- cross-posted to:
- thisisnotmylife@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- thisisnotmylife@lemm.ee
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One person was arguing that they shouldn’t be able to refuse to do “chores” in prison, but the things they do there are things like making license plates, furniture, and fighting wildfires. A bit far from mopping up and taking out the garbage.
Is that person wrong though? Would they be able to refuse “chores”?
Edit: This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know if they are factually correct or not.
They’re in prison. Forcing them to do anything is wrong. We’ve already taken their freedom. Using them as labor is morally wrong. Especially when you look at the punishments like solitary.
I’d argue that simple chores can be used to help inmates get used to structured work as part of a reintegration effort. Of course that only makes sense if reintegration is the main goal of the prison system, which isn’t the case in the United States.
In any way, if inmates were to do labor, they’d have to be subject to labor law including worker protections and minimum wage provisions. That would probably require the United States to abolish slavery first, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
If it’s not against their will. Sure.
A guy I knew once that I definitely wouldn’t call a friend, used to say, “the only way you can change a man is if he’s in diapers.”
And in a lot of different aspects that has resonated with me, in this case, if you’re forcing a person to do labor in order to make that a better functioning member of society… It’s not going to work. They may just do the work they are forced to do without changing at all. Or they just cause trouble. OR, you hire prisoners to do the job that they need and then substitute labor that they can’t hire within. But the logic or forcing someone into submission just will never work, that’s definitely a reason why the recidivation is high.
A lot of these folks in prison were raised “free range” or completely feral and thus were never taught even the most basic elements of home care and cleaning. Knowing how and when to do those “chores” is essential should any of them want to reintegrate into society as any sort of a functioning person. Like the military will show recruits basic hygiene because some of these recruits were never taught it.
Oh wow, we are doing these savages a service! Now, go put out that wildfire, unclean one /s
Jesus, this sounds like Europeans landing at whatever they colonized centuries ago
Chores = firefighting? Where the fuck did you grow up?
California prisoners are used as fire fighters on wild fires.
That was not a rhetorical question. I am asking if that argument is or is not factually correct.
They can’t refuse any job short of firefighting. They will be punished for doing so. Reports from former inmates indicate punishments range from solitary to beatings.
Let me rephrase: would the proposition, if it had passed, prohibited prisons from requiring prisoners to perform domestic duties within the prison?
See that’s still too vague. Cleaning the bathroom is a domestic duty and yet is something a janitor does in this context. I would say that’s probably the dividing line, if it’s something you’d pay someone to do then they would be banned from requiring it.
I guess I’ll put my personal opinion on the record here. I think that penal labour is generally an exploitative industry, if you want to call it that. And I do think that prisoners who perform work should be paid for that work. At the same time, I’m also sensitive to the fact that it costs a great deal of money to pay for room and board and security for prisoners, and that it’s also fair that their labour be used to offset some of the cost of their own imprisonment rather than laying the burden entirely on the public purse.
So while I don’t support solitary confinement as a punishment (for anything), I do think that prisoners should have to at a minimum cook and clean for themselves. If they don’t want to cook, then nobody else should have to do it; they just won’t have dinner that night if they don’t cook and serve it themselves. If nobody wants to wash the dishes, then it’s not the administration’s problem if there aren’t any clean plates to use for the next meal. If nobody wants to clean the shower, then it’s not the administration’s problem if grime starts to build up on it. The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.
Which means I agree that “extra” work beyond what’s necessary to maintain the basic needs of the prisoners should be paid and optional. “Optional” meaning there’s no punishment if you choose not to do it, but if you don’t, you won’t have money to pay for services like postage stamps, extra phone calls, or the prison commissary. Even if prisoners are only paid half of minimum wage, that’s still an improvement, because it recognises that their labour has value and this money can also be used to pay for fines and restitution. A pretty common problem among the newly-released is that they are saddled with an obscene amount of debt because the State makes them pay court costs, room and board, fines, parole monitoring fees, and restitution but only pays them fifty cents an hour for their work, meaning they leave prison thousands of dollars in debt with the threat of parole revocation if they can’t pay. That just drives people to resort to crime in order to find the money.
Why are you taking jobs away from the working class and giving it to prison slaves?
Prisoners are a subset of the working class. I am advocating for giving them jobs and paying them a reasonable hourly wage for those jobs (measured in dollars and not cents) so that they can gain work experience that is useful when they are released, and so that the fruits of their labour can also be used to offset the cost of their incarceration, compensate the victims of their crime, and build up a nest egg that can be used to help them re-integrate back into society.
And these jobs are not typically those that the free working class are willing to do anyway. That’s why the companies offering these kinds of jobs always get busted hiring undocumented workers paying them next to nothing with no paid breaks, days off, overtime pay, and in horrendous working conditions.
