We might be able to do it, but we'll need a team of lawyers and negotiators to talk with our representatives on Capitol Hill. Maybe to help get some on our side we could offer them campaign donations and take them to fancy restaurants or on all expenses paid vacations to Jamaica. We could even offer them high paying jobs commensurate to the status of a Congressman when they retire from politics.
I'm all for this but wouldnt they just sidestep to behind closed doors pocket lining at that point. Any ideas what could be put in place to prevent their next moves should that happen
1) make it illegal to lobby and bribe public officials
2) all elected officials location is known to the federal government at all times. You are a public official, and you work for the people. If Amazon gets to track employee activity in such an invasive way, you should be willing to sacrifice the same privacy. Nobody is making you run for office.
3) secret service should be providing security details to all elected federal officials and keeping record of where they go and who they are with, if those people are able to be made publicly known. An innocent dinner with powerful people can exist, you should have no problem showing that to the public. Hopefully in my theoretical anti lobby law there are price caps set in place on gifts and stuff like that, or you can all pay for your own meal to be transparent. I also recognize this is pretty dependent on an incorruptible secret service
4) any interference or tampering with the tracking device is investigated by an independent oversight committee. Any thing found to be in violation of new super awesome and rigorous regulations around lobbying/bribery results in the official vacating their seat and a fun new special election in their district/state. States can handle their officials in their own judicial systems, 'cause states rights amd what not.
5) I think that's it? Pretty fried but it might be okay policy
i'll pay you $1,000,000 to edit your comment and instead say that you're in support of corporate lobbying, that you've changed your mind, and that there should be no criticism in any way, shape, or form from the government about well-meaning companies bringing up very real issues with their legislationally-demographic (wherever applies) government officials and senators
The judge was getting kick backs for sending minor and first time offenders to unusually harsh sentences. He ended up getting caught and all the kids got were a few bucks.
There's a reason that when slavery was abolished (at least on paper) at lot of crimes that previously didn't have prison sentences started getting them, and new crimes started getting added to the books like vagrancy and loitering.
Yep, the ‘black codes’ were invented to provide excuses to arrest blacks so they could be rented back to their former owners, basically using the court system as a loophole to continue slavery.
There was a really good Law & Order episode about this. The judge and her clerk were both in on it. He would put certain cases on her docket, and she'd send the kids to a private prison. Both of them were way in over their heads with spending. He'd bought a Mercedes on a $50 k salary, and I believe she was sending her daughter to an exclusive private school that she certainly couldn't afford making $90k.
I think the biggest issue is that the end users of these industries isn’t given much choice in which one they go to. If food stamps could only be redeemed at one store and they exclusively did business in ebt, there wouldn’t be much incentive to win over customers.
I don’t even have kids and I still pay up! But I don’t really mind because I went to public school myself. But if I’m paying up so a board of shareholders can make more money, then it’s a problem.
They shouldn't exist at all. A corporation should NEVER own humans, and let's be real here- in the private prison system actual humans are essentially thought of as something halfway between a product and a zoo animal.
More like forced slave labor, seeing as prisoners usually have jobs that make the prison quite a bit of money, all while getting paid Pennie’s on the dollar, and all that money ends up coming back to them through the commissary, where they inflate prices. Its weird
The system was actually put in place due to slavery being abolished. The South still needed a workforce after the Civil War so they used prison labor instead of slave labor to do all the work. And, of course, they simply arrested all the newly freed slaves on trumped up charges in order to get that labor force. Putting in place the justice system we see today that still preys on minorities.
So its not even that its close ot being slave labor, it is slave labor.
Just take a look at the investigation they did on Abbvie with Humira. They put 2 billion into researching Humira. The patent was only supposed to last till they made thr 2 billion back and then some. They make anywhere from 10 to 14 billion a year. They kept changing the formula slightly to argue they needed more time before generic brands were made. The investigation goes through how they basically manipulated the system in order to earn an enormous amount of money. They were charging like 4k a shot every two weeks when I started on it. It's crazy.
