• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    American prisons ARE meant for torture. Don’t get it twisted.

    naw. not really. Prisons are meant to provide cheap domestic labor to the corporations running them. it’s all profits.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        yup. And there is a reason why laws are written to disproportionately affect certain groups- like how crack cocaine gets more jail time than powder, or marijuana convictions…

    • PunnyName@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      That’s a part of it, yes. It’s the slavery loophole in the 13th amendment.

        • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Loopholes are things intentionally built into structures with the purpose of allowing something through. I find it weird so many people think loopholes aren’t something intentional.

          • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            I’m having a lot of trouble finding a source that backs up this position. Everything I’m reading says that loopholes are typically oversights, not intentional inclusions.

            That being said, the 13th amendment’s allowance for prisoner slavery is not a loophole at all, it’s an explicit allowance. Loopholes are not explicit, that’s kinda the whole point of them. It’s a bit like saying that the standard deduction on your taxes is a loophole. It’s just an explicitly defined feature.

            • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              While that, in fact, does happen, when a large portion of loopholes benefit corporations are written by people employed, or otherwise invested in, those corporations you would have to be lying to yourself, or ignorant of the situation, to believe loopholes are generally unintended.

              https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/

              The above is one example of how this is done. Bills are written to model what the industry wants to get out of legislation. Then they use LLMs to construct legislation after being trained on those models. They then collude to push these bills to as many places as possible, greasing palms the whole way. Sometimes these are just out-right legislation for the purposes of enriching the industry, more often though they are bills written with carefully designed language to allow for specific technicalities, or for stipulations of compliance to be so vague as to be unenforceable, or to use a bunch of jargon and complex linguistics to make a law read one way to the laymen, but another to the professionals that will actually be interacting with these laws.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      FWIW the vast majority of prisons in the US are not corporate run (>90%), but those majority government-run prisons still provide a lot of free/cheap manufacturing labor to private companies.

      The government itself is to blame, not just private prisons.