[BizarroLand]

The slavery of free humans is illegal in America, so now the big issue is figuring out how to convince voters that imprisoned criminals deserve rights.

Even in liberal states, the dehumanization of criminals is an endemic behavior, and we are reaching the point in our society where ironically having the leeway to discuss the humane treatment of even our worst criminals is becoming an issue that affects how we see ourselves as a society before we even have a framework to deal with the issue itself.

What one side wants is for prisons to be for rehabilitation and societal reintegration, for prisoners to have the right to decline to work and to be paid fair wages from their labor. They further want to remove for-profit prisons from the equation completely.

What the other side wants is the acknowledgement that prisons are not free, they are for punishment, and that prisoners have lost some of their rights for the duration of their incarceration and that they should be required to provide labor to offset the tax burden of their incarceration on the innocent people that have to pay for it. They also would like it if all prisons were for-profit as that would remove the burden from the tax payers and place all of the costs of incarceration onto the shoulders of the incarcerated.

Both sides have valid and reasonable wants from their vantage point while overlooking the valid and reasonable wants from the other side.

[graemep]

I do not think you can equate making prisoners work with slavery. Other countries do the same, and it is not regarded as slavery in general.

If people were sold into slavery as a punishment (so they became some one else's property) as some ancient societies did, then that would clearly be slavery.

The most shocking thing about prisons in the US is how common prison rape is, and the extent to which it seems to be regarded as a joke. The majority of rapes in the US are prison rapes. How can that not be anything but an appalling problem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...

Rape is also something slaves are casually subject to in most slave societies. It was definitely accept that Roman slave owners were free to rape men, women and children they owned.

[ninjagoo]

The US Constitution's 13th Amendment abolishing slavery specifically allows it for convicted people. [1]

You'll see from the definition of a "slave" [2] that prisoner labor specifically fits the definition of a slave, hence why the constitution makes an exception for it.

[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/a... [2] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/slave_n?tl=true

[recursive]

> slavery of free humans is illegal

That's kind of vacuously true though, isn't it?

[chromatin]

I think his point is that slavery is not outlawed by the 13th amendment as most people assume (even the Google AI summary reads: "The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States.").

However, if you actually read it, the 13th amendment makes an explicit allowance for slavery (i.e. expressly allows it):

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*" (emphasis mine obviously since Markdown didn't exist in 1865)

[SR2Z]

Prisoners themselves are the ones choosing to work most of the time, and generally none of them are REQUIRED to work (they are required to either take job training or work).

They choose to because extra money = extra commissary snacks and having a job is preferable to being bored out of their minds all day.

That's the part that's frequently not included in the discussion of this whenever it comes up. Prison jobs don't pay minimum wage, but given that prisoners are wards of the state that seems reasonable.

[BizarroLand]

I have heard anecdotes that the choice of doing work is a choice between doing work and being in solitary confinement or becoming the target of the guards who do not take kindly to prisoners who don't volunteer for work assignments.