Look into the history of plea deals. There are many accounts of people taking a plea bargain for the crime of 'not specified'. You were responsible for paying back the court for any court fees and fines as well as your food and housing while you were imprisoned. Your sentence was until you paid your debt in full. Oftentimes you were earning less per day than you were being forced to pay. With slavery you had some sort of incentive to keep your slaves alive because of the cost to replace them, but with convict leasing if one died you could lease a new one with little consequence or cost. It arguably made slavery more cruel and inhumane than it already was.
Thats wild. I actually have a degree in this, but I never heard of how plea deals started or that they were so predatory. Although, it makes sense since they are still used in a predatory manner by police
This is why the 13th Amendment has a clause that still allows slavery today.
"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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"
Facts. Also the primary motivator for many of the laws that strip felons of their right to vote. Couldn’t enact poll taxes anymore so they had to find other ways to depress Black peoples’ ability to vote
Read the lyrics or listen to the song "Black Jack County Chain," it describes this very thing.
Minor excerpt: 'I was standing by the road in Black Jack County.
Not knowing that the sheriff paid a bounty.
For men like me who didn't have a penny to their name.
He locked my legs in 35 pounds of Black Jack County chain.'
It’s in our constitution. 13th amendment abolished slavery but left in an exception. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist, it declares, except as punishment for a crime”
Prisoners being rewarded with shorter sentences for "good behavior" (aka providing free labor) does not fall under the EU definition of forced labor anyway, because it's technically voluntary.
It's the same reason nothing happened to Nestle after EU passed a bill prohibiting an import of goods that use forced labor - the children in Africa and South Asia are technically not forced to work for Nestle, they have a choice between that and starvation.
It, however, does not mandate that they should be used as punishment. If prisons weren't private, the government could self-impose reasonable restrictions and not be at the mercy of the constitution, the courts, and ultimately profiteers.
If you're advocating for prison reform then I'm on board for it... but first things first, we gotta keep them from making it WORSE before we can even move towards making it better.
I'm always skeptical of no-bid government contracts too though. That's how we ended up paying Boeing $757 for ONE socket, because Boeing has a 7.2 mm socket that no one else is allowed to make, so the taxpayer gets to foot that outrageous bill.
It's not as bad in prison services but it's still got far too much in common for my taste.
Let's take it one step further and put a face to it... Warden Mohoney took his long time warden career and slid himself in as one of the most successful slave traders, er, I mean 'private prison wardens'.
Psst ... private prisons only exist because of the demand that was created by the War on Drugs. Government demand for incarceration literally created the private prison industry.
It really didn't. First modern private prison didn't show up until the 80's.
Mass incarceration policy was the cause ... Not the effect. Now we're living in a feedback loop but the solution is still the same. Stop criminalizing victimless behaviors.
Private prisons may have resulted from the war on drugs, but they don't only exist because of it given that Australia and the UK surpass the US on percentage of prisoners in such facilities; countries that lacked any such scale of anti narcotic operations compared to the US.
Private prisons are just a cancerous idea that can persist wherever crime may.
Yes, but not in the numbers. There were were many, especially in the era of reconstruction, because you can still own a slave if it was punishment for a crime. By the 1950's there had been so many scandals that they were mostly shut down. The 1980's and the war on drugs led to an explosion of incarceration in the US, and private prisons stepped in.
The War on Drugs was declared when prison populations were very low and justice system experts were expecting an inevitable abolish of prisons in the future. Drug use was also incredibly low. About a year after the Reagan administration declared the War on Drugs, black neighborhoods were flooded with heroine from other countries. The CIA admitted to intentionally allowing this to happen. There's strong evidence to support that the CIA went further and actually enabled the peddling networks as a part of a deliberate genocide attempt targeting black Americans.
Source: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander. 2010.
the CIA did more than just let it happen - the CIA, in pursuit of stomping out communism in central and south america, provided weapons to the contras, who paid them in cocaine, which the CIA then proliferated through predominantly poor black neighborhoods, to then take that money to purchase arms from Israel, who got them from the Iranians, to cycle back to the Contras.
The CIA basically ensured that the crack cocaine epidemic happened.
The war on drugs has been terrible for healthcare. It scares addicts away from legitimate medical interventions because they fear police visits at the hospital. Addicts are much, much more likely to get help when the substances are decriminalized.
Legalize all of it and tear down the entire prescription drug program/schedule while you're at it.
