Tennessee, Alabama, Oregon, and Vermont voted in the November elections to ââprohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, while Louisiana did not.
The votes had to do with the hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Americans forced to work for pennies an hour â and sometimes no wage at all. The four approved initiatives wonât bring about any immediate changes in the statesâ prisons, but they could remove some barriers to legal challenges over the brutal treatment of prisoners.
There are reasons to doubt much change will come from the votes. Colorado voters made slavery and involuntary servitude unconstitutional in 2018, but the stateâs court of appeals just recently decided that the people did not mean to abolish the state Department of Correctionsâ prison labor program. (...)
The ACLU research found that the average minimum hourly wage for non-industry work is 13 cents with an average maximum of 52 cents. And being forced to work for basically nothing doesnât just take a toll on the prisoner. From the report:
Because incarcerated workersâ wages are so low, families already struggling from the loss of income when a family member is incarcerated and removed from household wage earning must step in to financially support an incarcerated loved one. Families with an incarcerated loved one, many of whom are impoverished themselves, spend an estimated $2.9 billion a year on commissary accounts and phone calls. Over half of these families are forced to go into debt to afford the costs of a relativeâs conviction and subsequent incarceration.
Oklahoma now has the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., unseating Louisiana from its long-held position as “the world’s prison capital.” By comparison, states like New York and Massachusetts appear progressive, but even these states lock people up at higher rates than nearly every other country on earth. Compared to the rest of the world, every U.S. state relies too heavily on prisons and jails to respond to crime.
CoreCivic and Geo Group both saw their shares spike last month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that it will likely add 15,000 new beds for families after Trump’s executive order to detain undocumented immigrant families together, according to the newspaper.
The Trump administration is also pushing to increase the number of beds for immigrants to 52,000 from 40,000, requesting $2.8 billion for the 2019 budget year to fund the effort.
Geo Group declined to comment to the Journal. The company’s CEO, George Zoley, said during an earnings call in April that he anticipated the possibility of new contracts “as the president will be asking for a significant increase in the detention bed capacity for ICE," the outlet reported.
A CoreCivic spokesman told the Journal that the company is ready to address the administration’s changing needs.
The corporation’s CEO, Damon Hininger, said last month that “this is probably the most robust kind of sales environment we’ve seen in probably 10 years,” according to the Journal.
Both companies have relied on ICE for a significant chuck of their revenue in recent years, according to the Journal, which reported that the agency made up a quarter of CoreCivic’s revenue last year, up from 13 percent a decade earlier.
Geo Group experienced a similar rise, with ICE making up 24 percent of its recent from 10 percent in 2007.
Each of the companies donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration, and Geo Group last year held a leadership conference at one of Trump’s golf resorts in Florida.
This kind of fuzzy thinking has consequences. Example, 50,000 dead Americans during the Vietnam War or Obama's hugely expensive socialized health care albatross. Or the billions upon billions that socialist (sic) Americans gladly throw at the agricultural sector so it can destroy watersheds, create air pollution and contribute to a galloping obesity epidemic and reduced life expectancies.
Even the nuclear weapons backed affirmative action ethnic cleansing project in the Holy Lands receives support because of this kind of fuzzy thinking. I mention the Israeli nation building project because it brought you the Sept. 11th attacks and paints a target on the backs of Americans. Though I do realize that many Americans saw the Sept. 11th attacks as a huge positive and welcome more of the same.
Killing innocent civilians — something both Israel and the USA excel at — and ethnic cleansing enjoy long noble histories that predate modern capitalism by hundreds of thousands of years.
The Scandinavian social democracies all have better socio-economic outcomes than the USA but it strikes me that the vast majority of Americans have no clue as to how that happened. Both those that identify as 'left' and the 'right' — now outdated concepts from the early 20th century.
I'm thinking of capitalism in the sense of: "Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." ......
Well, that is precisely where you are wrong.
This kind of fuzzy thinking has consequences. Example, 50,000 dead Americans during the Vietnam War or Obama's hugely expensive socialized health care albatross. Or the billions upon billions that socialist (sic) Americans gladly throw at the agricultural sector so it can destroy watersheds, create air pollution and contribute to a galloping obesity epidemic and reduced life expectancies.
