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Comment by moate | Hacker News Reader

Wait a minute...you're telling me using slave labor is bad? BUT IT'S SO CHEAP!

The idea that we allow FOR PROFIT prisons to "employ" prisoners for less than minimum wage while they make money is an embarrassment. This is not justice. This is not "repaying your debt to society". The fact that all criminals get stigmatized and penalized during and well after their incarceration is punishment. The use of them as a labor force to perform tasks to create additional revenue for the prisons is just gross.

And don't get get me started about how this leads to a potential conflict of interest when you allow the prison companies to hire lobbyists who could lobby for harsher sentencing in an effort to create more slaves.

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Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling, and correlates with low-information rants. We're trying for the opposite here.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I really appreciate the role the site guidelines play in making HN a useful place to read comments (often more than the actual articles). However FWIW I appreciated this particular usage as I read it as a form of parody which i might not have caught had simple emphasis been used.

It may be that there's a slippery slope problem so maybe objecting to it is still a good idea, but I thought I'd simply mention my feeling for this particular case.

That's a good point and I partly agree. This might not have been the best hill to plant that flag on!

Man, your comment comes across as pretty classist. Would you extend the same argument against the use of italics? If not, why? Can you statistically demonstrate a disparity between information density of comments using all caps versus using italics?

If that's classist then the guidelines as a whole must be classist.

Yes, that's a real possibility.

Look around at other comments, no one is using all caps to get a point across. It’s uncouth to use caps here.

Right, that's what I'm pushing back against. I don't feel that the rules governing the normative HN discourse should be the rules by which we determine the informational content of a comment. Not following the manners of a certain group (acting uncouth) has no bearing on the truthiness of a statement. When the content of a person's comment is evaluated by their adherence to discursive standards alone then groups of people with alternative discursive standards, and by extension their thoughts, are more readily dismissed. Is that what we want to do here?

Certainly statements made with "alternative discursive standards" can be just as true. Convert any English sentence to uppercase and it's as true as it was. But from my point of view the issue is the systemic effects that "discursive standards" have on a community as a whole. The HN guidelines mention a bunch of things that we've found, over the years, to be important for that reason.

Hacker News is one kind of community among many. Think of it as a place where a certain game is played, with its rule set. If that's classist, then chess is classist because it doesn't allow "alternative gameplay standards" like moving your knight diagonally.

To me the important thing is that everybody is welcome who wishes to participate and play by the rules. Playing by the rules isn't always easy (including for me—I often have to edit my comments to make them more civil), but all it takes is a wish to do it, and that's as inclusive as HN can get while still having its particular character. It's fine not to like that character, but in that case the thing to do is find a community you like better, or create one. There's room for many communities and should be more.

Not all class is bad.

I generally appreciate the caps restriction, but in this instance side strongly withgumby,,abovee.

Of course, now we're discussing site regs rather than the evils and contagion of prison labour and for-profit prisons, which is its own meta-level of distraction and conversational degredation.

_Man, your comment comes across as pretty classist._

Yes, when someone is trying to set a "class" of standards, they are being classist. In this case, it's a standard that requires not holding down the shift key, so it's hardly exclusive.

Sure, but the underlying question is why are italics okay and not capitals. Arn't they both means to the same end, communication of emphasis? I understand no one want's to be yelled at, and it's a turn off in conversation, but arn't these just different methods of communicating the same thing? See my comment below for more.

Right, your objection is that we're excluding people, and you ask:

> Is that what we want to do here?

Yes. Just the fact that articles are oriented on tech excludes a whole host of people. And if you include too many people, that in itself will start to exclude people; in addition, the discussion will fall apart.

You're looking at it as a moral issue, and you're not wrong to, it's just that the morality is very much overshadowed by the practical mechanics of running a discussion forum.

I recommend "Choosing in Groups" by Michael Munger for some very insightful thoughts on how this all works.

Thanks for the thoughtful and honest response. I'll check the book out.

