If we get serious about actual rehabilitation in prisons instead of punishment there’s never been a better time to be able to learn just about anything on your own time. But we’d have to stop dehumanizing criminals. Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.
We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.
There are also perverse electoral incentives to having a prison in your voting district. Generally the prisoners count toward your population numbers but they can’t vote. No pesky three fifths compromise.
> Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.
Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.
They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.
It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.
If you want rehabilitation then you should ensure that they're working for more than slave wages and that money is set aside to be available to them upon their release.
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
Yeah, I think the if at the beginning of your comment is doing some very heavy lifting.
I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab. They seem viscerally invested in the concept of a prison as a place to store/segregate violent people, but have no interest in either helping those people learn to live safely in society or to have any advantages that the poorest non-prisoner gets.
Before we can jump straight to pointing to successful prison labor programs, I think we need to figure out how to message to those voters that it matters how we treat prisoners.
Not a fan of private prisons, but prisons (public or private) don't make money. They are a massive cost to the government. Incarceration is expensive (Google gives me a median of $65K per prisoner per year), and the percentage of prisoners that are able to earn more money through labor than the cost to lock them up is probably very low.
One of the overlooked purposes of imprisonment isn't revenge or rehabilitation, it's just letting the rest of us be away from that person for a while, removing them from society.
What a criminal record does to your ability to get a job these days, as compared to the past is pretty harsh. Back in the 80's and prior, you could work at a smaller place that didn't have the capability to do background checks. Now, it's $20 or less and ANY employer can do it. You have to specifically find some place that has deliberately chosen to take the risk.
Compare to Australia, where the employer doesn't see detail. They file the background check, but only get a "yes" or "no", based on that specific job and past offenses (if any).
> Costa says he was also surprised to learn that Thorpe was eligible for remote work while he was in prison. He hired him in June. He figured Thorpe might have trouble clearing the company's background check and he says he prepared himself for that. But since it only searches back seven years and since Thorpe has been in prison for more than a decade, "He is actually our cleanest background check," Costa says.
This just makes me feel like the entire modern process of matching workers to employers is a kafkaesque hell that has negative value.
The boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process. Stay in jail long enough and you’ll pass one of our arbitrary steps!
> boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process
What's the intent of the process?
I remember hiring a few years ago, where a deep background check uncovered an assault charge on a candidate I liked. The charges had been dropped. But they were violent in nature, and this spooked my team.
Fortunately, our GC once did family law. Between me pointing out this was a remote position and our GC showing that the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce, we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
> Preston Thorpe is only 32, but he says he's already landed his dream job as a senior software engineer and bought a modest house with his six-figure salary. It was all accomplished by putting in long days from his cell at the Mountain View Correctional Center in Charleston.
Remember when Pennsylvania judges took kickbacks to send teenagers to for-profit detention centers? They ruined thousands of people's entire lives, but hey they made a quick buck!
How many others are profiting from keeping prison populations topped up? Perverse incentives, ensuring the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with only the People's Republic of China rivalling it for prison population. Make slavery legal again with this one weird trick called the 13th amendment's "except as punishment for a crime"
I am OK with prisoners being rehabilitated, this includes them working. I am not OK with their jailers profiting. Nor am I OK with employers profiting by having unfair power over pay and conditions they wouldn't have with free citizens.
> Remember when Pennsylvania judges took kickbacks to send teenagers to for-profit detention centers? They ruined thousands of people's entire lives, but hey they made a quick buck!
And one of the judges [0] in the “kids for cash” scandal had the remainder of his federal sentence commuted by President Biden before he left office.
It wasn't a quick buck, it was a slow and methodical many year effort of corruption. Everyone should sue that judge for everything he's worth and send him to jail for the rest of his life.
This program sounds great and I think we should incentivize it. Unfortunately, I think it requires a constitutional amendment to work. We can’t rely on well meaning administrators to overlook the slave labor exemption for criminal punishment; these things will be exploited.
I guess with knowledge work there is some protection because it’s hard to force. Though, it would be desirable to extend such programs into other forms of work.
This... seems like it has the makings of a really great idea. So often prisoners are repeat offenders because they have no skills, no support system after getting out of prison so they revert to their old ways. Imagine already having a job and a large nest egg in your savings account because you got a remote job in prison. Or imagine going to prison as an 18-year-old, learning some skills through a prison educational system, and then getting a remote job and actually start contributing back to society. I'm not sure about Maine's implementation specifically, but something about this idea resonates strongly with me.
Yeah, I guess it's a good idea given the state of our current system. But it seems like prisoners fall into two basic categories - 1. people who very few employers would hire for remote work due to their criminal history. 2. people who really shouldn't be in prison at all.
When I visited a local prison through the https://www.douglassproject.org/ I had this exact thought: why not allow remote work? I'm glad it is being done somewhere! I hope it becomes more commonplace.
This is still slavery. Not chattel slavery, but the same thing that came up in reconstruction where minorities and poor whites become indentured servants
I always wonder why didn’t we ever do something like this with something like Amazon Mechanical Turk? Use prisoners for small frequent human cognition tasks. I guess with AI that ship has sailed though…
Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!
Wow. Just wow. The US really is on a trajectory back towards slavery between this and re-legalizing child labor in some states.
This stuff truly is a disturbing view of the future of the US.
>earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board
Yep. There it is. Sounds nice now right? Until in 5 years they decide, well it really needs to be 20%. Then it 5 more years. Well they are in prison so 30% should be resonable. Then as tax deficits grow .....weeeellllll maybe 70%..... Then it will be well prisoners shouldn't really be getting rich in prison so we take 100% but when they get out they will still have that job to fall back on. Just wait and see.