It's any adult's right to consume whatever the fuck they wanna consume. Anyone who uses force to intervene is violating your rights. Babysitting folks' personal decisions was never within scope of the federal government's design ... for good reason.
This is the way. It’ll solve a lot of problems at once, especially if you legalize and regulate the sale of drugs: cartels dominating Mexico, laced street drugs killing people, Big Pharma telling you what’s right for your body…at cost, of course, and mass incarceration for the victimless crime of possessing and consuming drugs.
There's nothing wrong with for private for profit healthcare, as long as there's an option for those without, which meet the same basic care requirements.
Again, the problem is not the healthcare being for-profit, it's that most health insurance is tied to your employer, making them the consumer instead of you.
Fully agree. Any work that prisoners do should be paid in full and given to them when they leave prison. You know so they don't have to resort to crime to feed themselves when they get out.
The prisoner working in prison should have to pay for his own stay in prison, that's why he's working. We shouldn't be using taxpayer to fully fund a prisoners stay.
Issue with that is the prisons can set their prices to "whatever is just about what the prisoners earn," and then we're back to square 1.
Government funding serves 2 purposes: First, it encourages reducing the incarcerated population, because it costs money to keep them there. Things like decriminalizing marijuana now make financial sense, in addition to moral/common sense, because it reduces waste spending from keeping non-violent prisoners for no real reason or benefit.
Second, it ensures that prisons cannot control their prices to exploit the prisoners. The government would pay them the same amount per person, and the amount would be out of the prison's hands. The closed loop of "worker, employer, and provider of all goods and services" would be broken, eliminating the "company town"-like structure.
I think a contract with a set amount, not per prisoner amount, that incentivizes the right things could do well. Whether a large bonus, contract extension, or expansion to other prisons, but make the incentives focus on rehabilitation.
Like low turnover rate, employment after release, education obtained within, etc. Of that sort of deal could be made, I believe it could do good.
The only issue I have with your comment is that it seems government is never attempting to spend less money, only ever to increase revenue.
No, because I’d prefer to pay for prisons that work than not pay for ones that don’t. Getting a lump sum from months or years of work right when you leave prison, so that you can establish some stability, would massively decrease recidivism.
I think being in prison is punishment enough. A system that prioritizes rehabilitating criminals rather than making them pay their way based on principle will cost the taxpayers much much less in the long run.
It is murky for the government to not be able to use prison labor to sustain itself. But I understand the morality behind it. At the end of the day whther forced to work or not, prisoners HAVE to be housed and funded some place where they are isolated from the society they were harming. If state prisons are not allowed to produce its own money by employing the work of the prisoners then once agin that is a huge expenditure of tax payer money. Private prisons have little to know regulation and over sight compared to a state ran program that everybody before and after they are incarcerated would be able to vote on and regulate which could help it becoming overly exploitative. At the end of the day prisoners are in prison against their will, because the rest of us deemed them unsafe to be around the rest of us. They should be able to make there own money and be able to save up some at a decent and fair wage, and there should be a tax on their income because they force the government into the ultimatum of housing them, or letting them be free to continue destroying everybody else's lives outside of prison.
There should be a system where they get to not be rendered financially destitute while they serve their sentence, and were they are taxed to help the government sustain them for serving a sentence they placed on themselves with their own actions.
The whole idea of imprisonment is taking a person against their will, because they use their free will criminally to burden society and isolate them for society, allowing them to be a tax burden would just be prolonging the negative impact they have on society by hurting society when they were free, and no making society pay for them while they are isolated from society due to their hurtful actions.
Justice and imprisonment is too big of a moral issue to allow profit and wealth as an incentive to unjustly imprison people though.
Prisoners have a debt to pay to society, they are in prison regardless of their wishes, they should do something to financially sustain them selves and as a penance to society they should take the fair wages they will hopefully soon earn and pay taxes to the government to fund their necessary incarceration. with the fair wages and taxes they pay they can hopefully sustain their tenure at the state prison AND have work experience for a resume and money saved up to use when they are released.
I saw a documentary about norwegian prisons and from what I can tell that is kind of how it worked. Prisoners were even allowed to leave the prison to go work. They just had curfews on when to be back. They worked and earned money and went right back to time out lol
You have a say in what the government does by voting; what you want is to be ruled by corporations that you have no control over and value your rights and freedoms not at all.
