231–240 of 374 posts
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It's not a mistake, this is all by design. This is the system working as intended under capitalism.
You shouldn't be downvoted here, this is true. As tax revenues decline, they are trying to shift the burden directly onto the inmates to pay for the whole works.
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Sadly it's even worse in Australia, where it's closer to 10x the rate for indigenous vs non-indigenous. I'd be horrified to find out they were expected to pay for their time behind bars though.
New Zealand does this. Our population is 15% Maori but 52% of prisoners are Maori. https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300304290/mori-youth-ke...
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Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.
>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails. Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
The actual mechanism probably has many more links including the voting of politicians who share the People's values, who then pass laws in the People's interest. But the underlying axiom of democracy is rule of the People, indirect as the American implementation is, is it not?
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Is that a thing… anywhere?
ASB in New Zealand offer it. They have a list you can search for various things and companies, your comment prompted me to check. Fines, taxes and some big companies appear there.
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Those stats are based on a tiny fraction of the US prison population. From elsewhere on that site, that agency is responsible for "158,012 Inmates".
Only statistic which I could find on short notice (literally first google result ...) but considering it's federal, I trust a small sample size more than random numbers from someone on the internet without quotation, especially if they are off by an order of magnitude from other countries. The clue is: It looks like the numbers are reversed which would make a lot more sense.
Years ago, I got a speeding ticket. I worked nights at the time, and the office to make the payment at had very strange hours because it was from a tiny town. My schedule made it difficult to make it over to the office during open hours, and one of the times I tried it was closed randomly over lunch because again, small town. (I learned later there was only one person who ran the whole office.) A day after my speedin…
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I've come to expect this. Hopefully the larger message with the student loan debt forgiveness isn't that they are forgiving 10k in student debt, or even that the people complaining about it had millions in PPP loans forgiven... but instead that they forgave near a trillion in PPP loans, some wealthy individuals having several million forgiven, but the most they can afford for low-income students is 10k. Leave it to A…
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That and, you know, profit.
There isn’t enough profit there though for that to be the driving force. Prisons as an industry make far less than industries with little to no political sway for even trivial protectionist policies.
Counterpoint question to most of the comments I’m seeing here: Who then is supposed to pay for a criminal’s stay in prison? Law-abiding tax-payers? Laws that SEND people to prison (like drug possession laws) can be fairly painted as ridiculous, but when it comes to paying for the actual prison infrastructure… it seems a lot less ethically clear.