To be clear I'm not against giving people a chance to reform. This is not that. If a person is reformed enough or behaved enough at a chance for reform then they should be on probation at worst. Not propping up a industrial prison complex for nonviolent crimes like 20+ year sentence selling drugs.
well maybe don't rape people. I get that the TV camera is able to visit the jail and tell a story and make people cry. But maybe they should witness the crime first hand before they put on the story.
There we go again, and then people wonder why they can't find engineering jobs anymore, or low wage/no job security if any, when anyone and everyone can be an "engineer" when they get bored and have some time on their hands. I still don't understand why there is no collective engineering committee and effort to gatekeep the profession like literally all other professions out there, because companies will NEVER initiate that since it's in their interest to keep it as is. Why would someone spend time and money to become an engineer when he or she is competing with the whole world and prisoners now? The reward is just not worth the effort anymore, this is what will kill engineering innovation on the long term for short term gains.
A title isn't what causes engineering innovations, nor is gatekeeping a source of them (just the opposite really). So how would that kill engineering innovations long-term?
[+] [-] taurath|5 months ago|reply
We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.
[+] [-] mullingitover|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gchamonlive|5 months ago|reply
Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.
They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.
It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.
[+] [-] themafia|5 months ago|reply
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
[+] [-] thephyber|5 months ago|reply
I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab. They seem viscerally invested in the concept of a prison as a place to store/segregate violent people, but have no interest in either helping those people learn to live safely in society or to have any advantages that the poorest non-prisoner gets.
Before we can jump straight to pointing to successful prison labor programs, I think we need to figure out how to message to those voters that it matters how we treat prisoners.
[+] [-] terminalshort|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 months ago|reply
Compare to Australia, where the employer doesn't see detail. They file the background check, but only get a "yes" or "no", based on that specific job and past offenses (if any).
[+] [-] kylebenzle|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vovavili|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coolestguy|5 months ago|reply
Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated.
[+] [-] lovich|5 months ago|reply
This just makes me feel like the entire modern process of matching workers to employers is a kafkaesque hell that has negative value.
The boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process. Stay in jail long enough and you’ll pass one of our arbitrary steps!
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|5 months ago|reply
What's the intent of the process?
I remember hiring a few years ago, where a deep background check uncovered an assault charge on a candidate I liked. The charges had been dropped. But they were violent in nature, and this spooked my team.
Fortunately, our GC once did family law. Between me pointing out this was a remote position and our GC showing that the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce, we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
[+] [-] terminalshort|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throwmeaway222|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|5 months ago|reply
Gives new meaning to working in Mountain View.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|5 months ago|reply
So I searched and THEN I found the blog of the inmate from the article! https://pthorpe92.dev/
[+] [-] amiga386|5 months ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
How many others are profiting from keeping prison populations topped up? Perverse incentives, ensuring the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with only the People's Republic of China rivalling it for prison population. Make slavery legal again with this one weird trick called the 13th amendment's "except as punishment for a crime"
I am OK with prisoners being rehabilitated, this includes them working. I am not OK with their jailers profiting. Nor am I OK with employers profiting by having unfair power over pay and conditions they wouldn't have with free citizens.
[+] [-] jihadjihad|5 months ago|reply
And one of the judges [0] in the “kids for cash” scandal had the remainder of his federal sentence commuted by President Biden before he left office.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Conahan
[+] [-] downrightmike|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rammer|5 months ago|reply
Especially with all the race issues in imprisonment.
[+] [-] voxadam|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nickff|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jholdn|5 months ago|reply
I guess with knowledge work there is some protection because it’s hard to force. Though, it would be desirable to extend such programs into other forms of work.
[+] [-] umvi|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] terminalshort|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cwoolfe|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] downrightmike|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tolerance|5 months ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45340442
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] deadbabe|5 months ago|reply
Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!
[+] [-] gpi|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bluefirebrand|5 months ago|reply
Awesome. So so so awesome
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] citizenpaul|5 months ago|reply
This stuff truly is a disturbing view of the future of the US.
>earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board
Yep. There it is. Sounds nice now right? Until in 5 years they decide, well it really needs to be 20%. Then it 5 more years. Well they are in prison so 30% should be resonable. Then as tax deficits grow .....weeeellllll maybe 70%..... Then it will be well prisoners shouldn't really be getting rich in prison so we take 100% but when they get out they will still have that job to fall back on. Just wait and see.
To be clear I'm not against giving people a chance to reform. This is not that. If a person is reformed enough or behaved enough at a chance for reform then they should be on probation at worst. Not propping up a industrial prison complex for nonviolent crimes like 20+ year sentence selling drugs.
[+] [-] tantalor|5 months ago|reply
Simpler explanation: "slavery" never ended, it's just called something else now
[+] [-] throwmeaway222|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tamimio|5 months ago|reply
There we go again, and then people wonder why they can't find engineering jobs anymore, or low wage/no job security if any, when anyone and everyone can be an "engineer" when they get bored and have some time on their hands. I still don't understand why there is no collective engineering committee and effort to gatekeep the profession like literally all other professions out there, because companies will NEVER initiate that since it's in their interest to keep it as is. Why would someone spend time and money to become an engineer when he or she is competing with the whole world and prisoners now? The reward is just not worth the effort anymore, this is what will kill engineering innovation on the long term for short term gains.
[+] [-] Nasrudith|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lawlessone|5 months ago|reply
As long as they're paid fair rates i think it should be allowed.
and my definition of a fair rate for them is what people outside the prison are paid, assuming they're paid a fair rate of course.