Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by bluejekyll » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:53 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #244

webXL wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree that the record makes it harder to get a job and give up crime, but what about the deterrence factor? How many more would commit crimes knowing that it wouldn't have any impact on their ability to get a decent job right after serving some time? > A corporation is allowed to quietly syphon away billions of dollars from society using clever government lobbying and tax avoidance schemes Was it society's t…

But is there really a deterrence factor? Most people don't commit crimes, due to a personal moral code. Those who have morals that don't get in the way of crime, just use the deterrence factor to find ways of not getting caught. Now what would really help, especially with recidivism, is to use the profit motive of prisons in a different way. First-time offenders-- the prison gets paid full price. If an offender retur…

Alternatively, there could be a payment based directly on the outcome. Say there is a period in which the ex-con pays back 'restitution', probably based on the crime and length of sentence. During that period the ex-con owes some percentage of their paycheck. That is, this prison makes most of its money from the restitution payments.

This would encourage prisons to also take an active role in finding ex-cons jobs afterwards, advocating for the highest possible pay (since they make more money), and also encourages them to train/teach the prisoner more to make them more likely to get a job as an ex-con. I think most victim advocates would be ok with this too as there would continue to be a penalty imposed for the crime.

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

#282

Post by samstave » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:53 PM UTC

hackermailman wrote: post #210

77pt77 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence. Don't you need a judge to determine that?

It's called 'good time', which you earn as credits for early release. If you refuse to work you get written up and subtracted good time which means time added to expected release date. These disciplinary writeups affect parole potential as well. The kitchen is also considered one of the better jobs, a bad job would be Hoe Squad, which means a chain gang led out into 35C heat to work the fields while guys on horseback…

>The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.

Is there any documented evidence of this happening?

EDIT:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...

http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2015/06/private-pri...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...

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

#283

Post by vanjoe » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:55 PM UTC

danharaj wrote: post #221

danielam wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing things. There is a difference between forced hard labor as just (and thus commensurate) punishment for a crime and actual, particular abuses committed by the justice system. There is nothing wrong with forced hard labor as a punishment for a crime to the degree required by justice (and frankly, many crimes deserve far worse). There IS something wrong with inflicting pain on someone who is innocent, e…

In other words, you think there exist situations in which it is just to enslave people. You're trying to make a distinction that literally no one else makes because you want to separate forced labor as punishment for a crime from the connotations attached to the word slavery. It's just a sleight of hand.

As long as you allow that society has the right to force people to be locked up without their consent because they broke a law, I don't think it's a stretch to say that society has the right to force people to do work.

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

#284

Post by outsidetheparty » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:55 PM UTC

outsidetheparty wrote: post #252

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely simplistic way to look at things. Private organizations do some things much better than public, and vice versa. More often than not it depends on the question you're asking... And there's a lot of contextualization needed in the answer. How's your electrical infrastructure, or your water infrastructure doing? They're supplied by private industry. How's your religious institution, your school bus,…

> Private organizations do some things much better than public, and vice versa. That is certainly a true statement, and I'm of course by no means suggesting that privately-supplied functions such as "day care" or "religious institutions" should be government-run. I'm reacting primarily to the current American administration's de facto stance of "small government good, big government bad," which I feel is just as simp…

> which functions a government ought to serve compared to private industry

(For what it's worth, and in case it helps clarify my stance here, my opinion on this is that if it's a necessarily monopolistic or universally-mandated function, it should be part of the government; if it's a function where meaningful competition is possible, let capitalism do its thing.

The goal being to provide some recourse when things go wrong: If my private daycare sucks I can just go to a different one, no problem. If my government prison system sucks I can at least theoretically vote the people responsible out of office. But when there's no opportunity for meaningful choice or competition, there's no benefit to privatization, it's just inserting a middleman who can skim some profit off the top.

This still leaves a lot of important gray area -- education and health care remain thorny issues for example -- but I hope I've demonstrated that I don't hold the simplistic "everything should be government!" stance you appear to have ascribed to me.)

