18 ms·

I understand this is the general policy in a few places, like Germany. The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are giv

I understand this is the general policy in a few places, like Germany. The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now". I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.

baybal2 2y ago
[dead]
llamaimperative 2y ago
It’s almost like there are multiple competing interests at play in a country of 340 million people…
dingnuts 2y ago
take your tinfoil hat off. the US isn't one system conspiratorially doing one thing or another. it is a myriad of competing individuals and groups. journalists have different incentives than private prison operators and tend to be more progressive for whatever reason. they often are activists. it should not be surprising that journalists might take a softer view and than prison industrialists in a country with free thought and expression
cj 2y ago
The article isn’t strictly talking about prisoners. In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in a graveyard, and can’t find a job years later.
- dylan604 2y ago
  The negative knee jerk reaction to things has become comical. It's to the point where schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus. They don't even care what the offense was for; they only look that there's not a clean slate.
  - worik 2y ago
    > schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and ostracising them. Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.
    - watwut 2y ago
      People kicking someone out of their immediate circle is not a new development. It always existed - both for good reasons and bad reasons.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        It has become much more common in the last, say, 10 years, than it ever was. It used to be an extreme last resort, now people talk about it like it’s the obvious first step. Discussed previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223003>
        watwut 2y ago
        Hacker news thread is not exactly a sociological proof. In that thread, people talk in abstract and no one reading it has any way to figure out a.) what happened in anecdotes they talk about b.) whether such situations are more frequent then in the past. Besides, hacker news is a place where imaginary past gets written about all the time.
        teddyh 2y ago
        I was not trying to prove my assertion; I was just making an observation based on my personal experience.
    - astura 2y ago
      I've noticed that the exact opposite is true - I've seen endless "one more chance" and "let's just bury the hatchet" for very bad behavior, behavior that should get someone ostracised. People are extremely forgiving, to a fault, for those in their in-group.
- ggreer 2y ago
  I'll be honest, I want to know more about the monument vandal. The article mentions that after graduating high school, a man "became rowdy with some friends and broke a small stone monument".[1] If the reason he couldn't get a job was that every employer googled his name, discovered what he did, and decided not to hire him, then clearly his actions were something that most people would want to know. If it was as inconsequential as the journalist claims, then why did his actions disqualify him from employment? Without details of the case (which would likely reveal the man's name), we can't decide whether memory-holing his past was beneficial to society or not. And that's exactly my point: People want to decide for themselves whether a person's past disqualifies them from becoming an employee, a friend, or even a lover. There are some crimes that most people are willing to overlook, especially if they happened long ago and the perpetrator has turned their life around. Nelson Mandela is an excellent example of that. But there are some crimes that most people are willing to shun someone for. The actual harm inflicted doesn't matter as much as how the actions reflect upon the person's character. For example: If you knew someone had been caught keying cars on three separate occasions, wouldn't you be a little hesitant to associate with them? The harm they did was minimal, but such actions say something about that person's psyche. Should their actions be googleable for all time? I don't know, but I know that I want to judge for myself whether those actions can be overlooked or if they're beyond the pale. I don't trust others to make that decision for me. Most importantly, if people realize that they can't trust public information, then they will be less trusting of strangers who can't prove their bona fides. They'll revert to how people solved this problem before the internet: preferring to hire relatives, former classmates, people who go to the same church, friends of friends, relying on stereotypes, and so on. It will become harder for someone to without the right connections to get their foot in the door, and it will hurt social mobility. 1. https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_how_the_right.html https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_ho...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - desert_rue 2y ago
    I have lived in an area of the US where a high portion of the population regularly attends church. I do not attend church. I noticed that when people found out about my lack of religion early in our acquaintance I was judged harshly for not being a believer. If they got to know me first, then they were okay with me by the time the subject of religion came up. Was I a bad person for hiding my lack of faith? The US has such a patchwork of reporting systems around crimes and convictions, and there are several workarounds to avoid having bad things surfacing. So there are likely already people around you who have secrets but are living decent lives now. We all have those things about ourselves we don’t discuss and this is the social lubricant that keeps our relationships going.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  Hiding it is the wrong way. Nobody cares about kids having stupid ideas. Erasing the entry closes the opportunity of providing a reasonable explanation and showing repent, that in fact could help highlight the candidate among other. If employers still care... is a red flag. The case tells about a person that 1) has anger problems, 2) never mastered any skills valued by employers, and 3) never cultured friends wanting to vouch for him. In sum, not the type that employers enjoy as coworker. Newspapers aren't necessarily the problem here.
