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    In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

    (www.mainepublic.org)
    245 points voxadam | 11 comments | 22 Sep 25 22:51 UTC | HN request time: 1.097s | source | bottom
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    taurath ◴[22 Sep 25 23:07 UTC] No.45340733[source]▶
    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.

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    terminalshort ◴[22 Sep 25 23:36 UTC] No.45340974[source]▶
    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.
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    1. superb_dev ◴[22 Sep 25 23:45 UTC] No.45341052[source]▶
    It might cost the government $65k to imprison someone, but that money isn’t disappearing. It’s going into the pockets of all the private businesses running the prisons who take a hefty profit
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    2. jacobr1 ◴[23 Sep 25 00:10 UTC] No.45341279[source]▶
    There seems to be a presumption that private prisons are widespread. And while not rare, they are only 8% of prisons. There is widespread use of profit-seeking vendors like food suppliers or phone companies though.

    I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).

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    3. t-3 ◴[23 Sep 25 00:28 UTC] No.45341413[source]▶
    > There is widespread use of profit-seeking vendors like food suppliers or phone companies though.

    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.

    4. citizenpaul ◴[23 Sep 25 00:35 UTC] No.45341475[source]▶
    >private prisons

    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.

    5. johnnyanmac ◴[23 Sep 25 00:53 UTC] No.45341591[source]▶
    8%, or 1 in 12, prisons being private isn't that encouraging when blowing up the statistic to the scale of a country. That's still thousands of facilities with perverse incentives.

    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".

    6. wsatb ◴[23 Sep 25 01:05 UTC] No.45341673[source]▶
    8% is 8% too much. They’re also currently housing 90% of detained immigrants. [1]

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

    7. defrost ◴[23 Sep 25 03:25 UTC] No.45342512[source]▶

      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).
    ~ https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/prison-contracts/
    8. chii ◴[23 Sep 25 05:53 UTC] No.45343205[source]▶
    Money spent on a prison is unproductive for society, so it might as well have just disappeared as far as tax payers are concerned.

    It's the same as paying someone to dig a hole, then paying someone to fill it back up. The money might as well have disappeared, as there's nothing to show for it (for the taxpayers that is - the hole digger is happy to have been paid)

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    9. DeWilde ◴[23 Sep 25 09:20 UTC] No.45344665[source]▶
    Have you considered the impact to the society if people destructive to it are not incarcerated?
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    10. chii ◴[23 Sep 25 12:03 UTC] No.45345784{3}[source]▶
    my comment was in relation to the grandparent post's:

    > cost the government $65k to imprison someone, but that money isn’t disappearing

    which is wrong, because it _is_ disappearing.

    Your argument is unrelated - it sure would be good if people didnt commit crimes for which incarceration is required, but it doesn't mean the cost has benefits. It simply has to be done; i would liken it to getting sick, and the healthcare costing money. That money, as far as you are concerned, disappeared, as it brought you no lasting benefit, even tho you must spend it.

    11. superb_dev ◴[24 Sep 25 20:14 UTC] No.45365442[source]▶
    That a fair point. I was trying to express that the money isn’t vanishing, it’s going into someone’s pockets