Yeah, and then people act like the flea market is some precious cornerstone of the local culture. In my city there is a flea market that has dozens of freshly stolen bikes every week. There's a fund where people buy back the bikes and reunite them with their owners. Unfortunately, there's no fund supporting violence against these bike thieves.
Depends highly on the region. Most US prisons look like daycare compared to Japanese prisons, wrt prisoner treatment. (The prisons in the southeast US are an exception to this)
I don't really mean it in the quality of life sense as prison is pretty awful in most of the world, especially in developing countries.
The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind. It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing. States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
The photo shows them walking in a line next to a guard that doesn't have to walk? I don't get it.
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.
Yes, but it's not nearly as big of a gap as the above comment suggests.
Being in prison sucks. If there's forced labor that approaches the same magnitude of unpleasantness, or even worse exceeds it, then that's a huge problem. But if it makes prison mildly worse than zero labor, that's not a tremendous issue.
> I think the sacrifice comparison wasn't to labor, but to the fact that capital punishment is still practiced in the US.
I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way, unless they rewrote part of it and totally messed up the phrasing.
Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
> I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way
? The comment literally says:
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
They're talking about the state putting people to death. Human sacrifice is when it was done to placate the gods. Modern day capital punishment is when the state puts people to death to placate the retributive demands of the people.
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
But read the two sentences before that. They're making a complete comparison without mentioning death penalties at all, and without any placeholders that could be filled in by a later sentence. The third sentence mentioning death penalties does not retroactively change what the first two sentences were talking about.
The comment very clearly says that slavery in the prison system is next to sacrifice, not just the death penalty.
If it wasn't supposed to say that, then the original commenter needs to come here and clarify.
> Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
So there's a much bigger and connected moral hazard, that the people that are paid to run prisons want there to be more inmates, whether or not they do any labor. That's especially bad when it's third party for-profit companies running things. And they'll use prison labor to make extra money on top of what they're already paid.
We should fight against that situation very strongly.
But if we have all the money controlled by the state, and the labor merely reduces the cost of keeping prisoners, then there's not a huge moral hazard to the criminal justice system.
If prisoners actually start making enough money to offset the entire cost of the prison system, then we should intervene. But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Read it in context again, it is commentary on the US prison system as a whole.
> But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
The critical sentence is "The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind."
I can see your argument that the thing being called barbaric is the prison system in general, but I'm still pretty sure the thing being called barbaric by that wording is specifically the slavery part.
> Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
That might be best but I'm not sure if it's obviously the best option.
The labor could actually make prison mildly less worse, as it breaks up the monotony of doing nothing. There is also often some comp, although way below minimum wage, and you can opt out (most don’t).
> It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing.
The sacrifice would then be laid on a stone slab, a chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. . . . The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. . . .
The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods.
Prison aka confinement is a form of violence. A lot of people consider "when the good guy hits the bad guy it's not violence" no no, it's still violence.
Restraining someone against their will is a violent act, it's just an acceptable form of violence (that of course I agree with) used by the "Good" to deal with the "bad" (relative terms ofc)
There has to be some kind of personality distribution thing here with how people view this kind of thing. My general take is "I'm attacked, _especially_ if I'm with family; just shoot them. There isn't even a quibble in my head.
Why do you immediately think of it as that violent ? ,
Not tolerating the crime, involves arresting the person, and penalizing them with fines and other consequences for a while, and then if possible work on improving their living standards and help them get a job to get out of a life of crime.
Not tolerating crime does not mean shooting people up or inflicting wounds on them, why should it be that extreme ? , either inflict wounds on people or let them go free with misdemeanor charges ?
It just kills the conversation and scope to actually fix this rise in crime mess, that is spreading everywhere.
> Why do you immediately think of it as that violent ? , Not tolerating the crime, involves arresting the person, and penalizing them with fines and other consequences
Different branch of these threads:
> So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
If we’re going to make sure we get appropriate vengeance, and we’re not going to pay to incarcerate them… what do we have left? Physical punishment? Slavery? Unless bankruptcy of a person (without any assets to begin with) alone is a sufficient punishment for these crimes, I’m all out of ideas on where this could go.
You may not be who he was referring to, but the people he was referring to certainly seem to be present.
Your two sibling comments are currently "Why is the comfort of the aggressor more important than the comfort of the innocent victim?" And "Yes." The assumption that some people in this thread are in favor of violence seems to be borne out.
Wishing physical violence into any IRL situation is some real keyboard warrior crap. I understand the appeal, I sadly do, but we need to move beyond it.
Will you be the one to deliver the violence, or would you rather someone else did that on your behalf?
Anyone who has implemented violence IRL is also scarred, for life.
I don't think they were suggesting that violence is the preferred option. But I don't think there's any country where law enforcement cares about bike theft, so prison isn't really an option.
> Ministry of Justice records show that in the five-year period between June 2017 and June 2022, just 159 people (out of roughly 350,000 bike theft cases) were found guilty of bike thefts and only two of these were given immediate custodial sentences.
The police could do way more, but it's easier to victim blame ("register your bike, use two locks, etc.")
So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
Describing prison as "free room and board" is absurd. People are not going there by choice. They are there because we as a society say they should be there, and we pay for that as a society. Every attempt to not do that (e.g. by charging people for the cost they impose on the judicial system) has turned out to be an exploitative nightmare. Are you also upset that people steal and therefore your tax dollars need to go towards policing?
I didn't say "free room and board" – you did. You also said that going to prison isn't a choice, but also that I can choose to go to prison whenever I want, so which is it?
Someone in a sister thread suggested sharia law and chopping off hands, so clearly there are other alternatives besides "society pays for prison" and "the criminal pays for prison".
And yes, I am upset that people steal and that this causes more of my tax dollars to go to heightened policing. Why wouldn't I be? Presumably the only people that are not upset about that are criminals and potentially the police.
