TIL 40 states in the US charge you $20-$80 a day for being incarcerated in prison.
TIL 40 states in the US charge you $20-$80 a day for being incarcerated in prison.
Very weird that I am so old and have literally never heard this mentioned in a TV show or book or movie or anything.
In four out of five states, if you go to prison, you are literally paying for the time you spend there.
As you can guess, this results in crippling debt as soon as you're released.
The county gets back a fraction of what they hold over your head the rest of your life until you commit suicide(or die naturally and peacefully with the sword of damocles hanging over your head).
$20-$80 a day according to Rutgers.
Counties apparently sue people and employ wage garnishment to get back the money that majority of people obviously cannot pay back.
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incarcerated-people-pay-stay-fees
The US is starting to sound made up
I left America over a decade ago due to a laundry list of grievances that I developed while having only ever lived in America.
Once I started living in other countries, I finally developed context to compare my American life with. And it just made things look so much worse than I had previously thought.
And now it feels like not a day can go by without learning some new awful truth about my former home.
It’s called the American Dream because you’ve got to be asleep to believe it
isn't every country made up after all?
But this has begun sounding like made up details, like someone heard how we feel and they decided to play into those concerns to see how much we'd believe before calling them out.
I honeatly think that a lot.
Isn't the US famous for their prison for profit, where prisons are privately owned and states need to pay if there are fewer incarcerated people inside?
To me, this sounds straight from 1984.
Yeah, the states is the most country with for-profit prisons, and not coincidentally incarcerates the 6th highest percentage of its population of any country, just about half a percent of the total population at any time, or somewhere under 2 million people.
But boy howdy, do those percentages change when you control for economic class and ethnicity.
It's less than ten percent of federal prisons. Police unions (including correctional officers) have a greater impact.
I don't remember prisons being mentioned in 1984. They just vaporized people and then acted like they never existed
This is some serious "keep hitting yourself" material. It's not like you can decide to not be incarcerated. $7300-$29200 of debt per year spent in prison. Man, that is some vicious shit. Nobody will be able to convince me that this is not specifically designed to keep people down forever.
Exactly. Recidivism makes a lot more sense now.
Imagine if you had $30,000 of debt right after you get out of jail with zero contacts and social support.
Yeah of course you're going to go back to what you were doing before, you have no other options that you're aware of.
Fuck that system.
It's not rehabilitation, it's slavery with extra steps
The amendment banning slavery says you can still enslave people if it's to punish them for a crime
Prisons are largely privatized nowadays, creating a demand for prisoners as they profit off of the free labor they get from prisoners
Rehabilitation efforts in the modern penal system are largely non-existent, with people usually coming out more violent and criminal than they came in, even if it was a bullshit arrest.
Black people are incarcerated at higher rates and with harsher sentences than white people for the same crimes, they also tend to get found guilty on much weaker evidence than their white peers
If you think it's a coincidence, I can't help you
And it’s never going to change either. No politician would ever campaign on a platform of prison reform, few would even vote in favor of it. Imagine the attack ads “Jeff Jackson wants to let murders and rapists go free and work at your kid’s school. Jack Jefferson protects kids and is tough on criminals voting three time to
ensure growth of his investments in PrisonMegaCorpmake sure they rot in prison forever… I’m Jack Jefferson and I approve this message.”
It would be nice if the prisoners could take class or earn a degree while in prison, at least when they get out they have a new skill or a degree so they have a better chance to get a job to pay off their prison debt.
Omg I can hear my parents now:
"Wait, I had to work and save and still not be able to afford an education?!?! I sHoUlD hAvE jUsT hElD uP a CoNvEnIeNcE sToRe."
I agree with you, 100%, FWIW. I'm just imagining the asinine conversations we're going to have to have with people who don't understand that the world doesn't revolve around them and they're not the main character.
That would happen if Rehabilitation was the goal, that is not the point of the private prison system, the point is to legalize slavery.
Nobody will convince me that two plus two isn't four.
If the twos are very small, it might be a heavy three.
"It's not like you can decide to not be incarcerated"
You can though..
