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Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

As it sits, do the prisoners have the right to refuse this work = sit in a cell or yard doing nothing? I might well choose the activity of the work. The world's prison systems are, as we all know, systems that promote the wide dissemination of DIY crime instruction from 'old boys' as well as 'tech boys' and it works very well at that!! With the rise of AI, and the application of AI to detailed instruction (AKA teaching) where each prisoner would have 3-4 hours of instruction, followed by 3-4 hours of AI supervised homework/surfing make a valuable day where they learn various new skills and are taught STEM matter as well as history/arts - as their intellect and interest allows. Prisoners could gain from this, as would we all.

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No they do not have the right to refuse, and can be punished if they do. The text is pretty clear: "involuntary servitude" is permitted as punishment for a crime.

> More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.

- https://www.aclu.org/publications/captive-labor-exploitation...

It’s a bit more complex than that and has a bunch of edge cases.

For example, in most of the states, there are prisons that are pay-to-stay, so prisoners basically go in debt while they’re incarcerated. This further troubles their debts, putting more pressure on them to take on work. Part of this debt can be written off by working on specific jobs that are sourced by local employers. There was a case of a woman I read about, how she’s paying off her pay-to-stay prison debt working at a wings place part time, while serving her sentence.

Since every state has its own laws and complexities, you get a bunch of scenarios that add up, which, in my opinion, are highly immoral.

Uhm ... how can prisons be pay to stay? Do you get a worse prison if you don't pay?

I'm genuinely not kidding, as a non-American who has some family living in US, some of that just sounds absolutely bizarre. However I'm not that sure about its intricacies. But keep in mind, going to prison for having debt is also a thing in the states. So not paying up your dues can eventually roll you back into the system.

But yeah, pay-to-stay imprisonment is a thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-stay_(imprisonment).

> going to prison for having debt is also a thing in the states

LOL no, except for some narrow definition of debt which only counts criminal activity.

Foreigners are so credulous when it comes to what they hear about the US.

I did very quick Googling, and my memory was based on reading these two [1] [2], I'm not entirely sure how are these correlated to criminal activities. Obviously, it's all nuanced and depends on each state, but don't mind being corrected:

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797098376/investigation-finds...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/a-world-of-debt-over-300-trillion-and-... - part about the woman in Missisipi

Annita Husband was imprisoned for embezzlement and placed under the supervision of a restitution center until she completed that. Her debt, as it were, was to the State of Mississippi.

Similar with the other example. These are people who are required to have a job so they can pay restitution, and if they refuse to get a job they can be imprisoned as one possible punishment.

Regular people who are in debt do not face debtor's prison in the US, this is not a feature of the bankruptcy courts. Debtors prisons were more common in the distant past, and especially a thing in Europe.

I’m sorry, but if you’re forced to stay at a place until you pay off your debt, how is that “not a debt prison”? You can call it “restitution center”, but… c’mon. They’re not being sent there because of their other crimes, but specifically because they need to pay off their debt. I’m not saying they’re going into a supermax or something, but their freedom is actively being restricted, because they have not paid their debt.

These people stole that money. Paying it back is part of their sentence. A sentence for a criminal act. The criminal act of theft, or embezzlement. They are, in fact, being "sent there because of their other crimes." If they had taken out loans for that money and failed to pay it back, they would not be in this situation, they'd just have shitty credit ratings.

Restitution is not borrowed money. That's a pretty important distinction. Calling it debt may be strictly correct but it comparing it to consumer debt is disingenuous.

You may be interested in reading up on the prison industrial complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...

Yes actually.

That's the part I don't get about people comparing this to slavery. You have the right to refuse. Everything I've heard from people actually in prison say they're grateful for it because it gives them something to do. Do we need to have reform around the prison system? Yes. Is targeting the one place where they are able to do something productive and earn some money the way to do it? Probably not.

Recidivism is so high for a lot of reasons, but two big ones are 1) prisons are focused too much on punishment for the sake of punishment and not enough on reforming those inmates who can be reformed (not all can); and, 2) ex-cons typically have little to no resources when they get out, have trouble finding employment, and turn back to crime as one of the only ways they can make any money at all. Does this mean they should get a pass for the crimes? Of course not.

But it does mean that we could combat #2 by actually paying convicts working as part of a prison sentence the wage they'd get for that same job after release. Why are we paying convicts less than $0.50/hr[0] for jobs they'd earn $25-30/hr for? Because it benefits those local economies, but at the cause of driving up recidivism. Imagine if you were incarcerated, had the option of working (the majority of incarcerated workers are punished if they don't work), and if you did you'd have thousands in savings when released to get back on your feet?

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

Being tossed in solitary confinement because you won't work for $0.40/hr sounds like slavery to me. It's right there in the language of the 13th amendment. Maybe has something to do with the US having the largest prison population in the world. Larger than China even, an authoritarian nation with 4x the population. Does that happen in a vacuum?

You're not going to get much reform if the prison operators are making bank on the status quo.

We can add this to the hundreds of reasons why for-profit prisons are bad.

You think it is different in government run prisons? There are valid reasons to be against forced prison labor, but the prevalence of it has little to do whether the prison is run by the government or a private company.

Government-run prisons may be badly run, but at least they don't have an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.

>Government-run prisons may be badly run, but at least they don't have an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.

Everyone who benefits from the prison industrial complex has a an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.

Only about 8% of prisoners are in private prisons:

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...

Take for example California. There are no private prisons. Yet CA is one of the states requiring forced labor and prisoners can earn a maximum of 37 cents an hour:

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2023/05/12/california-is-o....

Who is part of the prison industrial complex? How about the prison guard unions who directly benefit from having more prisoners?

>...Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California. The union spends heavily on influencing political campaigns, and on lobbying legislators and other government officials. CCPOA also hires public relations firms and political polling firms.

>As calls for reform of the state's prison system escalated during 2006, putting pressure on former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to take a more aggressive stance on reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...

This prison system with no private prisons is a prison system where the medical care is so bad that the system was taken over by the federal government:

>...The state's prison medical care system has been in receivership since 2006, when a federal court ruled in Plata v. Brown that the state failed to provide a constitutional level of medical care to its prisoners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_California#:~:text=....

One should care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison in CA. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles.

>...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betti...

After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corco...

This isn't to say that CA prisons are the worst in the country - likely other state's prisons are just as bad as CA. When you have the people regulating a system be the same people who are running the system, you have an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.

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