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

#285

Post by throwaway040435 » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:56 PM UTC

cubano wrote: post #225

pixl97 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on what 'added' means. The sentence you receive from a judge is probably not anywhere close to what you will actually sit in jail for. Probation, parole, double time, triple time, good behavior, trustee status, all affect the outcome. For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? Very commonly 366 days, though it may be as much as a year…

> For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court. You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something. >An ironic applicatio…

You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court.

Do you think it's appropriate to call out someone for using "jail" instead of "prison", when the meaning is clear, and you made the same mistake just 5 minutes prior?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497654

and in your original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14496609

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

#286

Post by Spellman » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #115

wonderous wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Legally speaking seems like in the US that prisoners are slaves. SOURCE: https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/13thamendment.htm...

13th is a Netflix documentary about this. Warning: It may be quite difficult to watch. https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741

Arguably also very liberal biased (speaking as a liberal-leaning individual).

Much of this theory is based on The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander which first popularized the idea of how we utilized the prison system to intentionally discriminate and keep locked up (for free labor) the african-american populations.

There recently was a book discussing a different explanation. In this book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff, Pfaff argues it's the perverse incentives of prosecutors and judges that are pushing up the prison population.

I don't know enough to say which is true, just wanted to get awareness of the competing ideas on the topic.

But definitely there's some really perverse incentives to lock people up for free labor. And, as the documentary accurately points out, it's all built in to the Constitution.

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

#287

Post by cjrp » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

yjgyhj wrote: post #162

cubano wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fas…

That is indeed totally crazy. I wish I had some way to verify your story, as I as a reader can't know who sits behind the keyboard on the other side.

There are several similar stories in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)

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

#288

Post by knodi123 » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

thriftwy wrote: post #222

narrator wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a friend who lived in Bisbee, Arizona, which is a small town next to the border that has a big border patrol station in the city. He said that because of the border patrol presence there aren't any illegal aliens around to do construction. He could only get cheap labor from ex-convicts. It made me think that typically ex-cons have formed the lowest rung in the economic ladder that illegal aliens now fulfill.

How about paying what it's worth for labor instead of expecting to get 'cheap' labor? Yesterday people expected cheap construction labor, today they complain there's not enough cheap home nurses around. I wonder if they'll aim for cheap software development labor tomorrow. I wonder why I don't feel entitled to cheap caviar and cheap yachts?

> I wonder why I don't feel entitled to cheap caviar and cheap yachts?

Let's stick to discussing services.

In well-populated niches like construction, nursing, and software development, you can safely assume that competition will make the price of the service as low as it can reasonably go and still get acceptable quality.

If construction labor costs go up to whatever point you consider "fair", then the cost of the finished products will rise to compensate. If you extrapolate this out for the results of all super-low-priced labor, then lots of costs go up, and the middle class suddenly has less buying power than before. Why, they'd need a raise just to keep the same standard of living!

It's a web, you can't tug on one part without moving lots of others. The only "stretch" available in this web is people who are earning more than they are actually worth, like some CEOs or Waltons. Which, come to think of it, is not that dear to me. So okay, fine, let's start raising the minimum wage.

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

#289

Post by revmoo » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 4:03 PM UTC

exclusiv wrote: post #273

jondubois wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the idea of having a criminal record is silly - It's a self-fulfilling label. Once you are labeled a criminal, it only makes it harder to get a job and give up crime. Besides, crime has become such an arbitrary thing. A corporation is allowed to quietly syphon away billions of dollars from society using clever government lobbying and tax avoidance schemes but if a member of society physically steals something fro…

How is it silly? If you are socially irresponsible and destructive you should have consequences. Just like financially irresponsible results in a credit hit and difficulty getting loans. You label yourself a risk when you do dumb things. I actually know someone who didn't get a government job at an animal shelter because of his poor credit. He has an MBA too. I don't think that's fair but maybe financially irresponsi…

So you don't believe a person should be able to pay their debt to society?

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

#290

Post by eli_gottlieb » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 4:06 PM UTC

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.

Innocent? All human beings are morally innocent, and with enough laws, anyone can be made a criminal.

Enforced prison labor is slavery, no ifs ands or buts. It must be stopped. This is an Americanized version of Stalin's gulags.