It's actually worse than that... I went looking for a list, I found this:
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/26/8660001/prison-jail-cost
"Forty-three states allow inmates to get charged for "room and board" — the cost of their own imprisonment. Thirty-five states charge inmates for at least some medical expenses. Taken together, at least 49 states have a law on the books that authorizes at least one of the two. (Hawaii, as well as DC, doesn't have statutes that explicitly address pay-to-stay.)"
That's the beauty of both ruling parties being 100% in support of the prison industrial complex. In fact, our current president even helped usher through the '94 Crime Bill, which keeps prisons nice and full for his golf buddies and institutional donors.
Remember, though, that people, opinions, and political landscapes can change. Yes, Biden was pretty shit back in the 90s, but it actually feels a little bit like he's trying to move back in the other direction. Don't gotta forget the bad, but also can't forget the (attempts at) good
Right it's important to remember 94 was literally 30 years ago. Attitudes can change significantly in that time.
Yeah, he wants to be known as a good guy. Look at GW Bush. They all want to be known as good guys late in life. Gates, Buffet, et al.
Remember, though, that people, opinions, and political landscapes can change.
Yeah, but Biden hasn't.
Remember when he mocked 'Defund the Police' in his first state of the union address?
He's an authoritarian. Always has been, and he's been a reliable vote in favor of every regressive piece of legislation that's led the country to this point, where fascism is becoming normalized.
RAVE act
I just heard about that for the first time a few days ago, and I couldn't believe it was real. As horrible as I think the United States of Ferenginar is, they always manage to surprise me and be worse.
I have to keep asking people not to compare American Capitalists to the Ferengi
The Ferengi have a rule book dictating the ways they are and aren't allowed to rip you off, American Capitalists would call that level of honesty and integrity Far-Left Socialism
Privatized prisons are an abomination.
Obligatory Incarceration in Real Numbers
The people writing these laws and the people paying them to write them are the ones who belong in prison.
I have a friend who was in. Outrageously expensive! Paid 'rent', paid for various classes he was required to take, and paid for each mandatory random drig test. Plus, what they have to pay for phone calls is crazy!!
Yeah that is totally crazy.
I've obviously heard from movies and stuff that you have to pay for your phone calls, but not once have I sienna depicted prisoners paying for their jail time and paying for the classes they take prison.
It's totally insane
This is what conservatives wanted. This is what Democrats wanted. This is what capitalists wanted. America is a fucking authoritarian shithole. It has no concept at all what freedom is, and never has. All of that "freedom" shit is a bald faced fucking lie.
And now some asshole raised in some Appalachian shithole is gonna stomp in here and try to tell everyone that America is great because he served in Afghanistan and if you hate America move
You think this is bad, we recently had a high profile case in the UK finally overturn a law where people who were found to have been wrongfully imprisoned had fees deducted from their compensation to pay the prison service for their food and accommodation.
Imagine spending years of your life in prison on a false conviction and then finding out you have to pay the government for the privilege.
rationales justifying these fees routinely do not recognize them as a form of punishment and instead policymakers see pay-to-stay as financial reimbursement to the state by portraying incarcerated people as using up system resources. The justification allows pay-to-stay statutes to survive legal arguments alleging double punishment.
Shouldve shopped around for a prison within your means
I read the wiki page. Pretty barebones, but it did link to https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34705968
In theory, I could entertain an argument about having criminals repay some of the costs of dealing with them, that's not what's going on here.
The sum that is able to be collected doesn't go straight into the county coffers, either - the jail contracts with a company
The jail gets 30%, the company gets 70%.
It really just looks like just another way to exploit prisoners for profit.
Yeah, that's what the Rutgers article at the bottom of my post was for, more context.
There is no doubt that the prisons are using pay for stay as an excuse to hoover up more money from the most vulnerable populations.
Might be somewhat acceptable if a job was available while in prison to support these living expenses. That at least might improve confidence and start the rehabilitation process.
Oh wait, who am I kidding. Prison has nothing to do with rehabilitation.
Not in the states. US prisons are exploitative first and punitive second.
There are, but the jobs available pay like $1 or 2 a day
So glad slavery got abolished*!
*terms and conditions apply
How to absolutely destroy your net worth:
Step 1: go to prison
There is no step 2.
On release: "you've paid your debt to society, now pay your debt to the prison!"