Oh it’s worse than that. California voted to make more homeless people, expand the three strikes system by turning some misdemeanors into felonies, and voted itself a slave state to take advantage of all that new prison population.
All that’s left is to privatize the pipeline.
But it’s okay, they removed the defunct ban on same sex marriage so they’re still progressive! Yay!
The baton used to crush your skull will be rainbow colored and have BLM on it.
I entirely agree with your point, it’s hypocritical “progressive” bullshit to maintain slavery.
But if I’m being honest, California is on my short list to move to because my state doesn’t support same sex marriage and I expect Obergefell to be overturned. It’s horrorific to be in this position but that’s me and my partners reality.
Oh it’s definitely better than other other states. But I would suggest checking out the NE and NW as well.
I know it has that reputation but I really don’t think California is the most progressive state. Maybe Oregon? Vermont? Not sure to be honest.
It’s pretty much just basic liberals here. And lots of fascists but they hide out away from everyone else most of the time.
I also feel like people forget how fucking enormous California is. It’s really just a few big liberal areas separated by a giant wasteland of racist rednecks that spans nearly the entirety of the United States from north to South in between. It’s huge. If you start in San Diego and drive north for 12 hours you’ll be…almost to the top of California. If you do that on the East coast you can drive through nine states.
It’s not even racist rednecks in most of those in-between areas. It’s a lot of Hispanics, and let me tell you… there’s a whoooolllleeeeee lot of racist Hispanics in this state and a lot that are happy they got in and fine with no one else coming in behind them.
You don’t have to be white to be racist or a redneck. Go to places like Fresno or Victorville and you’ll meet plenty of both. A huge proportion of Hispanics regularly vote against their own interests in California
California has the second largest population of Republicans in the US after Texas.
California also has the largest population of all states. A direct numerical comparison is disingenuous, a statistical comparison would be more valid.
Of registered voters in California, about 25% are Republican. In Texas, 38% are Republican.
https://independentvoterproject.org/voter-registration-by-state
Wait… only 38% of voters in Texas are registered republican, yet they win every single time?!
Gerrymandering is an art form in Texas
That’s not an issue for state-level elections or national elections, the answer is that many don’t vote and many don’t register for a party.
A lot of people don’t register for a party
46.5% are registered democrats
Texas doesn’t do voter registration by party so uh
How did they get these
And a ton of people choose not to participate at all.
Willy Wonka, but the chocolate factory is Texas:
🎵 Come with me and you’ll be
In a world of pure voter suppression 🎵
I have huge skepticism about the Texas number.
Texas DOES NOT have voters register for a party.
Voting for democrats more overwhelmingly doesn’t necessarily mean more progressive, just more acceptance for the Democrats in California, who are generally establishment neoliberals.
And yet in local races, primaries, ballot initiatives, progressive candidates and issues all lost. Almost every issue I voted on went the other way. So that has been my experience with California, that it is not very progressive. Admittedly this was a particularly bad election but similar things have happened before.
Yep. Cali is ideologically very neoliberal, from the SanFran techbros to the large presense of the Military Industrial Complex. People’s ideas are guided by their material conditions, which includes their class interests. I made an introductory reading list for Marxism if you are interested, the section on Dialectical and Historical Materialism as well as Scientific Socialism goes over said phenomena in further detail.
I realize I misunderstood what you were saying. Yes I agree.
I don’t find Marxism very compelling personally but I agree that material conditions certainly do have their influence on many things, perhaps including this issue.
I understand if you don’t want to talk about it, whether it be here or in general, but what is it about Marxism you don’t find compelling? I can either offer clarification or contextualization, if you want. I’m a big Marxist theory nerd.
It’s such a broad body of work that it’s hard to list all of the issues I have it it. I guess the biggest issue is just that Marx’s writings were an early attempt at describing a more rigorous case for social reform before more scientific theories of social change and economics were developed. So while his ideas were groundbreaking and innovative at the time they were written, not all of them have held up or are relevant to today’s world. And yet I don’t see many Marxists who have been willing to seriously dissect his ideas and take the useful ideas while discarding the bad or irrelevant ones. And in fact, those few who are willing to take a more critical stance are often ostracized and deemed “revisionists” which strikes me as a frankly absurd accusation. If you are not revising your theories then they are no longer theories but mere dogma, and that seems to be the state of mainstream Marxism today.
It’s pretty difficult to talk about anything if you don’t give specifics. What of Marxism hasn’t held up? What is better than it? Kinda hard to have a convo that way.
Secondly, taking a critical stance towards Marxism isn’t enough to be revisionist. Lenin added on Marxism and analyzed along his contemporary times, and isn’t considered a revisionist. Marxism is an ever-evolving ideology. Revisionism rejects pillars of Marxism like Scientific Socialism, the Law of Value, or Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
All that being said, it’s difficult to understand what you’re getting at if you don’t give an example.