  - yladiz 2y ago
    > Erasing the entry closes the opportunity of providing a reasonable explanation and showing repent, that in fact could help highlight the candidate among other. If someone does a crime, goes to jail or does whatever punishment is mandated by a court, have they not already “repented”?
Yeul 2y ago
Before things like the FBI and the telegraph it was quite common for Americans to find a new life in another state. You could be married in New York but nobody in Montana would know unless they actively started an investigation. The world has become a village.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  It's one of those feudal villages you can't leave.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    It's not because we're indentured, but because we're on an island, and now most of the island is as transparent as a village.
- jackstraw14 2y ago
  it was the main selling point of the US for quite a while.
- ddingus 2y ago
  True story: In the late 70's my Uncle had a run of bad luck and a dubious business partner basically sink him financially. After some discussion, he made a plan. It was simple: Uncle goes back to Virginia to lay low in one of the back hollers. My mom gets his mail, due to him living with us for a while[1], and writes "Deceased" on it, and "Return to Sender" 5 years pass. Maybe 4, I can't remember. Uncle shows up, everything is fine, and he and my aunt live out the rest of their days in a small comfy trailer no worries. [1] Living and other time with this Uncle was a great time in my life. Edit due to device change: My uncle had one eye, the other lost when he was young and unlucky in the woods. He read everything and acquired a great many skills which he proceeded to pass along to me: lock picking, electronics, engine rebuilding and a ton about autos, working with wood, metals, tools... He is probably still doing that in his afterlife. Good soul who I treasure having known.
  - adriand 2y ago
FredPret 2y ago
There are private prisons in the US that benefit from more prisoners. But there are many more people and organizations there that benefit from fewer prisoners. For most purposes, a country is not a singular thing.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  As I've gotten farther in my career as a product manager, I have to do more and more slicing and dicing of markets to understand who I'm building something for, identify opportunity. It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
  - teachrdan 2y ago
    > It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking. This is the top comment in a chain of siblings that are dogpiling on the parent for no good reason. I'm replying because I think it's a case of pointing out a distinction without difference, which is a low value response up there with "But correlation isn't causation!" In this case there are many different groups that benefit from a higher prison population. Private prisons are perhaps the most commonly cited, but they hold a tiny percent of the total prison population. But there are many, many private businesses that sell to prisons. Sudexo-Marriott makes millions selling services to private and public prisons. I once toured a "super max" prison in Ohio and saw that they had tens of thousands of dollars in commercial Hobart restaurant equipment. The knee jerk response here is, "Of course a prison pays for commercial dining services and equipment! That's not surprising, it's inevitable!" But that's my point. It's inevitable that there's billions of dollars being made off the US's prison population. And that's not including industries based specifically on exploiting prisoners, like prison phone and teleconferencing services that overcharged the incarcerated and their families by billions of dollars. There are many utterly conventional businesses that use slave labor from prisons. This is not hyperbole -- prisoners are often forced to work for $1 a day or less. They are punished with solitary confinement or even additional prison time if they refuse. The final rebuttal would be, "Well not everyone in America benefits from a large prison population!" But if you read carefully, that's exactly what the parent comment is saying. But enough different and powerful stakeholders do benefit from a large and growing prison population that it's difficult to enact reforms to make that number smaller. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffab&atb=v211-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffa... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business+predatory&t=ffab&atb=v211-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business... https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v211-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v...
jgalt212 2y ago
> the prison slavery system. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the enslavement?
- nashashmi 2y ago
  Slave is sometimes also referred to as captured person or captive. An imprisoned person is a captive.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    There's usually a work component, though. An imprisoned person may or may not be enslaved as part of that imprisonment. If they get paid a reasonable wage, they're a prisoner with a job. If they're not forced to work, they're a prisoner but not a slave.
