Why don't we put the prison population to work?

[matt0611]

Non-violent != victimless. Just wait until a non-violent criminal steals something from you and tell us now victimless that feels.

I never said non-violent == victimless.

I'm talking about the people who committed victimless crimes and are no threat to society.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I never called it cruel or unusual punishment.

You can make them turn up to a work place, you can make them behave but youre never going to be able to make them do a decent days work.

Looking back I misinterpreted your response. I thought you meant simply forcing them to work, not forcing them to do *good* work. Yeah, that's always a challenge, but with the correct motivation I think it could be done. There needs to be a quality of living incentive I think. People work at flipping burgers because they want to have a better life than being on the street. And the organization has ways to make them feel good about their contribution, even if it doesn't appear that great at a glance. Not to mention productivity metrics. If a good day's work can be measured in productivity, if they're not productive they should have their quality of living reduced.

I think people go into prison with the expectation of getting fed, clothed, and sheltered as part of the deal. They should instead go in there expecting to get locked up. That's it. Everything else, food, clothing, life's extras, need to be worked for, like the rest of society. I don't see how that's not fair, provided we give them opportunities to do so.

 

[Perknose]

Sure, wanting prisoners to break rocks just for the sake of breaking rocks, executing everyone in prison for more than 5 years, blah blah. This is hardly the first thread that's exposed that sort of craziness on here.

Surprisingly enough, you are the only one here suggesting "breaking rocks" and "executing everyone in prison for more than 5 years". So it would seem that these "bizarre punishments fantasies" are only in your head.

Unsurprisingly, your lazy-assed attempt at reading comprehension was so criminally deficient, you should be incarcerated for it!

eskimospy suggested no such thing, he was responding to the shallow idiots who did. RTFT!

I would be fine to have them go to a quarry and break rocks all day for no other purpose then to just break rocks.

Send them to a mine with no equipment.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Looking back I misinterpreted your response. I thought you meant simply forcing them to work, not forcing them to do *good* work. Yeah, that's always a challenge, but with the correct motivation I think it could be done. There needs to be a quality of living incentive I think. People work at flipping burgers because they want to have a better life than being on the street. And the organization has ways to make them feel good about their contribution, even if it doesn't appear that great at a glance. Not to mention productivity metrics. If a good day's work can be measured in productivity, if they're not productive they should have their quality of living reduced.

I think people go into prison with the expectation of getting fed, clothed, and sheltered as part of the deal. They should instead go in there expecting to get locked up. That's it. Everything else, food, clothing, life's extras, need to be worked for, like the rest of society. I don't see how that's not fair, provided we give them opportunities to do so.

You're naive and no you can't make them work. In America, everyone has rights, even the incarcerated.

 

[Drako]

Unsurprisingly, your lazy-assed attempt at reading comprehension was so criminally deficient, you should be incarcerated for it!

eskimospy suggested no such thing, he was responding to the shallow idiots who did. RTFT!

LOL, I see nothing about "executing everyone in prison for more than 5 years", so there .

Oh, and how is breaking rocks for no reason bizarre punishment? Hmm? HMMM?

 

[fskimospy]

Surprisingly enough, you are the only one here suggesting "breaking rocks" and "executing everyone in prison for more than 5 years". So it would seem that these "bizarre punishments fantasies" are only in your head. Please point me to these other threads with this "sort of craziness".

Uhmmm, no I'm not. Go re-read the thread and edit your post, plz.

 

[WelshBloke]

Looking back I misinterpreted your response. I thought you meant simply forcing them to work, not forcing them to do *good* work. Yeah, that's always a challenge, but with the correct motivation I think it could be done. There needs to be a quality of living incentive I think. People work at flipping burgers because they want to have a better life than being on the street. And the organization has ways to make them feel good about their contribution, even if it doesn't appear that great at a glance. Not to mention productivity metrics. If a good day's work can be measured in productivity, if they're not productive they should have their quality of living reduced.

I think people go into prison with the expectation of getting fed, clothed, and sheltered as part of the deal. They should instead go in there expecting to get locked up. That's it. Everything else, food, clothing, life's extras, need to be worked for, like the rest of society. I don't see how that's not fair, provided we give them opportunities to do so.

Fair or not you cant lock people up and then starve them. Once you take responsibility for their lives (and thats what youre doing by locking them up) you cant argue that they should provide for themselves.

Now you may well be able to set up some sort of reward scheme whereby inmates gain privalages for working but then you run into the problem of increased costs and accusations of making prison too comfy.

 

[airdata]

I've always wondered this. People talking about how the prisons are too expensive to run....

One thing that needs to be taken into account is the prison industrial complex. What is happening is that private corporations are building facilities and the government gives them X dollars per inmate per year. They do what they can to minimize costs and come up with Y dollars in actual cost per inmate.

X-Y= corporate profit from housing prisoners.


Of course, putting prisoners to work would also burden regular people who are in need of work.

What about training up some elite death squads? Life sentence? How about become an elite US killing machine?

 

[Keeper]

I never said non-violent == victimless.

I'm talking about the people who committed victimless crimes and are no threat to society.

For my own education. What is a victimless crime?
Shop-lifting? (We pay higher prices due to shrinkage)
DWI? If they havent been a threat to society all they have been is LUCKY.
Jay-walking? OK... I will concede that one. Any Jay-walkers in prison serving 1-4.... Sure... Let'em out.
Bank Fraud? Come on... You think the ins. companies will eat that loss?

