So all we need to do is find a way to put people in prison!

Win-win!

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    That’s the first sensible advocacy point I’ve seen sense I started reading these threads. It really doesn’t make sense to assign prisoners to jobs they’re legally barred from.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      From what I’ve heard this is actually an excellent job for many of them. It’s good pay (for prison labor) doing valuable work with a lot of dignity. And it’s work for their community that’s valuable on the outside. It should always be truly voluntary else it be horrifying, but if they can’t do it once they get out it’s not job training and it’s not reducing recidivism. These prisoners are doing heroic work, let them be heroic once freed.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        All prison jobs should pay actual wages and be voluntary though. While the firefighting job is voluntary, many prison jobs are not. Including jobs making products for private companies.

        • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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          29 minutes ago

          My thought was that they shouldn’t be allowed to do jobs that benefit the outside society at all. They can grow and cook their own food, clean their own living spaces, sew and launder their own living spaces etc and maybe hold an outside job as part of a finite period for reintegration but I don’t like the idea of them being allowed to work outside the confines of their incarceration because I worry about a society being able to benefit in any way from incarceration. I think it should always cost way more to lock people up than to let them be free. If you think it’s worth it to keep this person out of society put your money where your mouth is. But yes at the very least they should be paid as much as a normal employee would have to be.

        • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          They absolutely should not be allowed to work for private companies for less than a normal employee. That’s infuriating. Those companies should be burned to the ground. Disgusting

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Fine by me - I’ve hired ex-cons to do work on my house and would hire them again. But there’s a lot of vindictiveness about people’s past deeds. An excellent computer programmer I worked with got fired when her background check turned up a prostitution arrest from when she had been a homeless 18-year-old. Then at age 32, after turning her life around, she found herself being abruptly escorted from the building by two security guards. The problem was that we worked in a school district headquarters - nowhere near away students, but rules are rules and bureaucrats gonna crat, right? I would have had her give talks in front of high school kids. But it isn’t just misdirected authority - ordinary people social media will equally crucify somebody for Liking the wrong tweet. Maybe flinging shit is just a primate instinct, I dunno.