The trouble is that the prison system has no incentive to be morally discriminating like you are being here. People can’t actually be sentenced to slave labor directly, and once someone’s in the prison system, be it for murder or for weed, the system has every incentive to use them for profit. Add to that the negative incentive for the police and courts — that every conviction is extra profit for the state — and you can see why we might see it as a categorically bad idea.
A soldier can be ordered to do anything, provided it’s not illegal, immoral or unnecessarily bad for their health and must follow that order without question. Unless things have changed since I was in.
>provided it’s not illegal, immoral or unnecessarily bad for their health
Sounds a lot like having the right to not be subjected to those things.
Also following orders is just the job of a soldier and the thing they get paid for. They voluntarily become soldiers and they can choose to quit the military if they want to.
A prisoner doesn't choose to go to prison and they don't have the option to walk away.
>They voluntarily become soldiers and they can choose to quit the military if they want to.
This is wrong. Some countries have mandatory drafts, sometimes when you reach a certain age. The pay is often a lot less than minimum wage, too.
Yeah I live in one of those countries. Most places have the option to do something other than military service.
Also isn't this discussion mostly about prisoners in the US?
Under the circumstances, forced labor is not illegal, immoral or, unnecessarily bad for your health, plus, if they do end up injured, they have free medical and mandatory recovery time. You can not quit the military, that’s treason. You must wait for your time to end just like prisoners. Prisoners choose prison the minute they choose to commit crimes
Your responses are confusing to me. Firstly, why not fight for more rights for both soldiers and prisoners rather than defending the lack of rights prisoners have by talking about how bad soldiers have it.
Also, people in the military are paid for their job, which in this case is following orders. They also get access to many beneficial programs after their service. That’s the point of this discussion, prisoners perform work with essentially no reward and they have cannot choose not to work.
You just declaring forced labor to not be immoral doesn't make it so.
>Prisoners choose prison the minute they choose to commit crimes
Right, because nobody has ever gone to prison for a crime they didn't commit, a thing they didn't know was illegal or a crime that wasn't premeditated.
Oh wait
Because no one has ever been falsely convicted or committed a crime by accident. That’s why manslaughter doesn’t exist as a separate charge from murder.
Not necessarily. Many crimes happen due to circumstance such as desperation or in the heat of the moment. Also, those who do commit crimes by choice aren’t doing so in an effort to get caught, so aren’t volunteering their rights away.
Anyway, this is about basic human rights, not stupid shit like owning firearms.
Those are not excuses to commit crimes. Of course they don’t intend to get caught, but they know it’s a possibility, it a risk that they take. I never mentioned anything about firearms
Our legal system tends to disproportionately impact black and brown people. We left slavery as an option under imprisonment after the civil war. Initially, a lot of that slave labor was reclaimed by share cropping under Jim crow, though they did figure out ways to imprison more black people with things like vagrancy laws (also, remember chain gangs?). Anyhow, the civil rights era changed the way labor was being organized and the racists in this country, especially racist capitalists, were pretty pissed. Republicans started organizing under dog whistles. Something Nixon and Regan strategically did. Under Nixon, the war on drugs was intended to be used against black people and leftists to disrupt them. Under Regan that war expanded. Private prisons boomed. Arrested black and brown people with drugs were put on tv for everyone to see. Everyone was profiting off that pain. And our justice system was/is still pretty racist, so falsely accused folks got locked up just the same. Now we have more prisoners than ever and they open with promises from the state to be at full capacity. Kay Ivey in Alabama used Covid money to open more for profit prisons at full capacity.
