That’s called slave labour. Here you go again USA.
How does 16k permanently house and feed someone? Is that yearly cost? Where?
Mass housing dorms, basic shared facilities and cheapest tasteless grub for a person for 16k yep would work. Also I doubt any of them would reject volunteer labor or learning vocational crafts so they can survive have roof and warm food.
I have a family member who chooses to live homeless and after many years of being around him and others in the homeless community I can tell you that many would reject this. On a positive note, some would welcome it.
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If a person has a criminal conviction for homelessness, how likely they are to pass the background check with that conviction?
It feels like poor->homeless->convict->unemployable->indentured servant is the expected career transition.
It’s been known for 50+ years that incarcerating a person is the most criminogenic you could do to them. It increases crime. It solves none of the problems it uses to nominally justify its existence
Can I have some sources? I believe what you just said but the studies might actually say something slightly different.
Source is a college course from 20 years ago 😭 so I don’t recall specifics, but the idea is that prisons don’t so much as reduce crime as contain it, or shift it around.
I’m not sure you’d see that in reported crime stats in an area though
What I wonder about is how long would it take the modern right wingers to embrace mass forced labor for people in distress?
Yea in this case it would only make things bad. But maybe murderers and rapists deserve to be locked away.
Some people need to be kept away from others for their safety yeah, but a high security medical facility is a better place for them.
They’ve just re-instituted slavery.
It never went away, they just eliminated private ownership.
Prisons are privately owned, no?
Only a small minority. Private prisons are no doubt a problem, but the vast majority of prisons in the USA are publicly owned
They may be “public “ but they all funnel millions to the Epstein class and corrupt politicians through contracts on everything
History shows the pendulum swings both ways. The fast and more violently the swing to the right, well, political physics has some incredible lessons to teach.
How do they even tell if you’re homeless? It seems like a pretty fallible conviction to ruin someone’s life… Like what if your bus got delayed?
… have you not seen/been around homeless? It’s pretty clear, hygiene has taken a nose dive is probably the biggest indicator.
So you want cops to base things off of profiling?
Prison (hell #1) and homelessness (hell #2): the two whips of the capitalist state to lash us into wage labour slavery. “No underpaid job can be too bad to accept, or do you want to risk not be able paying your exorbitant rent, risk to become homeless? Sell your labour for the lowest price so some capitalist can make 2-3 times the profit of what you gain, which is bareley enough to pay another capitalist your rent.” This is what the capitalist state enforces by holding up these two hells. We don’t have a prison system by accident, homelessness is not a natural phenomenon. They exist by design. It’s not about the money that prisons cost in comparison to what housing a homeless person costs. The money for prisons is a fair price to pay for a capitaliat state given the MUCH larger sum of money that its capitalist class can extract of us by making us obedient and doing the even shittest job for the shittest pay to suck the most possible surplus out of our work. Become communist. Sabotage. Seize the means of production. Be a grain of sand in this machine.
In the country with some of the most gruesome history of slavery in human history, it feels pretty disingenuous to call waged labour slavery. This feels like the stock standard yankee settler aspirational landholder bunkum to me
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Joseph Stalin, 1936
The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment
-Engels
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch05.htm
The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.
The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
-Engels, again
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
You’re quoting Stalin (banger quote, btw) and you’ve not heard of the idea of wage slavery?
They do it so people like you think it’s okay
Elon Musk said he’d end world hunger if that were something that could be done. The United Nations World Food Programme did the math: $6.6 billion per year. That’s it! You can guess how much the world’s richest man has donated toward this cause…
Last I heard he NEGATED $43.8 Billion dollars of aid by cutting USAID, causing the deaths of 4.5 Million Children around the world.
How Much Would It Cost to End World Hunger?
The U.N. World Food Programme feeds over 100 million people facing severe hunger in more than 120 countries and territories every year. In 2021, WFP did this with a budget of $9.6 billion dollars, which was still $5.2 billion dollars short of their total funding requirements. Clearly, ending world hunger will require more money.
Back in July of 2021, former U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley mentioned it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
Edit: I should add, that they should still do it. Split it between the billionaires. Fuck, Elon is worth a trillion dollars
But you see the billionaires don’t have any money, just a number they keep pumping up.
They don’t have any money, except when they do. They have all kinds of money for stock buybacks and bribes to government officials but when it comes to paying taxes suddenly there’s no liquidity.
That’s still only $360b. We could do that with only a portion of the wealth of ONE MAN.
Just for perspective, a person who invested in the stock market recently and got a 5% return would be said to be investing poorly.
5% may not seem like much, but just for comparison, 5% of a trillion dollars is 50 billion dollars. I think you can see the point. Musk could solve world hunger, and it would be like chump change to him, even if he did fairly poorly with his investments. He wouldn’t even have to touch his savings.