The very idea is absurd. It is so counter productive to the idea of rehabilitation. The prisons themselves say they aren't a significant revenue stream. Trying to offset the cost of a societal need by charging fees to prisons doesn't even make any sense. And the companies that are tasked with collecting this debt get 70% of what they collect which means that even the argument about offsetting the state's cost doesn't make sense.
It's profit seeking, counter productive cruelty and that's it. Just shameful.
Trying to offset the cost of a societal need by charging fees to prisons (sic) doesn’t even make any sense.
Sure it does. It costs $$$ to build jails and prisons and more $$$ to run them. Why should I, the victim, have to pay twice? (once for my car, which the thief stole, and again in my taxes to fund the legal system once the thief is caught)
I can very much entertain an argument like that (counter-argument, pay prisoners minimum wage for whatever work they do and charge the $20/day from that).
But that's not what's going on here.
This is about a collection agency figuring out how to profit from a captive audience. It deserves the same regard from us as prison phone operators do.
It's really just another form of predatory bullshit.
The prisons themselves say they aren’t a significant revenue stream
This is crucial here, IMO. We could put whatever we want on the bills -- hell, we could charge a million dollar fee for each sentence! That would fix the funding problems -- but the simple truth is that most of the prisoners don't have the money.
If the issue was cost, you would build schools. A better educated population get less sick, earns more and thus pays more taxes, commit way less crimes, get less social welfare, in short it is a net gain in tax dollars.
Plus, someone who gets out of jail with a big debt will very likely cost way more to society than what could ever be recovered from them.
System of a down - Prison song.
Someone actually copied and pasted the lyrics here somewhere, if you go looking.
https://lemmy.world/comment/9798055
There
Nice, I didn't see it before. Must have missed it.
One of my go-tos for karaoke.
Nice.
The US is in free fall. Kinda crazy to see how passive the people are there.
Americans are protesting and many are getting physically assaulted and arrested for protests everyday, and there are many civil rights and labor rights groups constantly bringing lawsuits against the government, actively changing policy.
Unfortunately the government has been very busy snatching up essential liberties and writing bullshit laws, and it's almost impossible to keep up with the protests and lawsuits. The politicians get paid to be there, and can spend all of their time on legislation. Once they pass something, boom, it's in effect. Then it costs organizations and citizens tons of time and money to protest and appeal what was so easily done by the legislators.
What can I do?
So many people get a hard-on about the 2nd Amendment but they're all too spineless to invoke it.
In Oz you get paid a small amount per day so you have some adjustment money when you get out
Oz is better.
Is the far right movement down there getting as bad as it is presented, or is that just the only thing newspapers talk about besides the wildfires?
Nah, we have what we call casual racism, but the real far right intense stuff is a vocal minority. I live in regional NSW and we have a growing immigrant population, largely from Asia and Africa. The colour difference between what was here 5 years ago and now is there if you care to look but honestly it is just people being people for the most part, nobody really seems to care. That said, our billionaires are a major issue and government capture seems inevitably unless major reform goes through.
So they can sponge off any legal judgements you get for false imprisonment
Believe it or not if you can't pay.. straight to jail
And then if you can't pay after you get out, they'll sue you. I can't find evidence that you'll go back to jail, but I'm sure it's happened.
Indicative of a failed system OR a abusive system.
Pick one.
There are no other explanations.
Pick one.There are definitely other explanations, and neither of those are helpful or tell the whole picture.
It only makes sense if you think of criminality as some baked in trait in someone or see hurting criminals as the goal in some twisted sense of justice.
Abusive. Been there. Got abused.
I feel the same way about media control and social punishments for thought crimes.
"social punishments for thought crimes."
You mean consequences for what you say?
$1000 says your post history shows you to be a completely horrible person.
I thought last I heard about this that the bills for this weren't usually called for payment unless you were suing them for something. Could be mistaken
It's state dependant.
This article has a few Connecticut examples of the cruelty of the system and some background, from before Connecticut mostly abolished the pay to stay practice (thanks to democrats): https://apnews.com/article/crime-prisons-lawsuits-connecticut-074a8f643766e155df58d2c8fbc7214c
So apart from coercing inmates to do for profit work for pennies (other countries would call it slave labour), some inmates also get to pay for the privilege on top of that.