I think it’s probably one of those two. California is a bit too diverse idiology when you look at the individual level because it’s a huge state, just like Texas (which might go purple under better circumstance). Drive through central valley to know what I mean. Plus we’re the state that gave the country Reagan!
As for the slavery, dem voter turnout was fairly bad like in the other states, so that probably had some impact. Some red house seats got flipped though, although that is pretty specific to those communities (turn out lead by house members, believe it or not).
In every list I find online, it’s Massachusetts
Doesn’t Massachusetts have a law where your security deposit is held by the municipality and your landlord has to prove they deserve it?
One can only dream of such freedom where I live.
Yes, actually it’s beyond that; the landlord has to put the security deposit in an interest-bearing account so that it makes money while they hold it for you!
The American prison system is designed to make money. Prisons get paid based on how many people they house. Making sure people don’t wind up in prison is literally the last thing the warden wants to do. Anybody thinking America is gonna change it’s ways out of the goodness of its heart is fucking delusional.
I watched a video of a random streamer who ranted a bit about the elections. He had some great points, and he was basically saying what most people are thinking. He talked about voting and the people that refused to vote. He then added: how can you become president as a criminal but you are not able to vote as a criminal. And then continues with, he agrees that criminals shouldn’t be able to vote, because they are criminals with bad intentions. Fucker, the system is designed that most people ARE criminals. You can go to jail because a copper doesn’t like your face.
Literally every single person is one police encounter away from being a criminal, unless you’re rich that is.
It’s worth noting that California did abolish private prisons a while ago.
California is the USA in a bottle. You got progressive cities, conservative suburbs, rural areas and industrial hotspots, poor folks as well as the obscenely rich. Ronald Reagan was Governor in California for 8 years before becoming the blueprint of conservative candidates for the presidency.
This. Larger population than all of Canada = smorgasbord of different ideologies and classes.
Don’t blame me! I voted Yes!
The baffling thing is that the other side didn’t even file an argument against the measure in the voter guide… and it still lost!
Like, if your side can’t even be bothered to come up with an argument for or against particular legislation, I’m voting with the other side, full stop.
Edit: As roscoe comments below, I’m a bit stupid, tho I still feel like the logic used in the latter part is a bit faulty. The following is the original bullshit I wrote.
Lol, that’s some serious “I’m not a fascist” cope. Really? If you want people to debate you over why slavery is bad, you’re part of the problem, or like really young, which I’m hopefully doubtful of. It’s like me pointing a gun to your head, asking why I shouldn’t shoot you and then pulling the trigger because instead of making a sound argument, you just got mad at me.
I think you’re misunderstanding them.
A “yes” vote means no slavery. This was a prop to make forced prison labor illegal. Our voter guides contain arguments for and against propositions and rebuttals to those arguments, usually. No group even bothered to make an argument against the prop or a rebuttal to the argument for. They’re also saying, in general not just this prop, if no one can even be bothered to make an argument for one side, they’ll probably go with the only side that did make one. In this case that would be no slavery.
This was weird. There are always arguments both ways unless it’s just some editorial change to some law that for whatever reason has to go before the voters. This was totally non-controversial, or at least it seemed that way. I don’t understand how it didn’t pass.
Lol, that’s some serious “I’m not a fascist” cope.
TIL it’s fascist to not want prison slavery
Ballot measures have an “arguments for” and “arguments against” sections in the voter guide. I’d say over 95% of measures have an argument logged for both sides.
If one side of an issue decides not to log an argument, it’s my personal opinion that that’s a strong indicator I shouldn’t be taking that position.
There was a long argument as to why we should amend the state constitution to eliminate involuntary servitude as punishment, but no one bothered to defend keeping it as is….
There are artifacts organisations that refuse to argue against fascist organisations in order to not give them attention. Instead they argue in favor of others. So in a convoluted (and contrived) sense you just voted for a fascist.
Edit: This refers to your generalisation in the last paragraph and was meant as a joke and reference to a meme.
A “yes” vote means no slavery. See my comment in reply to lanik2000.
This refers to your generalisation in the last paragraph and was meant as a joke and reference to a meme
So in a convoluted (and contrived) sense you just voted for a fascist.
Voting against prison slavery is a vote for fascism, apparently.
This refers to your generalisation in the last paragraph and was meant as a joke and reference to a meme
The only thing that pissed me off more than Trump winning, was seeing how many good Props failed, and bad ones passed.
I’m glad we made LGBT marriage part of our constitution, but jesus christ the voting base here is NIMBYs, NeoLibs, and Conservatives.
Exactly right
My guess is that all those people who didn’t show up to vote dem weren’t around to vote for the other dem items.