He’s refusing to help people whose lives are being ruined without that help, or who are dying, even though the only penalty for Musk is that he would be getting inconceivably richer at a slightly slower rate.
It’s like he’s sitting on a mountain of life preservers amid an ocean of drowning people
Its not merely about money. Ending food scarcity in remote locations is big part of the problem. It’s a transportation issue of goods economically. We need to centralize humanity and not try to deliver food to example tribes in deep Africa. We have the food production and waste a good portion of food that we throw out.
The South loves slavery, more at 11. This is why the US should have punished the Confederacy as the treason it was instead of coddling them.
I just wish President Grant had punished the South more during Reconstruction but it wasn’t that popular at the time unfortunately and his corrupt administration certainly did not help.
I would like to permenantly house and feed myself for $16k. I have cash. Tell me how
It’s likely a room in a boarding house, and food through a volunteer kitchen - so that $16K is still being subsidised through private charities and/or local + state Government grants.
Don’t mistake me, though - I’m all for these types of programs. They’re a hell of a lot better than a swathe of people being homeless on the streets, or incarcerated in an overcrowded prison.
But yeah even if it cost double to house them rather than imprison them it would still be the right and rational thing to do
if you take the capitalism out of the housing, and didn’t have a dipshit fucking the global economy and cost to eat. in all but the expensive cities in the u.s., it’s probably not that far off for communities of small flats or tiny homes and community-run kitchens.
I’m pretty sure the actual cost is to permanently house and feed them until they can get a job that gets them self sufficient.
Move to one of the poorest countries in the world, live in a hut and do nothing except eating. Don’t get bit by wildlife or bugs.
Yeah, those numbers don’t make sense with the word “permanently”.
Move to Vietnam
Yeah, why don’t these guys just stop being poor and homeless?
/s
Just sell some stock and buy a house, duh. Oh, hey, I’ve just been offered a Cabinet position. Why would a Head-Up Display need a secretary though?
They don’t care because the breakdown is:
The tax-payer is out 66k in order to imprison the homeless That 66k goes to a prison, the prison makes money The imprisoned person is enslaved to prison labor, which the prison then leases out. The prison makes money.
The prison lobbies politicians to be “tough on crime” and pass laws that criminalize more and more things instead of helping people, that way the prison will make more and more money.
The people would be happier, healthier, and pay less in taxes if we just helped people, but we never will because helping people doesn’t make prisons money. Same thing for policing. Police, as an institution, did not begin as law enforcement. They began as slave catchers. Their attitude and overall goal has remained the same. The police exist to ticket and fine people wherever possible in order to generate revenue, and, when able, arrest and charge people with the goal of filling prisons with slave labor.
If you eliminate the part of the 13th amendment that says ‘except as punishment for convicted crime’ and make slave labor illegal period, and in fact, make it illegal for any entity anywhere to profit off of incarcerated persons, you will eliminate a metric shit ton of problems in the U.S.
The prisons sue the states when not enough prisoners come in. That’s the state of things.
What on earth could they possibly be suing for??
Not that I doubt you, mind, it just sounds incredulous!
The lawsuit centered around the Marana prison, a 1,400-bed facility operated by MTC. The contract between MTC and Arizona included a provision guaranteeing 97% occupancy.
Oh, so there’s a contract with the state that says that they’ll keep it at max occupancy. That’s fucked.
Here’s how I would get around it: We enact the legislation that says that prisons cannot profit off of any labor by incarcerated individuals, nor may their labor be leased, for any reason. Take that revenue away.
We hold to the occupancy contract, and they can have a prison full of people they have to care for but can’t profit from.
Then we let the contract end and refuse to sign another one.
Would that work?
I’d say make the prison responsible for rehabilitation and job training.
Yeah make it a form of cheap housing you can leave any time you want rather a punishment nexus. Sack the sadists and hire social and support workers.
Yeah that could be good. A prison’s success rate is determined by how few reoffenders it has.
Just confiscate their fucking property.
If they protest, arrest them and throw them in their own goddamn prisons.
In other words: use their own shitty laws against them. Only way to get those laws to change.
One tiny note, with markdown formatting, you gotta put two spaces after a line for a newline. But that’s only if you are absolutely absolutely sure, it’s best to use two newlines for a new paragraph. OR make a list by adding the minus sign to the start of each line.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
I recently visited family in Vietnam, the people there are reasonable secure, reasonable healthy and quiet educated… but nobody can convince me that this country is NOT very conservative and authoritarian…
religion
scared of death, scared of sin, scared of judgement
Nah… this is a too christian view…
Important to note this isn’t new or restricted to red parts of the country. Vagrancy laws, laws against loitering, etc are all ways of criminalizing the poor to ensure we are all loyal wage slaves, and to a lesser extent feeding the prison-industrial complex. Many Steinbeck novels touch on this so it was a prevalent cultural touchstone in the 30s
To be clear, those rules were all ways of criminalizing BLACKNESS in the immediate aftermath of emancipation because the freed people had nowhere to go and nowhere to sleep. And since racism is a system designed to get the working class to do the dirty work of the owning class, it makes sense that laws intended to enforce racism get used against all poor people in relatively short order.
a lot of systemic issues in the country have been around for a very long time. I always think of FDR’s secretary or labor, Francis Perkins advocating for universal healthcare and 80-90 years later it’s still an issue too few politicians take seriously.