I am curious....

 

[fskimospy]

For my own education. What is a victimless crime?
Shop-lifting? (We pay higher prices due to shrinkage)
DWI? If they havent been a threat to society all they have been is LUCKY.
Jay-walking? OK... I will concede that one. Any Jay-walkers in prison serving 1-4.... Sure... Let'em out.
Bank Fraud? Come on... You think the ins. companies will eat that loss?

I am curious....

Drug use.

 

[WelshBloke]

For my own education. What is a victimless crime?
Shop-lifting? (We pay higher prices due to shrinkage)
DWI? If they havent been a threat to society all they have been is LUCKY.
Jay-walking? OK... I will concede that one. Any Jay-walkers in prison serving 1-4.... Sure... Let'em out.
Bank Fraud? Come on... You think the ins. companies will eat that loss?

I am curious....

Growing your own cannabis then smoking it only in the privacy of your own home?

 

[Munky]

The prison labor system has been tried for ages. It will not work here, because we already have an oversupply of labor, as demonstrated by the unemployment numbers.

 

[Ausm]

I've always wondered this. People talking about how the prisons are too expensive to run, how law abiding citizens are the ones to feed, clothe, shelter, and guard those who have wronged us.

There's gotta be something that all that excess labor in the form of the prison population can do, to at least make the prisons break even, no?

The GOP have the answer they want to privatize the prison systems.

 

[werepossum]

Most prisons now have inmates do some jobs for a very modest wage, which allows them to purchase some small luxuries as well as offsetting the cost of their incarceration. Many non-violent offenders are also sentenced to community service as an alternative to prison. I also have no problem with people being sentenced to hard labor, although arbitrarily imposing hard labor after the fact on people sentenced only to incarceration doesn't sound kosher. However, having inmates do productive work, competing with the free market, smacks of slavery.

 

[actuarial]

LOL, I see nothing about "executing everyone in prison for more than 5 years", so there .

Oh, and how is breaking rocks for no reason bizarre punishment? Hmm? HMMM?

How about we REDUCE the prison population?

It'd work quite easily. First you reduce sentence time, but anyone who belongs there for over 10-20 years is simply executed within 5 years. You keep most non violent offenders out of prison in the first place.

indeed.

 

[Drako]

indeed.

That will teach me not to try to work while browsing the interwebs

 

[Siddhartha]

I love watching the bizarre punishment fantasies of people play out here. Some disturbing psyches at work on this here website!

I have noticed that the people in this thread who are advocating forced prisoner slave labor are pretty much the same people who advocated the torture and mutilation of prisoners in an earlier thread.

 

[bfdd]

I'm all for chain gangs, let them do the shitty jobs like cleaning up our roads and what not.

 

[fskimospy]

I'm all for chain gangs, let them do the shitty jobs like cleaning up our roads and what not.

This already happens with community service, etc.

 

[trenchfoot]

Having prisoners work flies in the face of two things:

1. The basic Repub rule that privatization will always be preferrable to government run businesses.

2. The basic Dem rule that taking jobs away from union workers is an absolute no-no.

However, I do like the idea that prisoners should farm some of their own food and maintain the prisons they reside in. Good for them and good for us.

Balancing how much the taxpayers save vs. how much the private sector makes in profits from doing business with prison-related projects seems rather delicate though.

 

[pcgeek11]

They used to do this: Cleaning out ditches, cutting the roadside grass, picking up trash, growing their own food, dairy etc...

They were called chain gangs down south. Excellent deterrent as in very hard labor.

 

[Kadarin]

Solution: Make prisoners work as migrant farm workers. This way, you put illegal aliens out of a job.

 

[desy]

OMG you're a bunch of dumbarses
Prison Labor is a huge corporation already in the US

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25inmates.html?pagewanted=all

http://boingboing.net/2011/03/08/american-prison-labo.html

 

[Bowfinger]

They already do this in Iowa, and have for decades: Iowa Prison Industries.

I was aware of them because they make office and institutional furniture, but they apparently do all sorts of things. If they're doing this in Iowa, I'd be surprised if it isn't somewhat common.

 

[Jhhnn]

The problem with prison labor, and privatized prisons, is that they introduce other incentives to the whole equation- profit & graft.

When prisons show a profit, there are no disincentives to extremely long sentences for relatively minor crimes, because they'll make money off your junkie ass every day you're locked up, and they have ways to convince you that picking cotton all day out in the sun & living in a tent w/o running water for 30 years is preferable to the alternative.

That's the way many bible belt prison systems worked for decades, and the rake-off, the graft on the part of prison guards & officials was incredible, yet not enough to prevent them from putting money back into the general fund every year.

The more people you lock up, the more money you make. It's a state sponsored form of slavery rather than the necessary incarceration of criminals. We need to have to pay to lock people up, just to keep the system semi-honest.

Having known several ex-offenders, I believe that inmates generally regard work details as a welcome break from the drudgery of prison life, particularly any that get them outside the facility. More of it? OK, just not enough to significantly reduce the cost of locking people up, and especially not enough to show a profit.

Privatized prisons are an abomination from start to finish, perhaps one of the most sordid panders to corporate interests ever invented.