There was a certain irony in ranked choice ballot initiatives failing while the same people that didn’t show up complained about both candidates being “exactly the same” or to punish the Democratic party.
Big time. Hurts to see it happen.
Maybe next life I will be free to vote how i want.
Can you expand on that? Good news in American politics would be a nice change.
- California made it in the constitution that marriage is between two people, gender or sex is not considered what counts
- And we also made it so Medi-Cal gets a permanent chunk of funding no matter what the budget is doing.
That sounds great!. I’m happy for Californians.
This is a spin on the truth. Slavery has
never not been illegalalways been legal per the US constitution, as long as the slaves are prisoners. We had a prop on it to disallow mandatory labor in prisons in California. We voted against it because Americans have a hard-on for punishment. Personally I think being caged is punishment enough, ESPECIALLY when you consider the sheer volume of for profit prisons in the US. Hurray, private business can keep doing slavery in the state -_-It has been and still is legal in federal law across the US
Slavery has never not been illegal per the US constitution
???
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States
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I think that was pretty clear and correct. Slavery is still very much legal in the USA.
Edit: actually the triple negative makes it say the opposite of that lol, carry on.
And yet, California voted affirmatively to be a slave state in 2024. I did not have that on my 2024 bingo card.
continue to be a slave state*
Like the rest of the entire country already is*
My point being that it should be more shocking to people that this is the way of the country as a whole instead of framing it as a California only problem.
It takes a 2/3rds majority of both legislative chambers, and 2/3rds of the states to pass a new amendment. There’s not any question as to why we’re still stuck with that line in an amendment passed in the 1860’s.
California has never before held a referendum on slavery and was admitted as a state in 1850 as a “Free State” because of a compromise on the national level.
In 2024, they voted for slavery. They can no longer hide behind the onerous process of editing the 13th amendment. They specifically voted in favor of slavery.
That’s fucking huge.
Why that bear don’t have 2 heads?
Because it isn’t 2189 yet.
Also, please use the spoiler tag.
The urge to re-install New Vegas grows…
Crazy that you uninstalled it in the first place tbh
If I don’t, I can’t remod it fresh and new after seeing all of the wonderful mods coming out all the time these days. Plus, I’d never play anything else!
Land of the
free
Land of the fee,
Home of the slave.
Land of the free is misspelled. It’s land of the three. Trump, Leon, RFK.
The US is working exactly as planned
And will collapse as has been predicted.
Basically because we’re the 4th largest economy in the world, and thus, billionaires also run this state.
We also didn’t get rent control adjustments, or a minimum wage hike. So yeah.
They haven’t called the results of the minimum wage vote yet, god dammit! Don’t take this from me yet!
At least we already indexed minimum wage to inflation a while ago so it will still go up, just not by as much.
I thought the bear in their logo had two heads
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter
I bet the mutated Canada Geese look the same, they couldn’t get any fiercer
The bear in the flag was over-hunted and had its habitat destroyed so it’s no longer found in California. It’s a great metaphor.
Same here, the only bears still in Toronto are all on Church Street
Bear meat is so gamey, it must have been to protect livestock right?
Maybe I’m not starving enough for it to make sense.
Soon
That comes after 2077
And all because 1950s McCarthyism incepted America with a seed that may eventually destroy it long after the USSR’s dissolution
I’d zoom out, Capitalism has a growth phase and decay phase, we are at the tail-end of the decay phase and need to jump to Socialism. Marx’s analysis makes this more clear, I wrote an introductory Marxist reading list if you want to check it out.
I’ve seen this. Isn’t it because of prisoner firefighters?
Fucking wild
You can absolutely still have volunteer programs like that. Volunteering to work time off faster shows a willingness to work on the problems that landed you in prison. Forcing it just creates misery.
That’s what pretty much all prison labor is. They coerce you with “Good Time” and something to do.
It’s still slavery, it’s not like they have a real choice. Do I rot in my cell or work and maybe get out a year early? Of course I’m gonna work. I’m not getting (really) paid for it, I’m just getting punished less. Sounds a lot like indentured servitude to me, which we all agreed was slavery too.
Oh no. Non volunteer work is punished if you don’t do it and provides no good time.
All right I’ll bite. I crave more information.
This except with a fire hose
While incarcerated California firefighters choose to work, many other incarcerated workers are not allowed a choice at all. The 13th Amendment ended slavery in the United States, but a loophole allows people convicted of crimes to be forced to work.
I maintain all prison labor is slavery.
I should have been clearer, I only attempted to provide a TL;DR.
Sorry, I’m not sure if you’re trying to make a point or just provide a TL;RD?
TL;DR
Got ya. 👍
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What’s wild is that even with slave labor, the budget for fighting fires is still not big enough.