    - Aloisius 2y ago
      Slavery was a condition, usually a legal status, where someone's autonomy was stripped from them. The work component only existed because why else would one want a slave? If someone born into slavery died before they could walk, they still were a slave. If an old slave was allowed to retire without working again, that didn't stop them from being a slave.
  - jgalt212 2y ago
    But there's no purchase or sale of a human. So where's the slavery?
    - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
      Only chattel slavery involves purchase or sale of a human. Any forced labor is slavery, it just might not be chattel slavery.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      Prison labor is not limited to inside prisons: https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-takeaways-7ec182c7b1b604b1e4cb2ffb6e2a0f0a https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve... Your labor should not have financial considerations to the prison. You taking a sick day should not risk punishment up to and included increased security points and should not impact any prison employees pay/bonus (COs/AWs/Ws often get bonus' based on inmate labor metrics). Security points are the 'nice sanitized' way penal systems threaten violence on inmates. If you get points you go to a more dangerous yard where your safety will be threatened and you will get hurt. Anything that can incur security points is a implicit threat of violence against inmates. Inmates should not be threatened with violence for taking sick days/losing a non-prison job. Inmates jobs should not include the possibility of overtime because inmates CAN NOT REFUSE it. Inmates should not be threatened with violence (security points) if they do not want to work overtime of need a sick day. Inmate jobs should not include zero hour jobs (jobs where the schedule constantly changes and you are not guaranteed any hours) because inmates CAN NOT control their schedules and it works out to be a nightmare for them logistics wise. For example leading to inabilities to file legal mail (inability to schedule around mail room hours), missed meals (chow hall hours are fixed with almost no accommodation other than SHU/medical meals), excessive isolation during transfers, missed 'move times' resulting in no personal recreation time, etc.
jmyeet 2y ago
There's a much broader problem here: unnecessary background checks. If you're applying for a job or to rent an apartment it absolutely shouldn't matter that you vandalized something 15 years earlier. It's likely automated systems building up these profiles too so what if you happen to just have the same name as someone who was convicted of something in a news article?
- hyperliner 2y ago
  [dead]
impossiblefork 2y ago
There are enormous problems with this kind of thing though, especially when for example, a murderer is part of the establishment or is cuddled by the big established entities. There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's Wikipedia page.' I think truth is much more important and I think what a court does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public as possible.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  What is this journalist's name? I couldn't find any information on this, but I don't have much to go on - Dagens Nyheter being a newspaper means "Dagens Nyheter murder" surfaces a lot of results of the newspaper reporting on murders.
  - impossiblefork 2y ago
    Jacques Wallner.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      I've found this claim online in only four places. Three are the "Alternative for Sweden" website, Samnytt, and Fria Tider. None are reliable sources (one's a political party of bigots, one's a tabloid that's been "sued multiple times for libel", and the third "anses ha ett uppenbart rasistiskt, främlingsfientligt och islamofobiskt innehåll" (quotations from Wikipedia)). I wrote this, before I looked up the names of the websites: > I don't know enough Swedish to say for sure, but the language feels tabloidy, and there are passages with quite similar sentence constructions in articles purportedly written four-or-more years apart – so this might be one story that was adapted / plagiarised. The fourth is https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/ https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/, which I can't identify the provenance of, but doesn't cite any source for its claim. The Swedish Wikipedia article has some kind of edit war, but the edits are all redacted, so I can't see what the edit war is about. (The revert comments look like "Tar bort icke källbelagt påstående.", so maybe it's about this.) I'm not wholly sure that this story is true: it could be a smear put out by this journalist's enemies. I see little reason to believe there was even such a trial, unless someone can find court records.
dsego 2y ago
Historically criminals from Germany would find a new life in Argentina. And they mostly lived out plain unremarkable lives, so this does work. Not sure everyone appreciated the benefits to society though.
anal_reactor 2y ago
> The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now". It really boggles my mind that so many people have difficulties understanding this concept, and prefer it when the general public wants blood. Peed in public? Capital punishment it is.
throw_m239339 2y ago
There is need for a middle ground between privacy and the safety of the community. In my country, a lot of horrible crimes could have been avoided if the repeated criminal's past crimes were something people could at the least be aware of, one way or another. I'm talking about murders and sex crimes.