Also, I do find that I post better stuff on HN than on other forums because I'm aware that if I'm ranty it will get downvoted. Sometimes insisting on standards can motivate people to elevate themselves.

They usually do.

I wrote a reply, deleted it, walked away from the computer, thought about what I wanted to say, and am writing this.

I appreciate your guidelines and what HN is trying to do with its comment section. I enjoy the discourse here and I feel that it's one of the better places for discussion on the web. I also fully acknowledge that I have here, and in other comments, gone against the guidelines. Finally I recognize that you are an authority on this site and are attempting to correct behavior you find problematic/potentially leading to a deterioration of the level of conversation you're trying to curate here.

I still stand by my Allcaps(Tm) usage here. I will try to keep it to a minimum. Sometimes the proper response is yelling. Also, correlation is not causation.

Edit: Also, if italics are used for emphasis, which is interpreted as yelling/voice change, I see literally no difference except your opinion on how people should designate yelling. I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE vs I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore! just feels like the comment section version of Tabs VS Spaces.

I think the problem is the yelling itself, not how it's designated.

That is to say, if you simply replaced all caps with italics but were still intending to invoke the feeling of yelling (which I consider distinct from emphasis) then your comment would be in violation of the spirit of the guidelines. The all caps are just a red flag.

Forced labor is slavery, no matter how you put it. The fact of the matter is the 13th amendment needs to be fixed.

Slavery was much worst, realistically. Forced labor is bad, but the comparison is whitewashing conditions under which slaves lived.

Yes, it's slavery, that's the point, just as prison itself is imprisonment.

We have a retributive system of justice, the point of a sentence is to punish you by harming you. You do a bad thing, society exacts retribution by doing a bad thing to you.

Fines, prison, forced labor, the death penalty are all punishments, and if you don't want those to happen to you, don't commit crimes.

The problem is those punitive actions are not considered from a more enlightened position of causing a net positive to society. A better approach retrains the individual and helps society by enforcing a mutually beneficial result rather than administering some measured form of torture.

Retraining the individual requires that the individual wants to be retrained. That's certainly something to offer, but a sentence is something you're forcing on a person.

For it to be effective, yes. You seem to be arguing the details of the implementation rather than the goal of what the implementation should solve.

Individuals (and circumstances) are different, there should be plenty of discretion and possibly review to ensure that solutions are measurably effective.

Have you considered that punishment may not actually create a positive outcome for society as a whole? Generally speaking most people come out of prison as hardened criminals and not reformed. Prison historically has been intended to kill the prisoners prior to release. Either we need accept we're trying to kill people or we need to realize that punishing people doesn't work in most cases and instead work on CORRECTING people (it is the department of the corrections after all).

TL;DR; retributive punishment is useless and produces worse results.

Would you feel better about it if the prisoners' situations were identical, but the profits went to the government or to reparations for victims of crime?

No. It's still an incentive to create crime and enslave people.

God no. That just incentives the government (who create the laws) to put people in prison. And who is the "victim" if someone goes to jail for say, possession of drugs/paraphernalia?

The only correct answer is "if you employ people, you pay them." This includes people currently serving jail sentences. Going to jail is meant to be a punishment. You're losing months/years of your normal life. If people wish to offer convicts a way to help mitigate this by offering them employment, then they shouldn't get the ability to employ them at a discounted rate, because that's punitive to people who are not in jail.

Absolutely not.

No, especially since such a huge percentage of US prisoners are non-violent offenders. What would make me feel better is if we made serious efforts at rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.

No no no. Money should go to the people doing the work.

> ...or to reparations for victims of crime?

The courts already have a way of doing this that doesn't involve slavery.

To that end: if there was a civil suit against someone and you wanted to allow convicts to work in prison while paying them a fair wage in order to pay off this debt, that is a logical and even noble choice.

I think the biggest issue everyone seems to have is the idea of below market wages being paid to the workers.

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