Yep. It boils down to rehabilitation v. retribution. Rehabilitation is effective at preventing recidivism. Retribution is politically expedient.
And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.
"if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail"
That's a great point that I haven't seen discussed in the media. When I was young, only "Fortune 500" type companies could afford background checks, so you had a fighting chance at getting a decent job.
Now, anybody can buy a instant background check online, and you can get not just felony data, but misdemeanor data, and even "just arrests, not convictions". And it's dirt cheap to do so. So, job prospects are dim, and even simple stuff like renting an apartment is difficult as well.
I'm sure there's more in play, but the concept of "At Will Employment" we have in the US creates an environment where only very specifically legally defined discrimination counts as such (race, gender, etc). Outside of that you can fire, or not hire, anyone, for any arbitrary reason you want...even for "no reason given".
So in the US there are rules around court data being public so companies scoop up that data and basically package it as a background check. This data is also enriched with voting data which is also public in most states which includes the people living in your home and other info. The company ADP which deals with paychecks also sells your income information to third parties so someone running a basic background check can actually know where you live, who you live with and how much you make.
Luckily the french did give us a tool to fight against this bullshit, it is called the guillotine?
Neither of those things need to be "done by the government". Unionization covers "protection of the job", and mutual aid covers "social protection".
Though yes, if the state is to exist, the least it should be doing is providing for its people - in my opinion via UBI + single-payer healthcare at minimum.
Socialism as a concept is super wide. Many Western European countries are socialist democracies (France, Sweden, ...) and proud of it. We actually like what we have (but we always protest anyway).
It seems to be the same in Australia from what I can see. We have "police checks" where the police certify that you have not been involved in any crime specific to the job you apply for. So if you have committed fraud, you could not get a job at a bank. And if you are a sex offender, you could not get a job with kids. But as far as I know, a fraud can get a job at a school and a sex offender can get a job at a bank and the employer would not know anything.
What makes this potentially complicated in the US is each state being a different jurisdiction. While states aren't really anything like "countries" in the European statehood sense of the word, they keep separate records by design, and there are often no interoperable systems for exchanging data. This is why there is no "USA marriage certificate" in the US, there's simply no nation wide record of marriages.
I'd guess the industry built around background checks and the like is partially a response to this. There isn't a national registry of crimes, at least not all kinds, so you could game the Australian system by just crossing state borders. Hence companies selling collections of people's (technically) public record. A solution may be to just create more national registries, but this seems antithetical to the US's idea of statehood. Maybe it'd be for the best, though...
It seems to be that the US ends up with the worst of both systems. States are not separate countries so they can not deny access like another country would deny a rapist from immigrating but they are also not unified so they can't take any collective action.
Seems to be the core of the covid situation too. There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.
> There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.
Can't or won't? If California can get away with its agricultural checkpoints without running afoul of e.g. the Commerce Clause, then it seems like restricting interstate border crossings is at least hypothetically possible.
In practice, it's pretty trivial to bypass those checkpoints if you really want to smuggle produce into the state (e.g. the I-80 checkpoint, where you can take the Hirschdale Road exit and follow Glenshire Drive to 287, then get right back on I-80). I highly doubt COVID checkpoints would be any harder to bypass.
No it doesn't. It's perfectly fair to be against the lack of uniformity in how prisoners are treated without being against retributive justice. That prisoners' lives should not depend on "the whims of the prison's management" (as another poster put it) is just common sense.
You're right in theory, but in practice, being in favor of retributive "justice" tends to go hand in hand with an acceptance of arbitrary application of said "justice", for reasons typically along the lines of "if you wanted humane treatment then you should've thought about that before being a hard-bitten criminal scumbag" (exaggerating, obviously, but not by much).
I think you can have a level of both. Obviously we don't want crime to be free of consequence, but we also don't want inmates to commit crimes again after their sentence(both for the sake of others and their own). In the US, we mostly care about retribution, even when we say that we want reformation. All the time I hear from people about how we need to focus on rehabilitation, but then hear a lot of the same people shout "lock 'em up!" even for property crimes.