baybal2 2y ago

[dead]

llamaimperative 2y ago

It’s almost like there are multiple competing interests at play in a country of 340 million people…

dingnuts 2y ago

take your tinfoil hat off. the US isn't one system conspiratorially doing one thing or another. it is a myriad of competing individuals and groups. journalists have different incentives than private prison operators and tend to be more progressive for whatever reason. they often are activists. it should not be surprising that journalists might take a softer view and than prison industrialists in a country with free thought and expression

cj 2y ago

The article isn’t strictly talking about prisoners. In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in a graveyard, and can’t find a job years later.

dylan604 2y ago
The negative knee jerk reaction to things has become comical. It's to the point where schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus. They don't even care what the offense was for; they only look that there's not a clean slate.
- worik 2y ago
  > schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and ostracising them. Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.
  - watwut 2y ago
    People kicking someone out of their immediate circle is not a new development. It always existed - both for good reasons and bad reasons.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      It has become much more common in the last, say, 10 years, than it ever was. It used to be an extreme last resort, now people talk about it like it’s the obvious first step. Discussed previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223003>
      - watwut 2y ago
        Hacker news thread is not exactly a sociological proof. In that thread, people talk in abstract and no one reading it has any way to figure out a.) what happened in anecdotes they talk about b.) whether such situations are more frequent then in the past. Besides, hacker news is a place where imaginary past gets written about all the time.
        teddyh 2y ago
        I was not trying to prove my assertion; I was just making an observation based on my personal experience.
  - astura 2y ago
    I've noticed that the exact opposite is true - I've seen endless "one more chance" and "let's just bury the hatchet" for very bad behavior, behavior that should get someone ostracised. People are extremely forgiving, to a fault, for those in their in-group.
ggreer 2y ago
I'll be honest, I want to know more about the monument vandal. The article mentions that after graduating high school, a man "became rowdy with some friends and broke a small stone monument".[1] If the reason he couldn't get a job was that every employer googled his name, discovered what he did, and decided not to hire him, then clearly his actions were something that most people would want to know. If it was as inconsequential as the journalist claims, then why did his actions disqualify him from employment? Without details of the case (which would likely reveal the man's name), we can't decide whether memory-holing his past was beneficial to society or not. And that's exactly my point: People want to decide for themselves whether a person's past disqualifies them from becoming an employee, a friend, or even a lover. There are some crimes that most people are willing to overlook, especially if they happened long ago and the perpetrator has turned their life around. Nelson Mandela is an excellent example of that. But there are some crimes that most people are willing to shun someone for. The actual harm inflicted doesn't matter as much as how the actions reflect upon the person's character. For example: If you knew someone had been caught keying cars on three separate occasions, wouldn't you be a little hesitant to associate with them? The harm they did was minimal, but such actions say something about that person's psyche. Should their actions be googleable for all time? I don't know, but I know that I want to judge for myself whether those actions can be overlooked or if they're beyond the pale. I don't trust others to make that decision for me. Most importantly, if people realize that they can't trust public information, then they will be less trusting of strangers who can't prove their bona fides. They'll revert to how people solved this problem before the internet: preferring to hire relatives, former classmates, people who go to the same church, friends of friends, relying on stereotypes, and so on. It will become harder for someone to without the right connections to get their foot in the door, and it will hurt social mobility. 1. https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_how_the_right.html https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_ho...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- desert_rue 2y ago
  I have lived in an area of the US where a high portion of the population regularly attends church. I do not attend church. I noticed that when people found out about my lack of religion early in our acquaintance I was judged harshly for not being a believer. If they got to know me first, then they were okay with me by the time the subject of religion came up. Was I a bad person for hiding my lack of faith? The US has such a patchwork of reporting systems around crimes and convictions, and there are several workarounds to avoid having bad things surfacing. So there are likely already people around you who have secrets but are living decent lives now. We all have those things about ourselves we don’t discuss and this is the social lubricant that keeps our relationships going.
pvaldes 2y ago
Hiding it is the wrong way. Nobody cares about kids having stupid ideas. Erasing the entry closes the opportunity of providing a reasonable explanation and showing repent, that in fact could help highlight the candidate among other. If employers still care... is a red flag. The case tells about a person that 1) has anger problems, 2) never mastered any skills valued by employers, and 3) never cultured friends wanting to vouch for him. In sum, not the type that employers enjoy as coworker. Newspapers aren't necessarily the problem here.
- yladiz 2y ago
  > Erasing the entry closes the opportunity of providing a reasonable explanation and showing repent, that in fact could help highlight the candidate among other. If someone does a crime, goes to jail or does whatever punishment is mandated by a court, have they not already “repented”?

