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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

This is part of a bigger penal-industrial complex in the US. Besides private for-profit prisons, you also have things like this, and a very similar system for drug rehab, where minor drug offenders may be sent to a privately-run religious "charity", which, rather than providing any kind of counseling or treatment, resells them as indentured labor to various industries, including meat-processing plants.

https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-...

https://revealnews.org/article/they-worked-in-sweltering-hea...

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This is another related and terrifying article:

https://www.propublica.org/article/black-children-were-jaile...

A judge in a Tennessee county, Donna Scott Davenport, locks up elementary school children (as young as 7) basically at whim for crimes that don't exist. They're given a "perp walk": handcuffed in front of their classmates and teachers, paraded through the school, and off to jail in the back of a police car. She has them put in solitary confinement. She failed the bar exam four times before passing. The children cry and throw up as they're sent away.

I was never sure why we only got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around. Articles like all these show that, if you're poor enough or black enough, it's always been here. I wish I felt like I was exaggerating in saying that, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.

You can jail children in the US? What kind of country is this?

The country that has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, as well as the highest number of prisoners in total. You know, the land of the free.

It’s one with fifty sovereign states with their own criminal justice and judicial systems. So the question really should be, You can jail children in Tennessee?

The majority of the US states have no minimum age of criminal responsibility. Other ex-colonial federations have states with their own laws and courts, too, yet do not have this problem.

In fact, the US is the only country in the world to lack these legal protections.

So is this an unusual thing or are their more states in the federation where this is done?

I think you see stuff at this level in every country.

> why we got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around

It was the transition from fringe to mainstream, along with the acquisition of power. Things like this might go from "isolated incidents" to more widespread to national policy. But yes, it's a change in degree not a change in kind.

I get it, and I agree with you 90%. But I think what we've (wealthier, white-er Americans) learned about race in the last 24 months shows that there's a big difference between "isolated incidents" and "decentralized but widespread behavior". I think that with respect to stuff like this, the second phrase is a better description. Any of these things are Gestapo tactics, the stuff of European and Latin American nightmare; the fact that they're not all coordinated out an office in DC is more an American curiosity than a point in their favor. At least that's my view.

> Any of these things are Gestapo tactics, the stuff of European and Latin American nightmare

Absolutely correct. But there's always a chunk of people who want to be in the Gestapo, or have someone to report their neighbours to.

My use of "isolated incidents" was ironic in that's the phrase always used to cover systematic problems that people don't want to address. You can have a lot of isolated incidents if you refuse to join the dots.

Dragging a teenager off to a prison camp for looking at boys is the tip of patriarchy, but the entire infrastructure of people who thought it was OK is also patriarchy.

Ah yes, of course. I completely missed the irony - my apologies. You're absolutely right.

There was a thread not long ago where a poster was wondering why cities such as Nashville and other in red states didn't have a great tech scene.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

Yeah, for sure. For every person I know in the legacy tech hub cities/regions who are considering that trendy move to Texas -- people there's a big article about every week these days, it feels like -- I know 2 or 3 more people who are well-positioned for such a move but ultimately decide against it for what we could politely call "cultural factors" like the stuff depicted in these articles.

(Now, of course, this insane totalitarian bullshit happens even in these friends' allegedly liberal tech hub cities. But they see the Austins and Nashvilles of the world as being replete with such things, and articles like these suggest they're not all that far off.)

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