Here's a more comprehensive article on how inmates and their families are being milked in the USA : https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/americas-dystopian-incarceration-system-pay-stay-behind-bars
What do they do if the incarcerated people are unable to pay the fee? Do they just let the debt add up? That's awful...
That Rutgers article says that they literally take people with a debt to court, or they take money from your wages while you're working, assuming of course that you can find a job after you get out.
Counties apparently sue people and employ wage garnishment to get back the money that majority of people obviously cannot pay back. For the rest of their lives until they commit suicide (or die naturally and peacefully with the sword of damocles hanging over their heads).
Sounds like good incentive to not have a normal tax paying job and rather maintain under the table and/or illegal ways of making money.
They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison Following the rights movement, you clamped on with your iron fists Drugs became conveniently available for all the kids Following the rights movement, you clamped on with your iron fists Drugs became conveniently available for all the kids I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch right here in Hollywood (Nearly two million Americans are incarcerated in the prison system, prison system of the US) They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison (For you and me to live in) Another prison system Another prison system Another prison system (For you and me) Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non-rich Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non-rich I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch right here in Hollywood (The percentage of Americans in the prison system, prison system, has doubled since 1985) They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison (For you and me to live in) Another prison system Another prison system Another prison system (For you and me) For you and I, you and I, you and I You and I They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison for you and me Oh, baby, you and me Oh Oh All research and successful drug policy show that treatment should be increased (Oh) And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences (Oh) All research and successful drug policy show that treatment should be increased (Oh) And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences Utilising drugs to pay for secret wars around the world Drugs are now your global policy, now you police the globe I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch right here in Hollywood Drug money is used to rig elections and train brutal corporate sponsored dictators around the world They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison (For you and me to live in) Another prison system Another prison system Another prison system (For you and me) For you and I, you and I, you and I You and me They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison They're trying to build a prison for you and me Oh, baby, you and me
Yeah that's a good one.
You can separate the lines so it's not all clumped together by adding double spaces at the end of the line.
I had to do that once when I posted a message like this, haha.
I felt like a dingus tapping out all the spaces, but it was very satisfying when it was properly formatted.
You can separate the lines so it's not all clumped together by adding double spaces at the end of the line.
I'm fully aware of this and saw what it did when I pasted it in....however...
I felt like a dingus tapping out all the spaces
I was also aware of this before I even began to, so I didn't bother.
Very weird that I am so old and have literally never heard this mentioned in a TV show or book or movie or anything.
I don't think that's weird at all. But it certainly says a lot about the US media landscape.
I've also never met anyone in real life who has ever heard about this.
And at this point I've texted everybody I know.
How did zero people ever in my whole life know this?
Like I know lawyers, and we've occasionally talked about how terrible the prison situation in the United States is, it's crazy that not one of them mentioned that prisoner is also have to pay to stay.
Ever.
Charging a prisoner to stay in jail seems like one of the cruelest parts of prison, now that I know about it. That seems crazy.
And that's what literally everyone I have told is saying.
"That's crazy." And it is. It's crazy
not sure which ones, but at least one charges you per day for the length of your sentence even if you're let out early
Back on my day prison was a nickle and we liked it.
But the important thing was to tie an onion on your belt, as it was the style at the time.
it's sad and conspicuous that all of the reasons you hear about these days that would actually justify going out and killing terrible people mostly all involve things the American government has done or permitted. Truly the driving force for evil in the world.
They're barely a 200-year-old country; relevant for roughly 80 of those years, the states are not the ultimate driving force of anything, and certainly not a vague concept like evil.
This specific issue is a failing on part of its citizenry, in company of many failings, but the country is not a static moment in time defined by its failings.
In Utah, you get charged fees by the day if you've been charged and/or convicted of a misdemeanor. No charge if it's a felony. They figure they'll get their moneys worth if the inmate goes to work at Utah Corrections Industries.
Even if you're just charged, or you have to be convicted and in prison?
Charged. No fees for prison. Just county/local jail.
Lol at those citations. low bar.
What do you mean?
Lazy criminals just need to get a job.
/s