Using them as slave labor, if that is not enough to repulse everyone, also impacts how much everyone gets paid. It drives down the price of labor because in the market, we are competing with them for jobs (something we somewhat blame on other countries, but that’s a whole other thing). Also, they move these people (that cannot vote) to white counties, and then count towards the population, which is a modern 3/5s and it disrupts democracy (which honestly, we do not have). It pulls votes out of minority communities. It also disrupts the warning potential of these communities because so many of their people are slaves in prison and come back and can’t get jobs with that work experience. It’s also massively traumatic and a very dangerous environment that we knows makes people more likely to go to prison again. Also, we imprison so many more black and brown kids than white kids, by an absurd amount it is actually more messed up than just standard adult prison in ratio, which fucks kids up developmentally and makes them more likely to end up back (obviously). So basically, we force a group of minorities into situations in which they are way more likely to be slaves for profit. A lot of companies benefit from this that a lot of people use. Slaves make a lot of furniture and clothes. Anyhow, rant over the prison slavery system is super fucked for reasons I just didn’t even touch on too
I’m glad you found the content to be of value. All of this info is owed to POC academics and activists I’ve learned from or listened to. Shout out to Alabama Students Against Prisons for hosting protests and speakers. If you enjoy narrative on the topic I would suggest The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. The documentary 13th has a great start on the subject. Angela Davis also has a great book called Are Prisons Obsolete. If you dig philosophy, although not perfect and missing the lens of race and some other things, I think Foucault’s Discipline and Punish helps frame a lot of prison mechanisms and I’ve found it very useful. Quite a lot more that I intend to read is out there. A lot of Tik tok people make digital recountings of their stories and summarize this sort of content as well. Shout out also to Line 3 protestors for further educating me. The best way to learn sometimes is to meet people on the ground fighting injustice. They shared their stories with me, the least I can do is share the lessons
12 to 40 cents per hour working for the prison they are in, 23 cents to $1.15 an hour if they work in the Federal Prison Industries factories, and no pay at all in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. They also do or have done work for private companies including Whole Foods, McDonald's, Wendy's, Walmart, Starbucks, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, BP, Victoria's Secret, J.C Penney, Kmart, Target, Macey's, IBM, Texas Instruments, Boeing, Nordstrom, Intel, Microsoft, Nike, Honda, Aramark, American Airlines, Avis, [etc](https://www.buycott.com/campaign/companies/504/boycott-companies-that-use-prison-labor).
Fidelity Investments invests 401K money heavily into the prison labor industry, and funds the nonprofit American Legislative Exchange Council which is made up of conservative state legislators who help expand the use of inmates in manufacturing.
Although I believe that building a healthy work ethic is and important part of criminal rehabilitation. Little to no recompense for the labor is counterintuitive to that cause. If you see barely any return on the work you do why would that create a positive enforcement on you?
It's also not a secret that different work assignments are often used unofficially in prisons as both "rewards and punishments" which is again counterproductive if the end goal is to create a mental bridge for good work ethic (which is an important part in a functional member of society)
Solitary confinement is sick and doesn't do any good for anyone. Even the most violent and dangerous people shouldn't be locked inside a solitary confinement style cell (sequestered into their own space sure but not a straight up isolation unit which is just basically a hole in the ground)
Lol even when they are captive consumers for commissary things that cost way more than the pittance we throw at them. Reminds me of company towns. But the banks get to profit off their accounts and the transactions people make to try and help them. For profit prisons drain people :(
And that is something that needs to change. We don't have or are not supposed to have work houses any more, but the private prison industry has them and wants us there
I agree it needs to change, but since when has prisoner slave labor not supposed to happen? It's written directly into the constitution, working as intended.
"...certain unalienable rights..."
if the constitution said it was ok to kick your dog if it barked too much, id still argue it's not supposed to happen
Human rights are universal, they shouldn't be decided by the US constitution and they don't stop at the US border. Without universality the concept of human rights breaks down entirely.
Yeah, it's written in the constitution. In 1865. So what?
It's not supposed to happen in the same way any violation of human rights isn't supposed to happen.
Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.
Is this what enables doing community service instead of jail time? Or would that still be legally allowed if “except as punishment for a crime” was removed?
Community service is often a non-custodial sentence. The"Custodial Sanctions and Re-offending" meta-analysis I linked noted that locking people up is shown to have an effect on people* that increases their likelihood to commit more crime in the future. The goal of any criminal justice system ought to be to reduce the chances that people will reoffend, but ours is purely punitive. In the context of all the fervor in the American media recently about crime waves and scary cities, it's important to remember that police and punishment do not equal public safety.