Even the nuclear weapons backed affirmative action ethnic cleansing project in the Holy Lands receives support because of this kind of fuzzy thinking. I mention the Israeli nation building project because it brought you the Sept. 11th attacks and paints a target on the backs of Americans. Though I do realize that many Americans saw the Sept. 11th attacks as a huge positive and welcome more of the same.
Killing innocent civilians — something both Israel and the USA excel at — and ethnic cleansing enjoy long noble histories that predate modern capitalism by hundreds of thousands of years.
The Scandinavian social democracies all have better socio-economic outcomes than the USA but it strikes me that the vast majority of Americans have no clue as to how that happened. Both those that identify as 'left' and the 'right' — now outdated concepts from the early 20th century.
You've built up what you may think is a rather robust logical argument, but I think there are some holes in it.
Regarding the bolded text above, Ordinary peoples' ability to judge the professional competence of experts (doctors, bridge designers, etc. etc.) is dubious at best. How many centuries before scientific reasoning came along did we put up with things like bloodletting, burning witches for disease and crop failure, etc?
Scientific method and knowledge gives us (in theory) the ability to judge if someone is competent at their job, but few consumers possess it in the requisite degree to make an informed judgement.
Look at how many people willingly give their money to quacks like Andrew Wakefield, or "Alternative" medicine practicioners of homeopathy, etc.
Even when it comes to traditional practitioners, how is one to judge reliably whether the failure of a therapy, or some other unwanted outcome is attributable to the competence of the practitioner? If a doctor sets your broken nose improperly, and you go to complain, they could tell you you did not follow their post treatment instructions carefully, or insist that the radiologist screwed up, or some other clever excuse. Most people assume that a certain aura surrounds people with "MD" appended to their name, and would not be likely to pursue this. Online review sites can potentially help somewhat in making it easier to detect patterns of complaints, but these comments and reviews are unvetted, so we don't know how reliable they may be.
There are ways that incompetent practitioners can continue to practice. If the state medical board (a regulating agency which presumably you as a libertarian/nonaggression principle supporter are not in favor of) suspends a practitioners' license to practice in one state, they can simply move to another. Even if they get decertified in every state, they can do what Wakefield has done, i.e. become an "unfrocked" doctor, i.e. a "service provider" or "consultant". Your options 1, 2, and 3 may be the only ones in your idyllic utopia based on non-aggression, but in the real world there is at least one other.
if you read the thread i was referring to price/overcharging
legitimate competition usually helps keep that in check
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your post assumes i'm against licensing or standards in medical care
obviously i'm not but it depends on who is controlling licensing and what standards one uses for certification or practice
there's some history of the medical profession in this country that i've posted over in the health thread i think
it deals with the pre-flexnor through post-flexnor stuff
Agree with most of what you write Steely_D but you are wrong on one point. It ain't necessarily 'capitalism'. It is self interest.
Canadian doctors get paid a fee for service and there is plenty of incentive to over-order. Would you call Canadian socialized medicine 'capitalism'?
How about we agree to call it professional self-interest?
I'm thinking of capitalism in the sense of: "Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." That gets cloudy when insurance companies are involved, of course. But, my point is that FFS medicine is diametrically opposed to the nature of making people healthier, and doesn't do anything to limit health care costs. (The limit comes when the the insurance company refuses to reimburse the doctor, and then they would reconsider what they want to order.)
And going back to the main topic, it's the same: the incentive for privately owned prisons is to make them financially profitable - and the only ways to do that are by cutting costs or increasing population.
In antiquated, obsolete Fee For Service medicine, where a doctor gets paid for everything they do to the patient, it's in the doctor's financial interest to over-order and - in truth - not cure the patient. They make more money that way. That's capitalism. ....
Agree with most of what you write Steely_D but you are wrong on one point. It ain't necessarily 'capitalism'. It is self interest.
Canadian doctors get paid a fee for service and there is plenty of incentive to over-order. Would you call Canadian socialized medicine 'capitalism'?
How about we agree to call it professional self-interest?
