[ashtonkem]

You’re overlooking something else. America has an unbelievable number of prisoners, which makes more careful and humane management effectively impossible. Estimates are that we’ve got about 2% of the US population in prison or somewhere else in the correctional system (pre-trial detention, probation, parole, etc.), the labor required to treat these people like humans isn’t available. And arguably by the point where you’re locking that many people up, as a society that might be the point.

As an aside, it does really rankle me that a country that won’t shut up about being “the land of the free” is arguably a prison state.

[cwkoss]

The US has a specific exemption to the prohibition of slavery for incarcerated individuals in our constitution. I think there are many powerful people in our country with a vested interest in keeping the prison-slave-labor pipeline flowing.

[utborin]

Grandmaster: Revolution? How did this happen?

Topaz: Don't know. But the Arena's mainframe for the Obedience Disks have been deactivated and the slaves have armed themselves.

Grandmaster: Ohhh! I don't like that word!

Topaz: Mainframe?

Grandmaster: No. Why would I not like "mainframe?" No, the "S" word!

Topaz: Sorry, the "prisoners with jobs" have armed themselves.

Grandmaster: Okay, that's better.

[edbob]

The exemption allows an individual to be sentenced to slavery , but that can only happen if the federal or state laws also allow that sentence. Is there any jurisdiction whose laws allow a sentence of slavery? Has anyone actually been sentenced to slavery in the last 100 years or so? I would imagine that if some jurisdiction somehow did sentence someone to slavery, the states would quickly amend the constitution to make that impossible, while the courts would doubtless find some other grounds for ruling that sentence unconstitutional. It just seems unnecessary to make a currently impossible sentence a little more impossible.

I was sentenced to hard labor, but that is quite a distinct sentence. I was a ward of the state, but not property.

[ashtonkem]

It's wise in these situations to consider the concept of plausible deniability, and how it can be used to obscure intent.

To my knowledge, nobody has been sentenced to slavery in a long, long time. On the other hand, the US has managed to lock up 2% of its population and force them to labor in circumstances and rates that would be illegal for free citizens in order to guarantee the profit of private corporations. That this system of arbitrary law enforcement[0] disproportionately hits the same sub-group that used to be literally enslaved really should send your eyebrows through the ceiling when the defense is that it's not literally slavery.

Of course, US prisoners are not chattel slaves; they're not literally property, and neither are their children. On the other hand the rate of recidivism in the US, and the strong correlation of outcomes between parent to child makes this kind of a cruel joke. If your father having been in prison makes you overwhelmingly likely to end up in prison yourself for similar reasons, it's hard to put on a straight face and pretend that nothing is wrong.

I'd argue that this structure represents something akin to stochastic terrorism, but for forced labor. Stochastic terrorism is a case where someone or some group attempts to radicalize and encourage terrorism from afar. Done correctly it produces a statistical probability of terror attacks without anyone (even the group) being able to predict the exact time and place. These types of systems are very hard to disrupt, which is why groups like ISIS leaned on them in order to attack the west, which had gotten very good at stopping more organized attacks.

Similarly, I'd argue that the US system represents a type of stochastic slavery. It's impossible to precisely predict who will or will not end up in the system providing free labor (unlike chattel slavery, where it's very easy to predict), but one can easily calculate the aggregate chance of someone ending up in prison. It's not literally slavery, but with the recidivism rate so high it ends up functioning like it for most people caught up in it. Oh, and it's run for a profit too, which is deeply concerning.

0 - Drug laws remain key to why America has so many people locked up, and drug law enforcement is incredibly arbitrary, both in terms of which drugs get which sentences, and who gets the hammer dropped on them when they get caught.

[edbob]

For the record, I fully support decriminalizing drugs, even if I disagree with the currently fashionable rhetoric about their supposed harmlessness. The statistical debate you want to have is fine. It could potentially be helpful, but not if you insist on terms that tell people that they are helpless. Please just stick to accurate terms that don't convince people to not even try.

We have an existing term, "prison labor", which accurately describes the conditions and evokes the appropriate moral connotations. When we have completely adequate terms already, why insist on a legally inaccurate word which requires such a lengthy redefinition?

