is not eligible for prison gain time.
Second, you do get credit for time served, whether you sat in a jail cell or a prison cell. If they don't credit you for time served, you can sue for illegal detention. It varies state-by-state as to whether you earn good-time (gain time) during your presentencing stay, but typically you get it if you didn't have any infractions.
Finally, prisons employ psychologists who actively gauge the population for "low morale" and suggest courses of action for the staff to take to keep the population under control with the least amount of effort/expense. Typically, they will improve the feed a little when the men become unruly. Also, the staff actively works with the gang structures to help keep the peace.
Actually working for the jail only provides you the opportunity to LOSE gain time, not get more.
If you refuse to work, you get up to 15 days in solitary confinement (the box, or I simply call it "jail" because its actually jail inside of jail) and lose 5 days of gain time, thus adding 5 days to your sentence.
However, it does not end there...one of the CO's that worked security in the kitchen often threatened to contact your sentencing judge and ask for extra time for screwing up in the kitchen.
The kitchen is also considered one of the better jobs, a bad job would be Hoe Squad, which means a chain gang led out into 35C heat to work the fields while guys on horseback yell at you to work faster.
The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
Is there any documented evidence of this happening?
EDIT:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...
http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2015/06/private-pri...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...
There is limited on-unit housing for officers, and inmates are responsible for maintenance of those.
It is not unheard of for inmate work-crew supervisors (officers) to buy their workers a hamburger or take-out meal; this is usually during or after a shift of unusual duration or a situation that deserves a little recognition.
There are special cases. My grandfather, a county sheriff, was granted custody of a TDCJ inmate by the director. The inmate worked as a porter in the county jail, and occasionally was my babysitter for short periods of time. This was in the '70's.
Obviously some sentences are not eligible to earn gain time.
No matter which way you slice it, the sentence is still 10 years, and the state can decide how much of that is spent in prison, and how much outside as a less-than-entirely-free person.
If you can manage to serve your entire sentence in prison without actually committing additional crimes, you might be able to walk out the front gates and never have a single day of probation, but I put the likelihood of that ever happening at just above infinitesimal. People in prison would mostly rather be outside and on parole/probation.
You only need a judge's help to keep someone in prison past the actual length of their sentence.
IANAL and IHNBAP, so I may be up to 100% wrong about this.