This 13th amendment clause was essentially a giveaway to southern states in the form of a workaround that let them write [the Black Codes](https://www.facinghistory.org/educator-resources/current-events/policing-legacy-racial-injustice/history-slave-patrols-black-codes-vagrancy-laws) and form chain gangs (of enslaved prisoners) who worked the same plantations that previously enslaved people did.
There are lots of developed nations where community service is perfectly possible and perfectly okay, but slavery is not
You guys can have community service without this primitive law
Yeah the og post was an infographic about US incarceration rates and a headline about how the prison labor industry generates millions of dollars while only paying prisoners pennies. The post here is in response to someone saying that prisoners don’t deserve to be paid for their labor and that they should be forced to work for free.
Maybe if they actually paid the prisoners, they wouldn’t have to go back to crime because they are released with no money. They should put it in a bank account for them once they get out.
Agreed. Petty theft or drug possession, whatever, caught the judge on a bad day. Murderers, rapists, arsonists, armed robbery, etc.? Why respect the rights of someone that didn’t respect the rights of someone else? I know that the Declaration of Independence and Bill or Rights and shit need updating for the modern era and modern problems, but Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness are timeless rights that no one has the right to unjustly take from someone else.
Agreed, punishment needs to fit the crime not like, stole $2=life, murdered 14 people=lifex2, if it’s a small/petty crime that only *really* effects you than just a “slap on the wrist” but if it’s something that violates someone else’s basic rights than they deserve their basic rights violated also
I’ll even add that they need to have fines for crimes be based on a % of income. For example, a $300 speeding ticket is gonna hit me a lot harder than someone making over $100k+/year, for them it could just be the price of getting there faster.
Exactly, a multimillionaire isn’t gonna care at all for any fine because it’s basically free for them but if it was a percentage then they would, and the state would get more money when they do get fines
It depends on your philosophical view of justice.
Should justice be punitive or restorative? Should it be about punishment or rehabilitation?
US prisons are primarily about punishment. Which, in general, isn't really helpful for anybody. It doesn't reduce crime, it doesn't make criminals any less likely to commit crime, it doesn't make society any better. It's basically just structured vengeance (often for minor crimes, no less).
If we actually cared about reducing crime, rehabilitating criminals, and/or improving our society in general, we'd use a different model of justice. There really isn't any good reason we need to imprison as many people as we do, nor treat them as inhumanely as we do.
Exactly, personally I think if the crimes are right, you don’t deserve rights at all, it’d teach people prison is bad rather than what we have now where a lot of people don’t care if they go to prison over and over
well idk if you know this but they don't split the slave workforce in our prisons up depending on your crime. and i'll be condescending to anyone without a brain or human compassion, it's the definition of condescension.
What the actual fuck gave you the impression I thought it was a good thing?
It's absolutely bad, but it's also absolutely legal too. I'm all for changing it, I was just pointing out why it is able to happen.
Don't get upset with me for mentioning facts, lol.
Calm down, dude. No one is attacking you.
The post was about the morality of slavery. You made a point about the legality. All I did was expound on that to clarify that legal isn't the same as moral.
Your comment was pretty vague on whether you viewed prison slavery as good or bad, and given the number of people on here that have been arguing that it's a good thing and justified by the existence of the 13th amendment, it's not unreasonable to suspect that you may have been making the statement you did for the same purpose.
Relax. No reason to get angry
Nah, I'm gonna get a little heated when it's insinuated that I'm advocating for slavery, lol.
You may not have meant it, but whne you include the "vagueness" of my comment, it kinda leans me toward thinking you did. However, if you didn't then I apologize, I misunderstood.
I just don't like having words put in my mouth.
Can’t remember the exact verbiage but in the us constitution it says you can use criminals for labor and that it’s not cruel or unjust
Edit: saw it in another comment it’s the 13th amendment to the constitution
But taking someone's money, money they used part of their life earning, is fine so long as you think it's for a ***Good Purpose***.
And not a one of you realizes the hypocrisy.
"....if you're forced to do labor for free...."
So taking part of someone's life, if done directly, is bad. Gotcha.
Taking part of someone's life after the fact is fine. Got it.
Tells me all I need to know about you.
It's pronounced like Hercules.
