What do you think of this plan to save the U.S. economy and improve society?

The U.S. prison system already rents out inmate labor to private firms.

The fact that you put being an anarchist as reason for someone to be in a forced labor camps sickens me.

some anarchists if you read carefully, is what it says. Meaning those who have a complete disregard for the saftey and personal properties of others. Don’t try and tell me they don’t exist.

So they’d be locked up for vandalism, public endangerment, assault, etc. I don’t see why political philosophy would enter into it, then. It’s just another form of political prisoners.

This whole idea, by the way, is why the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t actually outlaw slavery. It’s just illegal for anyone but the government to do it. As lawyer and writer Michelle Alexander makes very clear in her book The New Jim Crow, the prison, judicial, and law enforcement systems in this country are systematically designed to disadvantage people of color without directly using race as a factor. Given that, I see this as a more overt continuation of race based slavery.

And as I said, this already happens.

I think it is repulsive.
I can never support slavery.

What’s “a native who supports anti-white causes?”

@syzygy2600 just asking. I didn’t understand what you meant. geez What is a “native?” I’m seriously asking because I don’t know what you mean. I’m not being a “chooche.”

@bkcunningham ok sorry I was a little harsh there. By native I mean Canadian and American natives. Cree, Navajo, ect. I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with people who are racist, be they white, black, chinese, or cree, whatever the case may be. Just as conservative media outlets try to scare us with the black man, liberal media outlets go the opposite direction and while they don’t demonize white people, they make it seem as though all or most white people are racist, and that if a minority is racist to a white person that it’s justified, somehow. That is what I took from your post, and that was me putting something on to you so I apologize for that.

@syzygy2600 actually, with the exception of a few things in your list of criminals and the condition that “they will be given an amount of money based on the time they served in the camp,” this is pretty much already in existance in the US.

@syzygy2600, What’s repulsive is a militia member shooting a 9 year old child in the face, acting on some bullshit ideal that they are saving their country.

Are you referring to Jared Lee Loughner? You are aware that he was just a nutjob, right? And not actually a member of a militia? His politics are basically incomprehensible.

I cannot support your idea because of how it potentially lubes up the slippery slope to fascism, if you catch my drift.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard I know exactly what you mean, thats why I say that the system could be abused. Kind of like how communism is the ideal way of life but can never work because of human nature.

I was actually referring to a more recent incident in Arizona where a male and female militia members killed a Mexican family. I am very wary of armed militia groups, a few of them killed some cops in Utah in the 80’s, there have been many other incidents as well.

I know you are not serious but some people do take ideas like this seriously. I think they should be locked up myself.

@syzygy2600 I bring race into it because, as I pointed out, race is a huge issue in understanding the justice system. If you’re too lazy to even scan the link I shared and prefer to spew sarcastic attacks against people genuinely answering the question you asked, you might reconsider asking volatile and politically complex questions in the first place.

As for people like the ones who killed the Mexican family, and so many others like them who do that and get away with it, I don’t think they should be put into forced labor. Getting shot to death themselves works (and shit, I’d do it myself).

I think this is a stupid idea. This is nothing more than slavery.

Is that you Noam?

We classify inmates now and they voluntarily work in certain industries in the prison system guys. They get privileges and a stipend. The intems produced in the industries are sold by the state or used by the prison if they work in fields for produce or livestocks. Happening everyday all over the US. It’s just the categories of “criminals” that we don’t have now.

This is insane. When you link your economic prosperity with the prison inmates, you are creating a positive pressure towards locking more people up for and longer sentences. You are folding prisons into the existing industrial complexes.

That said, obviously, this is already happening. Except for the locking people up for speaking against gay people bit. Prison for speech is a little tough in the US.

I am going to set aside the criminal classifications. I profoundly disagree with thought crimes, but what constitutes a crime can be set aside for now, and I still have profound problems with this idea. Slave labor being used to create economic prosperity for a few always leads to a demand for more and more slaves. Further, competition for slave labor makes it pretty tough for companies paying skilled workers good living wages to compete. So they don’t. They swithc to the slave labor system to maintain their competitive edge and maximize profits. You set up a system where we don’t just race toward being a banana republic, we race toward being a society of owners and slaves. There will be little need for anything in between.

Finally, we have the problem that consumerism as currently practiced is completely unsustainable anyway. If we manage to revitalize the American economy to its previous peak, we are only hastening the end of life as we know it. Take a look at this video on consumerism. Also The Story of Stuff does a great job of capturing the magnitude of the problem facing us.

Our challenge is twofold. We have to get people back to work, but we need to put ourselves to work at something better than killing our planet’s ability to sustain human life.

@ETpro the prison industry in America is one of the fastest growing industries we have going.

@bkcunningham I know, and privitizing prisons was about as terrible an idea as politicians have come up with recently/

@ETpro whether they are privatized or not, they employ the same people and house the same people. It just comes down to who does it more cost effectively if I’m paying for it.

@bkcunningham No, it does not just come down to a cost comparison. There is the cost to society to consider as well. What is the job of corporate management. They must maximize profits. If they fail to do that for more than a quarter here and there, they will be replaced by someone who will. How does the CEO of a prison corporation maximize profits? The only ways are to cut costs, which may mean substandard care for inmates and certainly nothing remotely like rehabilitation or education; and increase market size.

The Arizona Papers Please Law was actually written by lawyers with ties to a White Supremacist group and was and pushed through the legislative process by a member of the Governor’s staff who just happens work for the nation’s largest for-profit prison corporation—the one that would house the prisoners rounded up by this law.

To pay paradise, put up a parking lot? No longer. Make that a prison.

@ETpro I was just commenting that the OPer’s concept already exists in a fashion.

Inmates have procedures for grievances and advocates if they feel they are being mistreated. Control at the local level of certain things is always, IMO, better. Let’s people know what is going on in their neighborhoods.

@bkcunningham Roger that. And the problems already emerging with it are foreshadowing of the evil to come. In Communist China, people are routinely just rounded up and stuffed into what are truly nothing more than slave labor camps and in come cases, farms for sales of transplantable human organs. That is not how I want our society “fixed.”

@ETpro yeah, it’s horrible. That is why I love America. The principles of our government are much better than that. It gives us, you and I, the power. I wouldn’t want it “fixed” like that either.

@ETpro Have you got a link to your claims about China?

“Civilization begins with conquest abroad and repression at home” – Stanley Diamond

@meiosis Start with this and this.

@ETpro If those links are the best you’ve got, then you’re seriously over-egging the pudding. There’s nothing in them that tells of “people…just rounded up and stuffed into…slave labor camps” or “farms for sales of…human organs”. Not that I approve of China’s disgraceful human rights record in any way, but exaggerating the problem is rarely productive.

@meiosis I consider arresting poeple because the ruling party doesn’t like their political views to be rounding them up and stuffing them into prisons. The fact those prisons provide slave labor that turns a profit for the government has to be an incentive to arrest more, not fewer. China doesn’t harvest organs from living prisoners, but does sell organs from ones that die while incarcerated. Again, the more prisoners locked up, the more profits. Those facts are as germane to this question as facts can get.