The forced labour part is relatively new-ish. I think the average American has no idea about the slave labour involved in their daily lives.
Forced labor is not new. When the USA amended the constitution in the aftermath of the civil war they explicitly banned private ownership of slaves but made a specific carve out for prison slavery. Immediately after emancipation the states created laws that freed black folk couldn’t avoid and in 10 years the prison population went from 90% white to 90% black. And those black prisoners were leased to plantation owners to work their fields.
Convict leasing lasted almost 50 years, but not before other modalities of prison slave labor had developed and matured.
It is in no way a relatively new-ish thing
I meant as a political talking point its relatively new, but I also havent been around forever so it might be a recurring topic.
I will say that in the 90s and 00s, the teaching was that we don’t do slavery anymore. Very explicit that slavery is bad, but its in the past so no worries. This has led to a lot of people born in the 80s and 90s becoming aware of this reality much later into their adult lives.
My guess is most of them still think slavery is “solved” in America. Most people aren’t going to look at most of the brands in their grocery store and think, “slave labor helped bring me this product.”
This has led to a lot of white people born in the 80s and 90s becoming aware of this reality much later into their adult lives.
My guess is most of them still think slavery is “solved” in America.
I’m always glad when people come around, but it’s also important to acknowledge this fact so we can correct it.
13th amendment of the united states:
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.
Yeah, they sorta gloss over that part in school when we learn about this stuff.
All of America’s laws are based on what puritanical, religious losers want.
Yeah, like the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act, or the right to remain silent, or title 9. Those are all what the religious losers want.
They’re literally teaching the Bible in schools now
You’re not counting the value of the slave labor.
Nor is the fact mentioned that most prisons in the U.S. are run by and as for-profit private companies.
That is why so many people are incarcerated in the U.S., and unpaid slave labor is part of this multibillion-dollar business.
It is a business that, for entirely obvious reasons, no other democracy in the world allows in this absurd form—only the U.S., the “Land of the Free.”
Land of the free labour
Most? I’m gonna need a source for that cause unless that’s changed recently, they’ve been mostly public prisons.
You’re right that only a minority of inmates are held in private facilities:
In fact, less than 9% of all incarcerated people are held in private prisons; the vast majority are in publicly-owned prisons and jails. Some states have more people in private prisons than others, of course, and the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration, but private prisons are essentially a parasite on the massive publicly-owned system — not the root of it. Nevertheless, a range of private industries and even some public agencies continue to profit from mass incarceration. Many city and county jails rent space to other agencies, including state prison systems, the U.S. Marshals Service, and ICE. Private companies are frequently granted contracts to operate prison food and health services (often so bad they result in major lawsuits), and prison and jail telecom and commissary functions have spawned multi-billion dollar private industries. By privatizing services like phone calls, medical care, and commissary, prisons and jails are offloading the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, trimming their budgets at an unconscionable social cost.
However, this does nothing to make the fact that private individuals profit from the incarceration of people any better. This practice could hardly be more unethical or counterproductive, as it creates a financial incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible—and it is obvious that this runs counter to the social purpose of prisons.
I completely agree with all of that. But I’d also like to point out that the prison system in the US isn’t being run with rehabilitation in mind. Our system is much more about punishment. They’d rather have people stuck in the system because they can be used as slave labor.
It’s one of the biggest failures of the US IMO and not a lot of people talk about it. Slavery needs to be illegal in all capacities. And prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to be used as labor. In theory I don’t have a problem with it, but in practice it just encourages abuse, as you have pointed out.
Absolutely, I just think that the fact that the U.S. system isn’t designed for rehabilitation has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires make billions by putting people in prison.
However, I don’t understand how you can have no problem with forced labor.
-$50,000, if the figures presented are to be believed. I guess that’s what happens when your party is led by a certified business genius. They’re just in it for the love of oppression.
Hm its almost like slaves aren’t quality labor or something. Weird.
they import them from South america.
actually GOP likely uses things like prison pop as part of the census for thier start, this likely another source too. another value to them, is that news never reports how they bus them to other blue states, so they can give sound bites to right wing media, to say “shithole liberal media cant control thier drug ridden state”.
Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted
