This just makes me feel like the entire modern process of matching workers to employers is a kafkaesque hell that has negative value.
The boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process. Stay in jail long enough and you’ll pass one of our arbitrary steps!
What's the intent of the process?
I remember hiring a few years ago, where a deep background check uncovered an assault charge on a candidate I liked. The charges had been dropped. But they were violent in nature, and this spooked my team.
Fortunately, our GC once did family law. Between me pointing out this was a remote position and our GC showing that the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce, we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
>we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
Did you try firing her just to be sure?
Within the default biases of the american law enforcement and court systems an assault charge on a woman in divorce dropped usually means almost the opposite of assault charges on a man in divorce being dropped.
We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.
Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated.
Whenever a read a story about someone who's been to prison and then ends up a solid, productive member of society, I can't help but think: "This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.
This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.
This is literally what rehabiliation entails. Convincing criminals that they have better options than crime.
It doesn't work for everyone. There are absolutely bad people who will just violate social contracts, or who can't control their rage turning into violence. Those people need to be incapacitated. But for the vast majority of criminals, particularly non-violent criminals, crime is an economic cost-benefit exercise.
I think some people just haven't been exposed to the benefits of taking a path to life that doesn't involve crime. Some people also need to be convinced that there are viable alternatives to crime. And as someone else said, society needs to give them the chance to redeem themselves and pursue those alternate paths.
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A42e604d8-31d0-4067-a08c-...
Agree, but do we have experiments trying Nordic models in America to see what aspects of their model work here (and which may not)?
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-will-little-scan...
Sounds like Oregon started but hasn't gotten very far:
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425946/how-norway-helping-...
Getting policy right under adversarial conditions is really hard - even harder than the already hard problem of identifying and testing good policy.
Just like Swedish-American homelessness rates are comparable to homelessness rates in Sweden, etc.
...are they? (Serious question.)
(Note: "There was no significant difference in rates of lifetime adult homelessness between foreign-born adults and native-born adults (1.0% vs 1.7%). Foreign-born participants were less likely to have various mental and substance-use disorders, less likely to receive welfare, and less likely to have any lifetime incarceration. The number of years foreign-born adults lived in the United States was significantly associated with risk for homelessness" [1])
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00333...
There's lots of evidence that maintaining connection to family, and providing skills training reduces recidivism. You should be asking for studies proving that what we're currently doing is effective or humane.
As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll a 1 at birth on many attributes at once, and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. They will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely, with dignity and compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.
And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.
In short: humans are not inherently good 'uns or bad 'uns. The social interventions made by friends, families, community, state-run programs, have a discernable effect on reoffending rates.
I think it’s logical that you’re both right, with the disagreement being in the ratio. If you honestly think all humans are born equal, I suggest visiting a mental ward, or more relevant here, watching some interviews/analysis of mass murderers. There’s a well accepted, by the medical field, by objective metrics, spectrum of self control, awareness, autonomy, and intelligence, expressed in humans. We’re not all the same. You typing here suggests you’re on the relatively extreme end of the “genetic luck” spectrum.
I don't. But in addition to genetics, babies pop out of rich and poor vaginas. Socioeconomic status is a much stronger indicator for being incarcerated than genetics (not counting "male vs female"). There is also the theory that the children of prisoners grow up without fathers and are more likely to go to prison, thus perpetuating the cycle. Children that lose both parents (to imprisonment, drug addiction, abandonment) and enter foster care or become wards of the state have terrible life outcomes. Not genetic, but familial due to disrupted social support networks.
I also think that if, for example, you get addicted to heroin, and you don't have a good support network, that will be your only life until you're dead. But if you do have a good support network, you have an better chance of getting clean and staying clean.
Assuming the certain % is something meaningful and not like 1% then:
Yes, given that America and the world has run the largest ever social experiment, America imprisoning a higher percentage of their population than any other country and most other countries continuing to thrive with lower crime numbers than America (in cases where countries do not thrive obvious external and environmental factors are seen) it follows that America, a nation of immigrants with higher heterogeneity of the population than other nations of the Earth, does not have a population with a greater percentage of the population genetically predisposed to anti-sociability.
America has a population where 1 in 3 adults has a criminal record. If criminality was in any significant way genetically hard-wired in Americans it seems difficult to believe the country would have lasted as long as it has, although I admit my argument here may be slightly weak given the current state of things, but I think one can argue that is not the fault of the anti-social population.
Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.
They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.
It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.
I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).
Yep. Everyone's heard about private prisons and their pet judges, but few know anything about Bob Barker or VitaPro. Their are deep and very murky waters here.
Are a red herring to distract from the real issue. The industrialist complex around prisons that do in fact profit from prisons. Like all gov contracts are also highly inefficient by design.
But yes, the ones really profiting are those making deals to service the prison. Those who bring food, or repair the infrastructure, or custodial duties. A lot of seemingly unrelated industries have every reason to lobby in the background to focus on "hard on crime".
[1] https://truthout.org/articles/immigration-detention-has-beco...
~ https://abcnews.go.com/US/top-private-prison-companies-profi...
Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics
Two corporations, GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, Inc. (CCA), manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US.
These contracts are extremely lucrative; in the 2017 fiscal year, GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined revenue of more than 4 billion dollars.
Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are invested in mass incarceration because incarceration is profitable for them.
Such corporations ensure that correctional facilities are in demand through a variety of techniques, including minimum occupancy clauses and political lobbying efforts.
https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/the-economic-impact-of-pr...
private prisons make money for their corporations. Look up Wackenhut.
Places with a greater population tend to get more representatives in a state or federal legislature, all else being equal.
This makes sense for minors (part of voter-households, to be voters later) and noncitizens (either in voter-households, or at least with freedom of travel) but it becomes a perverse-incentive when we start talking about people forced to be in a specific region by a government that put them there and won't let them leave.
The only ethically-hard problem is which jurisdiction their vote should count in, since they cannot demonstrate it by choosing where to live. Perhaps a choice between:
1. The location of the prison, if their main interest is the conditions of their detention rather than anything outside.
2. The location of their property or close family, because they're still paying property-taxes or school levies etc. and they will be returning there later.
Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.
The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.
The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.
Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.
It's literally unconscionable in any kid of democracy to me.
To be clear, I'm saying it's garbage, but it's garbage very much on purpose.
But I think the laws in some U.S. states do actually allow felons to vote under certain circumstances.
Yes. Why shouldn't they?
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/20...
I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab. They seem viscerally invested in the concept of a prison as a place to store/segregate violent people, but have no interest in either helping those people learn to live safely in society or to have any advantages that the poorest non-prisoner gets.
Before we can jump straight to pointing to successful prison labor programs, I think we need to figure out how to message to those voters that it matters how we treat prisoners.
Compare to Australia, where the employer doesn't see detail. They file the background check, but only get a "yes" or "no", based on that specific job and past offenses (if any).
"He figured Thorpe might have trouble clearing the company's background check and he says he prepared himself for that. But since it only searches back seven years and since Thorpe has been in prison for more than a decade, "He is actually our cleanest background check," Costa says."
"He doesn't have a parking ticket." What does a parking ticket, let alone a criminal conviction have to do with programming?
Let's just go ahead and get to the exploitation, the corporate scum offered him minimum wage and are taking advantage of his situation.
Gives new meaning to working in Mountain View.
Awesome. So so so awesome
This stuff truly is a disturbing view of the future of the US.
>earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board
Yep. There it is. Sounds nice now right? Until in 5 years they decide, well it really needs to be 20%. Then it 5 more years. Well they are in prison so 30% should be resonable. Then as tax deficits grow .....weeeellllll maybe 70%..... Then it will be well prisoners shouldn't really be getting rich in prison so we take 100% but when they get out they will still have that job to fall back on. Just wait and see.
To be clear I'm not against giving people a chance to reform. This is not that. If a person is reformed enough or behaved enough at a chance for reform then they should be on probation at worst. Not propping up a industrial prison complex for nonviolent crimes like 20+ year sentence selling drugs.
Simpler explanation: "slavery" never ended, it's just called something else now
What was gross margin per average (because the cook picks no cotton) of your typical plantation?
I'd bet it's a whole lot less than the federal .gov's margin on someone in one of the 20+% brackets. State .govs are probably all over the place.
Hard to account for because the .gov "doesn't show a profit" in the same way that "we're totally a nonprofit <wink>" hospitals don't but should be a doable calculation.
Also "intent" is cop for we didn't like your face.
Especially with all the race issues in imprisonment.
So they take a cut of your pay. Totally not profit? They deserve it? Why not 20% why not 95%.
Also this headline is yellow AF. "Prisoners are thriving" oh yeah? "THRIVING" In f-ing prison? I bet if you asked them 100% would rather not be doing their full time job in prison. I'd stake my life on it in fact.
They also have to volunteer, what are you even saying
1) it can be both
2) I don't see the economic value here. If a prisoner software engineer can make 80k and can instead make 200k if they weren't in prison, what would make the state more? the garnished wages on a prisoner that need to partially go into maintaining the prison, or the taxes on the free person who's paying their own bills? (this isn't rhetorical, I think it's closer than what first blush tells us).
> "Prisoners are thriving" oh yeah? "THRIVING" In f-ing prison?]
Given the context of the article, I take "thriving" as in "being rehabilitated". Which should be the goal of the justice system, but it's been clear that is almost never is the result.