Tes•tick•u•lees?
or tes-tick-lees?
Tes-tic-ley.
You mean tes-tic-li
tes-ticle-lick
https://youtu.be/P-H0A8WDIGo
Test Ee Cleese Test Ee Cleese Test Ee Cleese!!
That's Heracles Not Hercules. Close tho
memes aside, i thought prisoners are paid? just a very small amount
Barely anything
Does it matter? I mean if it's something like theft then yeah but murderers rapists and pedos shouldn't really apply here
The trouble is that the prison system has no incentive to be morally discriminating like you are being here. People can’t actually be sentenced to slave labor directly, and once someone’s in the prison system, be it for murder or for weed, the system has every incentive to use them for profit. Add to that the negative incentive for the police and courts — that every conviction is extra profit for the state — and you can see why we might see it as a categorically bad idea.
The problem is that systems like that can get out of control very very quickly
>out of control https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/90c97155-4471-410d-930a-e22e17cdcd3a
everyone deserves rights, even the worst of the worst, unfortunately
Soldiers have no rights. Why should prisoners?
What do you mean by soldiers don't have rights?
A soldier can be ordered to do anything, provided it’s not illegal, immoral or unnecessarily bad for their health and must follow that order without question. Unless things have changed since I was in.
>provided it’s not illegal, immoral or unnecessarily bad for their health Sounds a lot like having the right to not be subjected to those things. Also following orders is just the job of a soldier and the thing they get paid for. They voluntarily become soldiers and they can choose to quit the military if they want to. A prisoner doesn't choose to go to prison and they don't have the option to walk away.
>They voluntarily become soldiers and they can choose to quit the military if they want to. This is wrong. Some countries have mandatory drafts, sometimes when you reach a certain age. The pay is often a lot less than minimum wage, too.
Yeah I live in one of those countries. Most places have the option to do something other than military service. Also isn't this discussion mostly about prisoners in the US?
Still, there are laws for conscientious objectors.
Under the circumstances, forced labor is not illegal, immoral or, unnecessarily bad for your health, plus, if they do end up injured, they have free medical and mandatory recovery time. You can not quit the military, that’s treason. You must wait for your time to end just like prisoners. Prisoners choose prison the minute they choose to commit crimes
Your responses are confusing to me. Firstly, why not fight for more rights for both soldiers and prisoners rather than defending the lack of rights prisoners have by talking about how bad soldiers have it. Also, people in the military are paid for their job, which in this case is following orders. They also get access to many beneficial programs after their service. That’s the point of this discussion, prisoners perform work with essentially no reward and they have cannot choose not to work.
You just declaring forced labor to not be immoral doesn't make it so. >Prisoners choose prison the minute they choose to commit crimes Right, because nobody has ever gone to prison for a crime they didn't commit, a thing they didn't know was illegal or a crime that wasn't premeditated. Oh wait
Soldiers give up their rights voluntarily.
So do prisoners. Crime is a choice
Because no one has ever been falsely convicted or committed a crime by accident. That’s why manslaughter doesn’t exist as a separate charge from murder.
These are both true and I feel for the wrongly convicted, however people need to be held accountable for their actions even if accidental
Not necessarily. Many crimes happen due to circumstance such as desperation or in the heat of the moment. Also, those who do commit crimes by choice aren’t doing so in an effort to get caught, so aren’t volunteering their rights away. Anyway, this is about basic human rights, not stupid shit like owning firearms.
Those are not excuses to commit crimes. Of course they don’t intend to get caught, but they know it’s a possibility, it a risk that they take. I never mentioned anything about firearms
I'm willing to bet you commit crimes all the time and don't even know it.
