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Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

latimes.com

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Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#121

Post by gnode »

wavefunction wrote: post #98
kapauldo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not get carried away, they are criminals who committed crimes.

Then let's make their slavery part of the official statute rather than claim we're not also committing crimes.

It essentially is, by exception. The text of the Thriteenth Amendment states:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#122

Post by cubano »

csmark wrote: post #60

The USA has ~5% of the world's population but 22% of the world's prisoners. Financial profiting from prisoners: Prison Labor - paid $0.93-0.16/hr California Prisons didn't want to release prisoners because they would loose cheap labor..Courts said they had to: https://thinkprogress.org/california-tells-court-it-cant-rel... 30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit f…

At the risk of being boorish about the subject...

I was recently released from Las Vegas County Jail (CCDC) where all sentenced inmates, myself included, are forced, by state law, to "work" in some manner in the jail.

In this case, work consisted of 11-hour shifts, 6 days a week, of ultra back-breaking kitchen work. We were not even allowed to have water cups anywhere outside the break room.

They actually yelled faster! faster! as we ran "the line"...I never could get over that one. All that was missing were the whips and the guards with shotguns spitting tobacco.

We processed approx. 10 thousand trays per day, and were constantly harassed and threatened big time by the corporate kitchen staff in charge. It wasn't enough that we were clocking 60-70 hours a week for the grand total of 1 extra tray per meal (not every meal grant you, just the ones we were working during), but you could actually get thrown in the box and lose gain time (more days in jail) for eating a cookie or some trivial such thing.

If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.

I did the math...2 shifts of 28 workers 365 days a year...with overtime and all that, approx $50k per week($2.6mil/year) of free basically coerced slave labor for the Aero-mark Corporation that ran the kitchen.

[edits]

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#123

Post by kbart »

kapauldo wrote: post #96

Seems like it would be smarter to just give them the money and revoke it if they break the law again.

I imagine a lot of people would be tempted to commit a crime for $75k then. A better alternative would be to spend at least some of these money on prevention programs to create alternatives for young offenders with the poor background.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#125

Post by steego »

misja111 wrote: post #109
ClassyJacket wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It really doesn't seem very many steps above slavery Zero. It's literally slavery. The thought of it is barbaric and horrible.

Yes the thought of it is horrible, but isn't it part of the purpose of criminal punishments to scare away people from committing crimes?

I get it.

However, if criminal punishment actually scared people away from committing crimes, why are our incarceration rates are so high?

You'd think a country with mandatory minimum sentences and capital punishment to deter a lot of crime, but it appears it simply doesn't work. One theory I read (I can't find the source ATM) posited deterrence tends not work against people who tend to go to prison because people who go to prison statistically have a poorer sense of risk/reward.

So what do you do?

Personally, I think it depends on the type of crime. First, we need to recognize that some of our policies incentivize crime, especially the illicit drug market. People with a poor sense of risk/reward will naturally gravitate to this line of work because they probably respond a lot more to the reward than the risk.

There may be a population that is deterred by criminal punishments and one could argue it makes sense to keep criminal punishments to simply deter that population. I don't disagree with that, but I do think we really need to reassess whether criminal punishment is the universal deterrence some people make it out to be. Our best crime prevention policy may simply be removing or poisoning incentive.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#126

Post by jlebrech »

jopsen wrote: post #99
jlebrech wrote: post #52

at that cost they should send prisoners to an island and send them $50,000 of care packages.

No need for an island, just set them up with an apartment, an GPS tracker, and a Netflix account... Most of them will happily sit at home and watch Netflix :)

yeah, that would be cheap.

they can have pizza delivered and call hookers lol

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#127

Post by sharemywin »

misja111 wrote: post #109
ClassyJacket wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It really doesn't seem very many steps above slavery Zero. It's literally slavery. The thought of it is barbaric and horrible.

Yes the thought of it is horrible, but isn't it part of the purpose of criminal punishments to scare away people from committing crimes?

Except it's a horrible deterrent and many of our laws a just a waste(ie. drug laws) of taxpayers money.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#128

Post by lovich »

crusso wrote: post #119
conanbatt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being convicted to slavery is justice now?

I don't like the over-use of the word "slavery". Slavery was the capturing of innocent human beings and then forcing them and their progeny to do labor in perpetuity. It was utterly dehumanizing and undeserved treatment. We do a disservice to the meaning of slavery in the USA by calling everything slavery: taxation, prison work, marriage, etc.

So other than the progeny part, how is prison labor not exactly what you said? People are literally captured, and based on overturned convictions at least some percentage are innocent. These people are then forced to work and can have their sentence extended arbitrarily by bureaucrats and not the court system. Based on the California example the system even tries to keep people working when given a court order to release people. The only thing preventing the in perpetuity part is basically the good graces of the bureacracy.

I do agree about the overuse of the term in other situations however

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#129

Post by smileysteve »

jopsen wrote: post #99
jlebrech wrote: post #52

at that cost they should send prisoners to an island and send them $50,000 of care packages.

No need for an island, just set them up with an apartment, an GPS tracker, and a Netflix account... Most of them will happily sit at home and watch Netflix :)

Just a thought, that's also tax free income (if we're assuming not counting prison jobs program.)

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#130

Post by ffxtian »

usmeteora wrote: post #87
flexie wrote: post #11

I get it - it's tempting to solve the Harvard Business School issue by sending the MBA students to prison before they wreck havoc on the economy. But I'm not sure their dads would pay the exceeding tuition. Also, there is the whole question of whether it would be fair to the other prisoners. Pretty soon the prison economy would be infested with cigarette derivatives and yard swaps.

Back to the topic, prisons are just another haven for contract robbing. The prison contracts everything from security to mopping. Everything is 3x more expensive. Prison costs are a sink to our society. Except taxpayers foot the bill. Theres an economic incentive to keeping crime low and right now were all being robbed blind, in this area as well (because yes there are too many to count) The amount who are released w…

> Before we talk about Harvard grads destroying the eocnomy, lets talk about making it less and less likely for 75% of the people imprisoned to ever be able to contribute to society once they are released.

Why not both?

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