If there's anyone wrongfully imprisoned or otherwise having the book thrown at them, that's a different matter.
Do you have knowledge of, eg of New Hampshire (which is mentioned as a counter example in the article?)
https://www.criminon.org/where-we-work/united-states/new-ham...
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-states-use-private-pr...
As long as they're paid fair rates i think it should be allowed.
and my definition of a fair rate for them is what people outside the prison are paid, assuming they're paid a fair rate of course.
Why aren't we all doing this?
I guess with knowledge work there is some protection because it’s hard to force. Though, it would be desirable to extend such programs into other forms of work.
Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
How many others are profiting from keeping prison populations topped up? Perverse incentives, ensuring the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with only the People's Republic of China rivalling it for prison population. Make slavery legal again with this one weird trick called the 13th amendment's "except as punishment for a crime"
I am OK with prisoners being rehabilitated, this includes them working. I am not OK with their jailers profiting. Nor am I OK with employers profiting by having unfair power over pay and conditions they wouldn't have with free citizens.
And one of the judges [0] in the “kids for cash” scandal had the remainder of his federal sentence commuted by President Biden before he left office.
So I searched and THEN I found the blog of the inmate from the article! https://pthorpe92.dev/
cl0ckt0wer•2h ago
We really need to get rid of the exception in the 13th amendment.
_qua•2h ago
schaefer•2h ago
djohnston•2h ago
faitswulff•2h ago
_qua•2h ago
If you're interested in doing hard federal time, I would suggest you consider interstate trafficking of distribution quantities of drugs.
jMyles•47m ago
...there are two million people in prison. Several million more in various stages of the carceral cycle who be be easily subbed in when more labor is required.
Slavery of this variety is alive and well.
johnnyanmac•42m ago
If you're white, maybe. There's still stories of some states having the book thrown at recreational drug usage.
SuperShibe•2h ago
lovich•2h ago
It’s just slavery with all the perverse incentives that come with it, and I think we’d all be better off if this was a lever that no one in society had access to pull on
malcolmgreaves•2h ago
What then? If they're not forced to produce something of value to give to you, then how can you ever be made whole again? Does the state pay? If so, why do taxpayers who didn't commit a crime foot the bill? If it's insurance, then why do non-criminals paying insurance premiums foot the bill?
If there's nothing linking the action (_theft_) to the needed outcome (_restitution_), then there's this unmoored loop of perverse incentives wherein some folks can continue to commit crimes with very limited consequences.
Doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to work while in prison. But surely for any and all crimes that have a clearly defined dollar amount, shouldn't that criminal be forced to pay that amount back? Garnishing future wages can be circumvented (_just don't get a real job when you get out, keep stealing things to support yourself_). And even at best, it's very much _delayed_ restitution. Justice delayed is justice denied.
margalabargala•2h ago
To be clear, in the present day, when a prisoner works, how much money do you think they make, and who do you think keeps the value produced?
WaltPurvis•2h ago
ryoshoe•2h ago
Are any of these solutions that unreasonable when you consider that the state/taxpayers are already footing the bill to keep prisoners incarcerated?
p_ing•2h ago
How do they pay you back when employers run background checks (not to mention housing)?
johnnyanmac•35m ago
What does that have to do with rehabilitation? That person can go to prison, realize the errors of their ways, and have a healthy life.I don't have to like nor forgive them. I'm not being "made whole again" no matter how long you lock them up.
> If they're not forced to produce something of value to give to you, then how can you ever be made whole again?
1) you generally don't get something "produced of value", unless suffering is a currency now. Probably is in 2025
2) insurance. not everything can be given back, but many material goods can be compensated.
>If it's insurance, then why do non-criminals paying insurance premiums foot the bill?
because that's how insurance works, in spirit. You're all pooling together a fund so that you help out some other person when they need it. The instigator is often not the one footing the bill to begin with. Shaking down a criminal with no money is as useful as yelling at a forest fire as it burns your place down.
>Doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to work while in prison. But surely for any and all crimes that have a clearly defined dollar amount, shouldn't that criminal be forced to pay that amount back?
if they have it, sure. As is, this isn't the model of the "justice" system, though. You're not getting paid back for anyone put behind bars.
WaltPurvis•2h ago
That's a different problem, for different inmates -- the inmates covered in this story are paid market rates. It mentions the software developer has a six-figure salary.
charcircuit•2h ago
Why would the prison / prisoner charge below market rates for their labor?
toomuchtodo•2h ago
https://www.walkfree.org/news/2025/13th-amendment-loophole-f...
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
jacobr1•1h ago
t-3•1h ago
charcircuit•8m ago
johnnyanmac•32m ago
The prisoner doesn't really get too much choice in the matter other than taking/rejecting the offer.