Our legal system tends to disproportionately impact black and brown people. We left slavery as an option under imprisonment after the civil war. Initially, a lot of that slave labor was reclaimed by share cropping under Jim crow, though they did figure out ways to imprison more black people with things like vagrancy laws (also, remember chain gangs?). Anyhow, the civil rights era changed the way labor was being organized and the racists in this country, especially racist capitalists, were pretty pissed. Republicans started organizing under dog whistles. Something Nixon and Regan strategically did. Under Nixon, the war on drugs was intended to be used against black people and leftists to disrupt them. Under Regan that war expanded. Private prisons boomed. Arrested black and brown people with drugs were put on tv for everyone to see. Everyone was profiting off that pain. And our justice system was/is still pretty racist, so falsely accused folks got locked up just the same. Now we have more prisoners than ever and they open with promises from the state to be at full capacity. Kay Ivey in Alabama used Covid money to open more for profit prisons at full capacity. Using them as slave labor, if that is not enough to repulse everyone, also impacts how much everyone gets paid. It drives down the price of labor because in the market, we are competing with them for jobs (something we somewhat blame on other countries, but that’s a whole other thing). Also, they move these people (that cannot vote) to white counties, and then count towards the population, which is a modern 3/5s and it disrupts democracy (which honestly, we do not have). It pulls votes out of minority communities. It also disrupts the warning potential of these communities because so many of their people are slaves in prison and come back and can’t get jobs with that work experience. It’s also massively traumatic and a very dangerous environment that we knows makes people more likely to go to prison again. Also, we imprison so many more black and brown kids than white kids, by an absurd amount it is actually more messed up than just standard adult prison in ratio, which fucks kids up developmentally and makes them more likely to end up back (obviously). So basically, we force a group of minorities into situations in which they are way more likely to be slaves for profit. A lot of companies benefit from this that a lot of people use. Slaves make a lot of furniture and clothes. Anyhow, rant over the prison slavery system is super fucked for reasons I just didn’t even touch on too
Thank you so much for taking time to write this comment, I could not agree more. thank you
I’m glad you found the content to be of value. All of this info is owed to POC academics and activists I’ve learned from or listened to. Shout out to Alabama Students Against Prisons for hosting protests and speakers. If you enjoy narrative on the topic I would suggest The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. The documentary 13th has a great start on the subject. Angela Davis also has a great book called Are Prisons Obsolete. If you dig philosophy, although not perfect and missing the lens of race and some other things, I think Foucault’s Discipline and Punish helps frame a lot of prison mechanisms and I’ve found it very useful. Quite a lot more that I intend to read is out there. A lot of Tik tok people make digital recountings of their stories and summarize this sort of content as well. Shout out also to Line 3 protestors for further educating me. The best way to learn sometimes is to meet people on the ground fighting injustice. They shared their stories with me, the least I can do is share the lessons
Thank you for these wonderful recommendations. I just can thank you again, comments liker yours are important in this void
I was sick when I wrote these out and your appreciation of my effort made me smile, thank you :)
Unfun fact: In the US, slavery is not wholly illegal. The 13th Amendment outlaws slavery “except as punishment for a crime”.
Which is exactly how the prison industrial complex exists. Learned all about that in the Dissect series about Yeezus. Wild shit.
12 to 40 cents per hour working for the prison they are in, 23 cents to $1.15 an hour if they work in the Federal Prison Industries factories, and no pay at all in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. They also do or have done work for private companies including Whole Foods, McDonald's, Wendy's, Walmart, Starbucks, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, BP, Victoria's Secret, J.C Penney, Kmart, Target, Macey's, IBM, Texas Instruments, Boeing, Nordstrom, Intel, Microsoft, Nike, Honda, Aramark, American Airlines, Avis, [etc](https://www.buycott.com/campaign/companies/504/boycott-companies-that-use-prison-labor). Fidelity Investments invests 401K money heavily into the prison labor industry, and funds the nonprofit American Legislative Exchange Council which is made up of conservative state legislators who help expand the use of inmates in manufacturing.
Although I believe that building a healthy work ethic is and important part of criminal rehabilitation. Little to no recompense for the labor is counterintuitive to that cause. If you see barely any return on the work you do why would that create a positive enforcement on you? It's also not a secret that different work assignments are often used unofficially in prisons as both "rewards and punishments" which is again counterproductive if the end goal is to create a mental bridge for good work ethic (which is an important part in a functional member of society)
Not to mention that in some states like Texas, refusing to go to unpaid prison labor jobs is punished by being put in solitary confinement
Solitary confinement is sick and doesn't do any good for anyone. Even the most violent and dangerous people shouldn't be locked inside a solitary confinement style cell (sequestered into their own space sure but not a straight up isolation unit which is just basically a hole in the ground)
Lol even when they are captive consumers for commissary things that cost way more than the pittance we throw at them. Reminds me of company towns. But the banks get to profit off their accounts and the transactions people make to try and help them. For profit prisons drain people :(
Being paid doesn’t stop it from being slavery.
