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Comment by jaclaz | Hacker News Reader

If - for a moment - we can abstract from the actual conditions of the "lodging" and from the quality of the food (that I understand can be terrible in some US prisons), if we take a single "free" man or woman that is working the same hours (possibly not full-time because there is not such a job offering) at minimum wage BUT has to pay rent, utilities and food, plus medical care, etc., I don't thing that the net (i.e. what remains after having paid all "basic" bills) is very different from a few cents per hour.

This hypothetical single low-pay worker has not done anything "bad", and there is no reason why society should "punish" him/her, but I doubt that he/she can save more than 50 US$ per month.

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I get where you're coming from, but I think it's a little disingenuous to abstract away living conditions. For all those 'basic' bills your minimum wage laborer is likely getting a comfortable bed in their own room with only a few housemates, much better nutrition, a cell phone, private showers, etc. If they wanted to live in a storage unit, shower at the YMCA, and eat for 2 dollars a day they likely could save much more.

> If they wanted to live in a storage unit

Which is illegal. And even if it wasn't, it's sad that someone working minimum wage has to live like a prisoner if they want to save anything significant.

I totally agree. I'm using a reduction to absurdity to make my point that prisoners experience abysmal living conditions, not arguing that the state of minimum wage workers is just.

There were people before the civil war who defended slavery on similar grounds. Free workers may or may not be able to afford the necessities, but slaves are guaranteed everything they need. It's not necessarily an absurd line of thought.

Sure! It's not absurd at all, as long as you don't care about silly stuff like fundamental human rights.

It's exactly this distancing, this "abstracting away" of the intangible, unquantifiable benefits of freedom and agency, that allows people to slip into these ethically barren silos.

People are capable of rationalizing extraordinarily inhuman abuses.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/us/holocaust-education...

> Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was.

Now that might be one of the craziest things I've read all month.

That is absolutely insane. How bad is our education system that it is unable to teach and retain such simple facts.

I learned about it as a kid at my public Chicago school, but it took resources: textbooks, novels, field trips. I even had the privilege to see a play recounting one family's attempts to escape.

Public school systems around the country are under attack by the people in positions of authority. Neoliberal Democrats and Evangelical Republicans have allied in a fight to privatize and strip resources away from the public school system. Public school teachers in the most neglected states have finally had enough, and are rising up and striking for better conditions for themselves and their students.

It's worth it, to make sure we remember to never repeat the horrors of our past.

http://kfor.com/2018/04/03/these-crumbling-textbooks-show-wh...

It's also not really a simple fact. When you live in a safe, stable environment where you are taught empathy, that everyone should treat everyone else fairly, and that nurtures a healthy skepticism, horrors so extreme are hard to wrap your head around. How could people treat other people, other living, breathing, bleeding humans, with such callous disregard?

How to educate about hate, how it develops and how it manifests is hugely complicated and always encounters political friction. Americans have our own genocides[1], cultural erasure[2], history of violent bondage[2] and modern[4] internment[5] policies[6] that we also fail to educate about on a wide scale. It's not surprising that so many have slipped through the cracks wrt the Holocaust.

1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1567.html

2. http://www.gwichinsteeringcommittee.org/the-forced-assimilat...

3. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/lynching-memorial-montgom...

4. https://eji.org/mass-incarceration

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

6. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/18/immigr...

Then again, a single phone call in or out of prison is super expensive and so are various fees. And it is not like medical care in prison counted much.

And more importantly, it skews incentives and market.

The issue becomes that these prisons are exerting downward market force across the industry by using this labor source. They're creating an additional supply of workers which decreases demand and therefor wages. I'm fine with "The Free Market" doing its thing, but not through slavery/unfair practices.

To the point you're making of all the other things the prisons provide for the convicts and how that would amount to pay equivalent for free laborers: that's their job. They provide a public good service, feeding/clothing/housing in a humane way people who have violated laws. In exchange they are given money from the government. Their primary business should be that and not disrupting labor.

Oh man, you are so close to realizing what's actually going on. Once you realize that creating a permanent underclass to apply a constant downward pressure on wages is a feature of market economies and not a bug you'll be all the way there.

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