Yeul 2y ago

Before things like the FBI and the telegraph it was quite common for Americans to find a new life in another state. You could be married in New York but nobody in Montana would know unless they actively started an investigation. The world has become a village.

HPsquared 2y ago
It's one of those feudal villages you can't leave.
- nine_k 2y ago
  It's not because we're indentured, but because we're on an island, and now most of the island is as transparent as a village.
jackstraw14 2y ago
it was the main selling point of the US for quite a while.
ddingus 2y ago
True story: In the late 70's my Uncle had a run of bad luck and a dubious business partner basically sink him financially. After some discussion, he made a plan. It was simple: Uncle goes back to Virginia to lay low in one of the back hollers. My mom gets his mail, due to him living with us for a while[1], and writes "Deceased" on it, and "Return to Sender" 5 years pass. Maybe 4, I can't remember. Uncle shows up, everything is fine, and he and my aunt live out the rest of their days in a small comfy trailer no worries. [1] Living and other time with this Uncle was a great time in my life. Edit due to device change: My uncle had one eye, the other lost when he was young and unlucky in the woods. He read everything and acquired a great many skills which he proceeded to pass along to me: lock picking, electronics, engine rebuilding and a ton about autos, working with wood, metals, tools... He is probably still doing that in his afterlife. Good soul who I treasure having known.
- adriand 2y ago

FredPret 2y ago

There are private prisons in the US that benefit from more prisoners. But there are many more people and organizations there that benefit from fewer prisoners. For most purposes, a country is not a singular thing.

Schiendelman 2y ago
As I've gotten farther in my career as a product manager, I have to do more and more slicing and dicing of markets to understand who I'm building something for, identify opportunity. It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
- teachrdan 2y ago
  > It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking. This is the top comment in a chain of siblings that are dogpiling on the parent for no good reason. I'm replying because I think it's a case of pointing out a distinction without difference, which is a low value response up there with "But correlation isn't causation!" In this case there are many different groups that benefit from a higher prison population. Private prisons are perhaps the most commonly cited, but they hold a tiny percent of the total prison population. But there are many, many private businesses that sell to prisons. Sudexo-Marriott makes millions selling services to private and public prisons. I once toured a "super max" prison in Ohio and saw that they had tens of thousands of dollars in commercial Hobart restaurant equipment. The knee jerk response here is, "Of course a prison pays for commercial dining services and equipment! That's not surprising, it's inevitable!" But that's my point. It's inevitable that there's billions of dollars being made off the US's prison population. And that's not including industries based specifically on exploiting prisoners, like prison phone and teleconferencing services that overcharged the incarcerated and their families by billions of dollars. There are many utterly conventional businesses that use slave labor from prisons. This is not hyperbole -- prisoners are often forced to work for $1 a day or less. They are punished with solitary confinement or even additional prison time if they refuse. The final rebuttal would be, "Well not everyone in America benefits from a large prison population!" But if you read carefully, that's exactly what the parent comment is saying. But enough different and powerful stakeholders do benefit from a large and growing prison population that it's difficult to enact reforms to make that number smaller. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffab&atb=v211-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffa... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business+predatory&t=ffab&atb=v211-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business... https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v211-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v...

jgalt212 2y ago

> the prison slavery system. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the enslavement?