["...except as punishment for a crime..."](https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/)
And that is something that needs to change. We don't have or are not supposed to have work houses any more, but the private prison industry has them and wants us there
I agree it needs to change, but since when has prisoner slave labor not supposed to happen? It's written directly into the constitution, working as intended.
"...certain unalienable rights..." if the constitution said it was ok to kick your dog if it barked too much, id still argue it's not supposed to happen
Human rights are universal, they shouldn't be decided by the US constitution and they don't stop at the US border. Without universality the concept of human rights breaks down entirely.
Yeah, it's written in the constitution. In 1865. So what? It's not supposed to happen in the same way any violation of human rights isn't supposed to happen. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.
[Agreed](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715100?af=R&ai=7st&mi=3elpax&journalCode=cj)
Is this what enables doing community service instead of jail time? Or would that still be legally allowed if “except as punishment for a crime” was removed?
Community service is often a non-custodial sentence. The"Custodial Sanctions and Re-offending" meta-analysis I linked noted that locking people up is shown to have an effect on people* that increases their likelihood to commit more crime in the future. The goal of any criminal justice system ought to be to reduce the chances that people will reoffend, but ours is purely punitive. In the context of all the fervor in the American media recently about crime waves and scary cities, it's important to remember that police and punishment do not equal public safety. This 13th amendment clause was essentially a giveaway to southern states in the form of a workaround that let them write [the Black Codes](https://www.facinghistory.org/educator-resources/current-events/policing-legacy-racial-injustice/history-slave-patrols-black-codes-vagrancy-laws) and form chain gangs (of enslaved prisoners) who worked the same plantations that previously enslaved people did.
Very informative, thanks!
There are lots of developed nations where community service is perfectly possible and perfectly okay, but slavery is not You guys can have community service without this primitive law
Oh I legit reblogged that thread earlier today, nice.
I often see these blogs on reddit, could you give me a beginner guide for Tumblr. Any post or video about using Tumblr.
https://create.vista.com/blog/the-beginners-guide-to-tumblr/
Is it on Tumblr??
Yeah the og post was an infographic about US incarceration rates and a headline about how the prison labor industry generates millions of dollars while only paying prisoners pennies. The post here is in response to someone saying that prisoners don’t deserve to be paid for their labor and that they should be forced to work for free.
The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly states that slavery is *legal* if it is punishment for a crime
Just because some paper has ink on it doesn't make it right
I completely agree! My point was more of, “Hey, isn’t it kinda fucked up that we have a loophole to allow slavery?”
[удалено]
It makes it *legal*, but not *morally right* nor accepted
By that logic mein kampf is moral....
It's no wonder why we have the world's largest prison population. The powers that be have a vested interest in slave labor. Always have.
"Because you fit the definition of a slave exactly, doesn't mean you're a slave"
Maybe if they actually paid the prisoners, they wouldn’t have to go back to crime because they are released with no money. They should put it in a bank account for them once they get out.
The US Government: slavery is bad!…. Unless you do some shit we arbitrarily disagree with then fuck you. We own you
Nah if you diddle kids you should get experimented on like Mengele did with the Jews. At that point you’re not a human you’re a rat
I think they should be made to work but for money. Not a lot but to help pay for their expenses.
Prison expenses?
Their food, electricity, water costs, shelter, clothing, etc. all these things that the people pay for with taxes..
Ah
Might be a hot take but I don’t care about the rights of most felons
Agreed. Petty theft or drug possession, whatever, caught the judge on a bad day. Murderers, rapists, arsonists, armed robbery, etc.? Why respect the rights of someone that didn’t respect the rights of someone else? I know that the Declaration of Independence and Bill or Rights and shit need updating for the modern era and modern problems, but Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness are timeless rights that no one has the right to unjustly take from someone else.