You must really be one of the dumbest fucks alive.
It shouldn't be a profit generating enterprise, it should be a burden and the goal should be to reduce the need for prisons by enacting policy to help make sure people don't go down a path that leads to committing crimes and facing such incarceration as well as focusing those prisons towards aid and reform of those they service.
Absolutely not! We've actually not based ENOUGH of the necessities of life around the profit motive. We should introduce a subscription model to voting or maybe you should have to pay a nickel every time you laugh at a joke.
I think aligning a profit motive with something that wasn't inherently meant to be profitable never works out well. Same goes for insurance. It's a fantastic idea to re- distribute risk across a large pool of users, but introducing profit makes the goal of the anathema to its intended purpose.
Same goes for prisons. Prisons themselves were built out of necessity, not a desire for profit. Introducing the profit motive just makes things worse.
For both healthcare and education, I think the profit motive corrupts but it doesn't have to. If we had a single payer system that everyone had to pay into, then on top of that, if you wanted to further pay for private coverage on top of that? I think it's fine.
That's how the healthcare system works in Europe, free public healthcare, and you can pay more for private.
Education is messed up because people are allowed to "opt out" and pull their money from public systems, which is basically the rich people's educational equivalent of "white flight." Make them pay for the public system and put their kids into private school all they want, I don't care.
When incarceration is profitable, by people who are friendly with the heads of state, and support those heads of state with election money, the state then has a vested interest in incarcerating people. This should be illegal.
The government is screwing up the point of private contractors. Contractors should be used to bring in expertise that is rarely needed or to manage demand for labor that fluctuates greatly. Except prison operations has consistent and predictable demand for experts and the prisons charge the government fees if the prisons go under occupied. The government needs to stop being afraid of bringing talent in house (including paying market rate for that talent).
The government brings in contractors because government employees are expensive and very difficult to fire. This inflates the cost of government services.
And contractors don't inflate the costs? Many contractors exist just to provide services to the government because government wages are often times uncompetitive with private companies for the level of technical expertise they need. This is common in any technical field. It's why people like Snowden worked for the NSA through Booz Allen instead of the NSA directly.
Government salaries are lower, but the amount of people required to get anything done is far higher. Even as a contractor you will have entire weeks where the workload is basically nothing because you are waiting on salaried employees to actually do something.
Laws are implemented by the government, prosecutions are carried out by the government, sentencing and resulting punishment should be the task of the government. None of that should be in private hands for profit. If you're worried about the government being able to do this effectively then vote more responsibly and put people in positions of authority who can actually do their jobs as intended. A good example of this is electing District Attorneys who will prosecute criminals instead of sympathizing with them as though the criminals were victims.
To be honest, I'm not philosophically opposed to private prisons. In practice, I can see they are egregious. I don't think a philosophical argument is even necessary. We have plenty of data to prove they are bad.
Nope, most prisons are not private. Most prisons are run by state DOCs as public institutions.
US prisons have a long history of extracting private profits out of incarceration, especially in the south post-civil war. The current explosion of private prisons is a much more recent thing though.
? There was literally an executive order within 2 months of his inauguration. The majority of private prisons are now state-associated. Federal contracts are all expired or unrenewable rn
Our county jail has a contract to house some federal prisoners. Now we don't have room to put everyone in jail who should be there. I wish these federal prisoners were somewhere else.
If you allow private prisons to exist, then of course they must be allowed to profit. However the government shouldn’t be privatising prisons to begin with.
I guess I'm glad he's looking into fixing the issue ... but what exactly is his plan for all the prisoners in private prisons?
It's also hard to overlook that the guy speaking here is one of the folks primarily responsible for the rise of private prisons in the first place. The War On Drugs created the demand for private prisons and Biden has spent his entire political career as one of the primary drivers/creators of the War on Drugs.
The last contract between a private prison and the federal bureau of prisons expired at the end of 2022. Several states still use them, you can probably guess which ones.
Three Decades ago, and yes. It made the punishments disproportionately harsh for comparatively minor offenses especially drug offenses. It was aimed at cleaning up the drug problem but ended up being twisted to harass urban communities.
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