[wantab]

Apparently you don't understand what a prison is for or how those people got there. Your point a) implies you think prisoners are not bad people which stands out to me.

You are in prison to be punished for what you did AND pay back your debt to society.

[byuu]

If we only locked up truly guilty people up for truly bad things, that would be fine.

But even ignoring the large number of innocent people in prison; we have a lot of laws that are blatantly unjust. The biggest would be that about half of the prison population is there for minor drug offenses. A guy smoking a plant that makes him giddy and hungry is not worth locking up at substantial cost to taxpayers. Or you have the guy that spent six months in prison because he ordered a hentai comic book from Japan, and the postal inspector thought that the girl that looked 16 drawn in pencil was a real child being harmed. Or you have the elderly black woman who got put into what is essentially debtors prison because she couldn't pay her traffic tickets. Or the guy that got locked up for refusing to pay child support on a kid that turned out to not be his, but the judge didn't care about little things like facts. And on and on and on.

In fact, we have so many ridiculous laws that it's been said that the average American commits three felonies a day:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...

http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp...

[wantab]

So, we should let everybody go? You're complaining as if jails should be abolished and, seemingly, all laws, too.

While innocent people do go to jail, most people in jail are not innocent. You only hear about the innocent ones cause it makes the news but, by far, most people are in jail cause they deserve to be there.

[byuu]

I'm saying we shouldn't have unjust laws. But since we do, we shouldn't treat them all as slaves. I'm saying we shouldn't have innocent people in prison, but that's impossible to prevent. And since we do, again, we shouldn't treat them all as slaves.

I'm more interested in prison for rehabilitation than I am as punishment. I'd rather we reduce the recidivism rate than bask in schadenfreude. I'm more interested in addressing why we have the highest per capita incarceration rate of any first world nation.

[wantab]

You're being off topic. Straw man comes to mind.

Whether you agree or not with how they got to prison has nothing to do with how a prison should operate. The point is prison's do what they do with people incarcerated and no one should consider it as a nice place to spend some time.

[byuu]

What straw man? I've been arguing against forced prison labor this entire time, even before you joined the conversation. I haven't deflected any points you were making to some new topic.

And yes, I'm all for taking the TVs out of prisons and not having it be a good time. I'm also against mandatory labor. They're prisoners, but they're still human beings.

Others here have said it's voluntary, so if that's true, that's at least better. I still think they should be paid fairly so as to not displace jobs from people not in prison, though.

It's clear though that I'm against this, and you're not, so there's really no point in continuing on. I'll just say that I hope you never have to experience working for pennies a day.

[Retric]

There are a 10's of thousands of innocent people in prison making the punishment argument morally questionable .