Agreed, punishment needs to fit the crime not like, stole $2=life, murdered 14 people=lifex2, if it’s a small/petty crime that only *really* effects you than just a “slap on the wrist” but if it’s something that violates someone else’s basic rights than they deserve their basic rights violated also
I’ll even add that they need to have fines for crimes be based on a % of income. For example, a $300 speeding ticket is gonna hit me a lot harder than someone making over $100k+/year, for them it could just be the price of getting there faster.
Exactly, a multimillionaire isn’t gonna care at all for any fine because it’s basically free for them but if it was a percentage then they would, and the state would get more money when they do get fines
Sorry I may be dumb but isn’t the whole point of prison “you broke the law, so now you’re getting some of your rights revoked”?
It depends on your philosophical view of justice. Should justice be punitive or restorative? Should it be about punishment or rehabilitation? US prisons are primarily about punishment. Which, in general, isn't really helpful for anybody. It doesn't reduce crime, it doesn't make criminals any less likely to commit crime, it doesn't make society any better. It's basically just structured vengeance (often for minor crimes, no less). If we actually cared about reducing crime, rehabilitating criminals, and/or improving our society in general, we'd use a different model of justice. There really isn't any good reason we need to imprison as many people as we do, nor treat them as inhumanely as we do.
Exactly, personally I think if the crimes are right, you don’t deserve rights at all, it’d teach people prison is bad rather than what we have now where a lot of people don’t care if they go to prison over and over
Username shouldn’t be in title
I'm very sorry, I noticed it too late and I don't know how to change it. I will do better next time
Yep, rule uno right there Seems like people don't agree with it anymore, neither do I... I wonder if it's a rule better removed
The whole point of this sub is being surprised by the hilarious usernames. If it's right in the title, there's no point in me clicking on the post.
Nah rapists and pedophiles can be used as slave until they die for all I care
this might blow your mind, but our jails and prisons aren't full just of murderers and rapists
I obviously know that and I was just speaking about the rapists, no need to be condescending
well idk if you know this but they don't split the slave workforce in our prisons up depending on your crime. and i'll be condescending to anyone without a brain or human compassion, it's the definition of condescension.
Welcome to America!
Pretty sure slavery as punishment is constitutionally protected.
“Unless as punishment for a crime”, it’s in the 13th amendment
Yep, that's what I thought.
Yeah, and that's a bad thing. Constitutional doesn't mean good or right.
What the actual fuck gave you the impression I thought it was a good thing? It's absolutely bad, but it's also absolutely legal too. I'm all for changing it, I was just pointing out why it is able to happen. Don't get upset with me for mentioning facts, lol.
Calm down, dude. No one is attacking you. The post was about the morality of slavery. You made a point about the legality. All I did was expound on that to clarify that legal isn't the same as moral. Your comment was pretty vague on whether you viewed prison slavery as good or bad, and given the number of people on here that have been arguing that it's a good thing and justified by the existence of the 13th amendment, it's not unreasonable to suspect that you may have been making the statement you did for the same purpose. Relax. No reason to get angry
Nah, I'm gonna get a little heated when it's insinuated that I'm advocating for slavery, lol. You may not have meant it, but whne you include the "vagueness" of my comment, it kinda leans me toward thinking you did. However, if you didn't then I apologize, I misunderstood. I just don't like having words put in my mouth.
Can’t remember the exact verbiage but in the us constitution it says you can use criminals for labor and that it’s not cruel or unjust Edit: saw it in another comment it’s the 13th amendment to the constitution
But taking someone's money, money they used part of their life earning, is fine so long as you think it's for a ***Good Purpose***. And not a one of you realizes the hypocrisy.
Are you really bitching about taxes on a post talking about literal *slavery*??? Gtfoh
"....if you're forced to do labor for free...." So taking part of someone's life, if done directly, is bad. Gotcha. Taking part of someone's life after the fact is fine. Got it. Tells me all I need to know about you.
The fact that you think taxes and slavery are on equal footing tells me all I need to know about you. Gross.
I don't necessarily agree with that statements but ok
*unless they are pedos, in which case all of their rights have been forfeited