Slavery is an involuntary condition which cannot be exited through one's actions. It's vital to recognize that criminals can choose to exit the criminal class. It's not vital for rich people in the suburbs who don't have to live in our world. It's vital for us, ourselves. Those of us who accept responsibility for their actions tend to be the ones who make it in society. The ones who blame society, government, Republicans, white men, SJWs, or anything else outside of themselves which they have no control over, keep doing the same things over and over, stay addicted to drugs, sex, and violence, and keep coming to prison over and over. (There are some skinheads that blame racial preferences for their own failures in life, lest anyone think that I'm naming SJWs facetiously). Rich people can afford to have these intellectual debates that talk about helping the poor but never seem to actually do anything. We have to actually live in this world, where our own choices and actions will be the only ones we can always count on.

Stop telling people that they have no control over their lives. If they believe you, it will be true. These ivory tower theories have real-world consequences. They never seem to get around to actually helping the poor, but they do convince people that they can't help themselves, and those are the people that I see coming back to prison on their 8th or 9th sentence. Those are the guys with 8 kids, most of whom will also end up dead or in prison.

[ashtonkem]

> It's vital to recognize that criminals can choose to exit the criminal class.

Citation needed.

How can one choose to not have a cop plant evidence on you? Or lie during trial, or choose to not get strong armed into pleading guilty because you can't afford bail and they're threatening you with even worse consequences if you don't plead out early? Or not have a law about drug usage enforced selectively against you and not against others? These are things that happen each and every day in this country, to paint that as a choice on the part of everyone is actually kind of insulting.

Even for those who did commit crimes and got thrown in jail, what exactly do you expect them to do when they get out and can't get a job? Recidivism is very high in this country, higher than our peers. Either you've got to conjure up something about American criminals that makes them permanently criminally, in which case I will just assume that you're two steps away from getting out the skull calipers, or you're forced to come to the conclusion that we've decided to arrange our society in a way that makes this a likely outcome.

Yes, some individuals do escape the cycle, and that is both good for them and good for society. But given the strong trend, one has to ask why.

> stay addicted to drugs, sex, and violence, and keep coming to prison over and over

See, there's a funny thing that happens here. This logic is only ever applied to some people. Poor, black, and addicted to crack? Criminal, straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect any help. Rural white and addicted to opioids? Well by god they're a victim who needs help!

Now to be honest, I think that both of those groups need help, and should be treated far, far better. But the selective nature of who gets sympathy and treatment and who gets steel bracelets is pretty core to my argument.

> There are some skinheads that blame racial preferences for their own failures in life, lest anyone think that I'm naming SJWs facetiously

I still think you're bringing up SJWs facetiously.

> Stop telling people that they have no control over their lives.

Stop making up my point. It's annoying.

Every single person's outcome is a mixture of their own choices, luck, and society. Individual choices matter, I never claimed to the contrary. The question is not "do individual choices matter" but rather "is the playing field setup in such a way that some people's choices are more likely to result in negative outcomes than other people's?" > those are the people that I see coming back to prison on their 8th or 9th sentence. Those are the guys with 8 kids, most of whom will also end up dead or in prison.

Gee, I wonder why that seems to happen so often? Obviously it's people on the internet worried about the US criminal system's fault, because that obviously makes sense.

[edbob]

Not much point talking if you're going to say "Citation needed" to trivial truths, while making trivially disprovable claims like rural whites not going to prison for drugs. (You may have heard of methamphetamines). I was actually intentionally trying to be more fair to the left when mentioning unfair blame being assigned, as it could seem biased if I only mentioned unfair blame against "conservatives", but it's interesting how you masterfully twisted that attempt at fairness into a slur against me.

"The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal. The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man. The only way that our problem will be solved is when the black man wakes up, clean himself up, stand on his own feet and stop begging the white man, and take immediate steps to do for ourselves the things that we have been waiting on the white man to do for us" - Malcolm X, seeing straight through the word games and sophistry.

[airstrike]

> America has an unbelievable number of prisoners, which makes more careful and humane management effectively impossible.

But that is such a cop out... America has the number of prisoners it has by choice, not due to some inexorable condition which differentiates it from other developed nations.

[ashtonkem]

> But that is such a cop out... America has the number of prisoners it has by choice, not due to some inexorable condition which differentiates it from other developed nations.

> And arguably by the point where you’re locking that many people up, as a society that might be the point.

I already covered that in my original post, please don’t snark over things that were already pointed out.