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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Oh, they also have a copier/printer that costs on the order of ten cents per copy. The phone system is also outrageously expensive. In the camps (think minimum security) they have limited access to computers which have e-mail which has a similarly absurd per minute rate.

If you could score the government contract to provide those services you'd make quite a bit money with stupidly large margins. It's a damn racket.

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New age slavery is what it is...

It's closer to true indentured service, where a debt is being repaid through a fixed period of labour. I think it's wrong to compare it to slavery, although interesting how the racial make-up in prison supports the assertion!

I do think inmates are probably better off with work to do. I also think it's reasonable for society to garnish a chunk of the profit from their work to offset the cost of crime and punishment. Just my opinion, and at an abstract level rather than specific. I don't say the balance is currently right.

I'd be more sympathetic if the country doing this didn't have a history of imposing harsher sentences on minorities, criminalizing the ingestion of plant material, and a corrupt policing and judicial system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal for just one example.

The US has 716 incarcerations per 100,000. From the list on wikipedia, that's the highest in the world.

It's also roughly the same number as North Korea has (no official numbers, just estimates).

So the US might not be the most heavy-handed when it comes to justice.

slavery is not only racial. The ottomans were more than happy to have white european slaves.

An indentured servant is not physically restrained from moving away, while a slave typically is. SO the jails are closer to slavery than bonded labor.

>An indentured servant is not physically restrained from moving away

What? If they could just move away, then they wouldn't be an indentured servant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant

> Runaways were sought out and returned.

I was pointing out the difference between physical and legal restraints. Indentured servitude, while of the same color, is a much milder situation.

The legal system of course returns an indentured person back, but an indentured servant still has some rights. A slave in the west has no rights.

The key difference is in the amount of liberties and the wages: prisoners in the US are forced to live in tiny cells for years and most importantly, are paid $0.25-1.00 per hour - a symbolic pay just for the prisons to be able to say they're paying prisoners and not using them as free labor.

Worse, the prisons actually get paid (a lot more) for providing these people to companies AND they get paid by the government to keep the prison system running.

Most (if not all) US States use prison labor to make their license plates.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/02/nj_inmates_work_to_...

http://www.cqql.net/adrian.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_State_Prison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oklKAMEOT7I

The federal phone facility is a lot cheaper than local or state facilities which uses a collect call system with an intermediate company that gouges terribly. If you get a Google Voice phone number in the area code of the prison for the inmate to call it is very reasonable, 90 cents for 15 minutes, and easily supported from outside.

The rate to do email is only a nickle a minute.

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