In Maine, Prisoners Are Thriving in Remote Jobs

If you're white, maybe. There's still stories of some states having the book thrown at recreational drug usage.

...there are two million people in prison. Several million more in various stages of the carceral cycle who be be easily subbed in when more labor is required.

Slavery of this variety is alive and well.

This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.

Agree, but do we have experiments trying Nordic models in America to see what aspects of their model work here (and which may not)?

Just like Swedish-American homelessness rates are comparable to homelessness rates in Sweden, etc.

As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll a 1 at birth on many attributes at once, and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. They will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely, with dignity and compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.

And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.

But yes, the ones really profiting are those making deals to service the prison. Those who bring food, or repair the infrastructure, or custodial duties. A lot of seemingly unrelated industries have every reason to lobby in the background to focus on "hard on crime".

[1] https://truthout.org/articles/immigration-detention-has-beco...

Yep. Everyone's heard about private prisons and their pet judges, but few know anything about Bob Barker or VitaPro. Their are deep and very murky waters here.

  However, currently only 8.5% of people who are incarcerated are held in private facilities.

  Despite the significant amount of economic and political power held by private prison corporations, it is imperative to understand that private prisons are not the only force at work in the Prison Industrial Complex.

  Exclusive focus on private prison corporations as the lynchpin of the PIC ignores and overlooks the variety of other players and systems at work.

  For example, there are thousands of companies and a wide range of contracts in both private and public prisons: it is a whole network of parties with vested interests.

  In Are Prisons Obsolete, Angela Davis explains that,
    “…even if private prison com­panies were prohibited – an unlikely prospect, indeed-the prison industrial complex and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively intact.
     Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but pub­lic prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corpora­tions that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect”
    (Davis, 2003, 99-100).

Are a red herring to distract from the real issue. The industrialist complex around prisons that do in fact profit from prisons. Like all gov contracts are also highly inefficient by design.

The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.

The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.

Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.

To be clear, I'm saying it's garbage, but it's garbage very much on purpose.

But I think the laws in some U.S. states do actually allow felons to vote under certain circumstances.

It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.

I guess state laws vary a lot, but are you sure that’s legal? You probably are required to have your address updated, even if moving within the same precinct. If they then allow you a choice of locations, sounds fine, but your wording sounded like maybe you don’t tell them you moved, which is probably not legal.

It's the racism. It's why the 13th amendment allows slavery for criminals and why Black people are disproportionately targeted and imprisoned.

It's literally unconscionable in any kid of democracy to me.