Comment by kgwxd
Comment by kgwxd 4 days ago
No cut is reasonable.
Comment by kgwxd 4 days ago
No cut is reasonable.
1) How is this different from any other prisoner
2) They wouldn't have to if they didn't insist on locking him up
It isn't different from any other prisoner. In many states you leave prison owing them back rent. Maine at least charges as a percentage of the prisoners income, rather than having them build debt.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...
Maine: https://www.corrections1.com/finance-and-budgets/maine-lawma... "the state can deduct up to 20% of their income — 10% for room and board, which is sent to the state’s general fund, not the Department of Corrections , and up to 10% to cover transportation provided by the department. Since 2020, the state fund has collected a total of $2.4 million.
They need money to pay for oversight. Any time prisoners talk to someone on the outside, it's a potential conduit for contraband or organized crime.
The exact same is true of people working outside of prison.
I think it's reasonable to assume an additional risk for people in prison.
Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.
Not really, contraband includes many things that are completely legal for non prisoners to have like currency, phones, knives, or alcohol. Sending that stuff to prisoners is illegal https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1791
List of prohibited items: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
You can send phones, knives or alcohol via email or slack?
People working outside pay rent. From a third to upto half their salary.
"No cut" is reasonable, but also "Some cut" is reasonable. However while arguing that "no cut" should be mandatory is reasonable, given that "no cut" would itself be reasonable, it is probably not pragmatic. Therefore in order to best support this kind of thing one should determine exactly how much "some cut" should be.
Isn't this largely just a one off situation that happened to work out? I doubt there will be legions of prisoners working remotely. If that future did come to be, it would be rather dystopian imo.
if, right now, it is not dystopian, then there is no reason to say it would inevitably be dystopian if there were multiple occurrences, although sure, I expect it probably would be considering what the world is like. Of course I am the last person who one would expect to say it but - there is always hope.
Fuck no! Lowering the cost of keeping people in prison would make it even easier for the government to lock people up for smaller crimes and with bigger sentences. It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has. They already know the "market price" (what the government is willing to spend) so adding "free money" into the equation just makes it easier for them to raise prices and end up pocketing even more money than they already do.
Framing it as offsetting the cost would also make it very easy to increase the cut, bit by bit, until it gets to a truly unreasonable level. And since the person is already in prison and we have to pay for them no matter what, why would they choose to work if the deal is so bad?
It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has.
This is a state by state thing. FWIW in this case, ME doesn't have private prisons. I don't bring this up to imply everything related to their cut is on the up and up, however, I believe Maine is very much incentivized to make this a useful program in terms of keeping people from returning to jail (as opposed to squeezing every dollar from the prisoners).
Don't you suppose that it's "fair" to request compensation for the room and board if the person is making a "fair" wage?
No. Prisons should cost society money. If you are taking away someone’s freedoms, there should be a high cost so you don’t do it flippantly when another solution will work.
Are you concerned that if you make prison too expensive society might resort to capital punishment to reduce prison costs? Or we end up releasing prisoners who are legitimate dangers to society.
And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.
Incredible for sure. To start with, it sounds like you think due process means that any kind or amount of punishment must be correct and reasonable, which. wow.
For starters this is just a complete non-comment. I mean there's no substance here.
And secondly, he has a good point. We don't want to make locking people up easy or cheap. It should be high-friction, it should take a long time, and it should cost the government lots and lots of money.
Why? Incentives. The government has no reason to prevent crime if locking people up is cheap. It's made even worse by the promise of cheap or free labor. Then, you run into issues where the government actually wants people to fail and do crime, so they can extract labor from them. We see this quite aggressively in some southern states like Georgia. A remnant of Jim Crow era America.
But, if prison is expensive, the government will be incentivized to put some of that money into crime prevention programs. Things like homeless shelters, food banks, job programs.
To be honest, if he didn't pay a cut of his earnings while living off government allocated funds, wouldn't that put him in a better position than those who haven't been found guilty and sentenced for breaking the laws of the land in which they reside? I can't see a much resistance to the argument that they one really ought to pay the full cost back to the state, as with community service... no?
No, for the simple fact that he'd still be stuck in an American prison where people are brutalized, sexually assaulted, denied access to medical care, abused by guards, etc. regularly. He deserves everything he is able to earn under those conditions, and truthfully it's a miracle he can work at all.
Americans have become too comfortable with their everyday sadism.
If my employer payed for my housing and food I would not consider it unreasonable that my paycheck reflected that.
> Why are they paid
Because people have expenses other than food and lodging. Prisoners do to, some save money for after they leave prison others spend it at the commissary.
I agree that a prison should not be a business (aka a different model than the US-model). I also think that many prisoners are currently treated unfairly.
However, ideally, I don’t think that it makes sense for someone to go to prison, which costs tax money, and meanwhile earn the same amount of money by remote working from prison as someone in the outside world, who actually has living expenses to pay for (which get taxed also).
So, I think, when it comes to fairness, it wouldn’t be unreasonable if a partial cut goes to the TCOO of holding that prisoner.
Now again, American prisons have their whole incentive model messed up, so I don’t even want to get in an argument about America’s implementation of this system and how it would lead to more problems— because it’s well-known and more than expected.
Presumably the prison is providing the "office" where the person works from, the Internet connection, etc.