nashashmi 2y ago
Slave is sometimes also referred to as captured person or captive. An imprisoned person is a captive.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  There's usually a work component, though. An imprisoned person may or may not be enslaved as part of that imprisonment. If they get paid a reasonable wage, they're a prisoner with a job. If they're not forced to work, they're a prisoner but not a slave.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    Slavery was a condition, usually a legal status, where someone's autonomy was stripped from them. The work component only existed because why else would one want a slave? If someone born into slavery died before they could walk, they still were a slave. If an old slave was allowed to retire without working again, that didn't stop them from being a slave.
- jgalt212 2y ago
  But there's no purchase or sale of a human. So where's the slavery?
  - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
    Only chattel slavery involves purchase or sale of a human. Any forced labor is slavery, it just might not be chattel slavery.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Prison labor is not limited to inside prisons: https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-takeaways-7ec182c7b1b604b1e4cb2ffb6e2a0f0a https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve... Your labor should not have financial considerations to the prison. You taking a sick day should not risk punishment up to and included increased security points and should not impact any prison employees pay/bonus (COs/AWs/Ws often get bonus' based on inmate labor metrics). Security points are the 'nice sanitized' way penal systems threaten violence on inmates. If you get points you go to a more dangerous yard where your safety will be threatened and you will get hurt. Anything that can incur security points is a implicit threat of violence against inmates. Inmates should not be threatened with violence for taking sick days/losing a non-prison job. Inmates jobs should not include the possibility of overtime because inmates CAN NOT REFUSE it. Inmates should not be threatened with violence (security points) if they do not want to work overtime of need a sick day. Inmate jobs should not include zero hour jobs (jobs where the schedule constantly changes and you are not guaranteed any hours) because inmates CAN NOT control their schedules and it works out to be a nightmare for them logistics wise. For example leading to inabilities to file legal mail (inability to schedule around mail room hours), missed meals (chow hall hours are fixed with almost no accommodation other than SHU/medical meals), excessive isolation during transfers, missed 'move times' resulting in no personal recreation time, etc.

jmyeet 2y ago

There's a much broader problem here: unnecessary background checks. If you're applying for a job or to rent an apartment it absolutely shouldn't matter that you vandalized something 15 years earlier. It's likely automated systems building up these profiles too so what if you happen to just have the same name as someone who was convicted of something in a news article?

hyperliner 2y ago
[dead]

impossiblefork 2y ago

There are enormous problems with this kind of thing though, especially when for example, a murderer is part of the establishment or is cuddled by the big established entities. There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's Wikipedia page.' I think truth is much more important and I think what a court does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public as possible.

like_any_other 2y ago
What is this journalist's name? I couldn't find any information on this, but I don't have much to go on - Dagens Nyheter being a newspaper means "Dagens Nyheter murder" surfaces a lot of results of the newspaper reporting on murders.
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  Jacques Wallner.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    I've found this claim online in only four places. Three are the "Alternative for Sweden" website, Samnytt, and Fria Tider. None are reliable sources (one's a political party of bigots, one's a tabloid that's been "sued multiple times for libel", and the third "anses ha ett uppenbart rasistiskt, främlingsfientligt och islamofobiskt innehåll" (quotations from Wikipedia)). I wrote this, before I looked up the names of the websites: > I don't know enough Swedish to say for sure, but the language feels tabloidy, and there are passages with quite similar sentence constructions in articles purportedly written four-or-more years apart – so this might be one story that was adapted / plagiarised. The fourth is https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/ https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/, which I can't identify the provenance of, but doesn't cite any source for its claim. The Swedish Wikipedia article has some kind of edit war, but the edits are all redacted, so I can't see what the edit war is about. (The revert comments look like "Tar bort icke källbelagt påstående.", so maybe it's about this.) I'm not wholly sure that this story is true: it could be a smear put out by this journalist's enemies. I see little reason to believe there was even such a trial, unless someone can find court records.

dsego 2y ago

Historically criminals from Germany would find a new life in Argentina. And they mostly lived out plain unremarkable lives, so this does work. Not sure everyone appreciated the benefits to society though.

anal_reactor 2y ago

> The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now". It really boggles my mind that so many people have difficulties understanding this concept, and prefer it when the general public wants blood. Peed in public? Capital punishment it is.

throw_m239339 2y ago

There is need for a middle ground between privacy and the safety of the community. In my country, a lot of horrible crimes could have been avoided if the repeated criminal's past crimes were something people could at the least be aware of, one way or another. I'm talking about murders and sex crimes.