I'm not one to be in the "America is bad at everything" camp, but I think one of the most negative aspects of our culture is that we act entitled to everything like the world is Burger King and we should get everything our way(or your money back). Fries too cold? Send 'em back and don't tip the server! Someone backed into our rear fender? Sue 'em for all they've got! Someone stole your TV? Lock 'em up and throw away the key! It all stems from materialism.
I live in Canada although did visit US few times. In my opinion the United States is great. Problem I think is that it is great at too many things. It had accomplished incredibly good things. It had also fucked things up royally. And keeps doing all of this. For the people I think it would be worth paying more attention to the dark side.
Years ago I read an interview with a prison warden. The interviewer at the end asked him what he would want the public to understand. The warden said, I would like the public to understand that everyone here is going to get out eventually.
- I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism.
- On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions; it's legal slavery (quite literally; the 13th Amendment carved out prison labor as an exception to the abolition of slavery). Prison laborers need the ability to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, and this negotiation is currently impossible because prisons can compel them by threat of violence to accept any terms, no matter how unfair to the worker. Indeed, if prisoners were fairly compensated for their labor, they might be able to save up enough money to not feel as strong of a need to return to a life of crime should they remain shunned by employers, per above (and hell, they might even be able to bootstrap themselves a startup and sidestep said shunning entirely).
>I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism.
That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it.
>On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions
As in the cousin thread, this may be your objection, but it isn't the popular objection; Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered.
> That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it.
And that question was outside of the topic I was originally discussing.
> Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered.
Because there was no real option to provide better terms. As pointed out by myself in that very same cousin thread, prison labor compensation in the state of Oklahoma has a monthly cap of less than $30, which is pathetically low, even when deducting room and board (which would itself be coercive, given that prisoners by definition can't exactly opt out of said room and board), and especially when factoring in price markups in prison commissaries.
The popular blanket objection to prison labor exists specifically because there are few (if any) prison work programs in the US that pay prisoners anywhere close to a fair wage. Indeed, if they did pay a fair wage, and weren't coercively presented to inmates as "you either work or you rot in the cell", then what reason would there be to object?
That sounds like a straw man. There's a big difference between practical "practical job training" and "breaking rocks."
If the labor is entirely volunteer and something that actually requires some training, it's job training. If it's forced (which is legal in many states) and it's entirely grunt work like janitorial duty or highway cleanup, then it's prison labor.
> John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.
> When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”
> The Oklahoma Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify the discrepancy, nor to answer questions about ProCom’s arrangement with the Bloomberg campaign.
Given the refusal to clarify that discrepancy, it ain't unreasonable to assume - barring concrete evidence to the contrary - that these prisoners are being paid a pittance for their labor, and Bloomberg - and ProCom, and the state of Oklahoma - definitely deserve any flak coming to them for that exploitation. The very fact that there is a maximum monthly wage for prisoners at all, let alone one as pathetically low as $27.09 per month, is barbaric.
Oh, so Bloomberg's primary objection -- and the outraged people's primary objection -- was that they weren't get paid a fair wage, not to the mere fact of prison labor? Then why can't I seem to find anyone saying anything to this effect, anywhere?
Because as best I can tell, the objection is exactly the "strawman" I originally alleged, that prison labor shouldn't be used, even when rehabilitative and helps the prisoner find employment after release.
> Then why can't I seem to find anyone saying anything to this effect, anywhere?
Because that's strongly implied to be the reason for any objection at all - i.e. the coercion of prisoners into working for a pathetically low wage, and the exploitation of that coercion for financial gain. Unless you can think of some other reason why people object to prison labor other than it being coercive and exploitative?
They're not independent. Sufficient skills can overcome the stigma of a criminal record. But providing prisoners skills usually involves some on-the-job training to be useful.
> Sufficient skills can overcome the stigma of a criminal record.
Not when there's an HR department in between the applicant and the hiring manager. People with "sufficient skills" get rejected all the time for reasons far more benign than e.g. having killed someone 30 years ago.
Like, this ain't about "stigma". This is about Kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy actively driving crime rates.
And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.