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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.

Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.

The kind of labor that can be efficiently done by slaves is mostly done even more efficiently by machines these days, and prison guards cost a lot more than just hiring society's existing pool of the poorest(voluntarily out of the probation office if need be). Forced labor outside of the third world is mostly sex work these days and that's for a reason which doesn't have much to do with human kindness.

Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia.

The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.

Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.

The enslaved soldiers definitely would have still been out-group after being enslaved, and if anything more prone to massive violence. You're correct that executions were also common, but I don't think either of us have the data to talk about "standard practice" in this case. And yet, an argument that says, "hard labor cannot be more efficient than execution" required a preponderance of the evidence, while my position (that hard labor can be made to be more efficient) requires only a collection of positive examples, regardless of how representative they are of average behavior.

Forced labour probably doesn't pay for itself if you have to pay the man with the whip a first-world middle-class salary. The gap in productivity between a slave and a free worker has grown a lot larger a society has got more productive.

The cost to feed/house/guard a prisoner in the US is significantly higher than the annual earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker, which is roughly the value you can extract from a forced worker (and more than you can get competing with the 3rd worlders on MTurk). The Nazi forced labour systems (the concentration camps that were not extermination camps, the Jewish ghettos, the forced labour of kidnapped French boys in Germany) were profitable, but the workers were not getting enough food for long-term survival, and the guards were cheap conscripts.

Forced labour probably doesn't pay for itself

I'm almost absolutely positive it could. The carceral system-- and in particular the prison labor system-- is inefficient because it has misaligned incentives at every level due to a complete lack of consensus about its actual goals plus institutional inertia from times with totally different values. If we're talking about making dramatic reforms anyways (which would be required to significantly streamline the process of executing criminals) then we could orient things towards actually making the existence of prisoners net remunerative for society.

Uh, imprisonment in the US is ridiculously expensive, and that's mostly security costs which don't exactly get easier if the prisoners are doing hard labor.

Our justice system is expensive because it's poorly designed. Or rather, because it wasn't designed-- because it's just a long pile-up of compromises with no guiding ethos. And yet, despite that, if we assume we're not going to redesign it, then imprisonment is still cheaper than the death penalty. If we assume we are going to redesign it, then why no redesign it so that criminals directly repay their contributions to society?

People demand that prisons be punitive while at the same time squeamish about the exact nature of punishment. Of course that leads to poor optimization for economic efficiency. We could get a lot more efficient use out of prisoners if we were a lot more judicious about exactly which rights we chose to violate, while at the same time not losing our heads if the same measures end up making prisoners happy. For example, encouraging moderate cocaine use but then predicating their supply on being productive and compliant.

(I'm not saying that specific intervention would solve our problem, just using it as an example of the sort of measure no one is even willing to consider.)

I'm also addressing your comment here:

The kind of labor that can be efficiently done by slaves is mostly done even more efficiently by machines these days, and prison guards cost a lot more than just hiring society's existing pool of the poorest

... with the above. Historically, slaves did plenty of complicated, specialized work that required a surprisingly high level of education. In rome,

Other vital services were provided by literate slaves who served as teachers, librarians, scribes, artists, entertainers – even doctors.

That in the modern day compelled labour is typically done by people with only the desire for and ability to compel uncomplicated work doesn't mean we'd have to stick to that paradigm. We imprison plenty of lawyers, hedge fund managers, accountants, scientists, etcetera. It shouldn't be impossible to convince them to do work that's on net beneficial to society even if we have to pay them with cash or reductions to their sentences.

We imprison plenty of lawyers, hedge fund managers, accountants, scientists, etcetera.

No we don’t. Rome captured some scribes as slaves, it’s pretty rare that a person commits a worthy-of-imprisonment crime while even able to work a factory job, let alone something high paying.

I'm not saying "plenty of" in terms of "proportion of the total population." I'm saying "plenty of" in terms of absolute numbers. I suspect many of those people would be happy for time off their sentences in return for working in the field they're trained for on behalf of the government.

Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's sort of exactly what we do with hackers already-- there's an existing pipeline from "black hat hacker" to "government spook."

And "worthy of imprisonment" crime is a measure biased towards people who commit crimes with an impact toward a few, specific individuals, rather than e.g. financial crimes that often have vastly more impact than your average armed robbery but result in far less jail time.

Indeed.

As of January 2024, the average annual cost to house a prisoner in California was $132,860

So these prisoners toiling under the lash had better all be full time employed professional workers for the labor camp to break even.

I guess the question is do you need the work to be economically viable? Maybe if prisoners were forced to do non pecuniary very hard work for 12 hours a day prison would be a much worse place to be and prison might be easier to manage (since the inmates would be exhausted).

This was tried in various forms in England in the 19th century after the Victorian Gold Rush attracted enough free settlers to Australia that convicts were no longer welcome there. (The legal term was "imprisonment with hard labour"). It failed because in order to be effectively punitive for people from the kind of rough background that produces criminals, hard labour needed to be hard enough to kill a significant fraction of the people assigned it.

The Victorians were perfectly comfortable hanging criminals who committed capital offences, and there was a lot of capital offences. So working criminals to death for less-than-capital offences was ultimately rejected as cruel.

Ok, but the American underclass isn't used to doing backbreaking labor. Bosses prefer Guatemalans for a reason.

The gulags had lots of disciplinary problems despite prisoners being literally worked to death on a regular basis.

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