Pants-of-dog wrote:This is semantics. In both cases, they are forced to work for little or no pay, have no rights to say no, no privacy, and no control over their own lives.
No, it isn’t just semantics, though there was a certain amount of “just semantics” going on before the 13th Amendment with southern states instituting Black Codes in 1865 and 1866 that were slavery in all but name—hence the “involuntary servitude” included in the amendment, telling the southern states that they didn’t get to give slavery a fresh coat of paint and slap a different label on it.
More importantly, the constitution has no problem with this kind of forced labour. This is in keeping with its lack of recognition for bodily rights.
You actually got one thing right, there is no recognition of bodily autonomy in the Constitution (whatever judges might say with their “emanations” and “penumbras”). It wasn’t exactly a concern of the Founders, and no one’s tried to write it in since.
But convicts serving jail time also lose their freedom and their right to vote, do you oppose that as well? The simple truth is that fines are pointless if criminals don’t have the money to pay them or the wherewithal to raise it and jails are expensive, so I have no problem with requiring jailed criminals to help pay for their upkeep while in prison. Nor, I think, do most US citizens.
An alternative punishment I wouldn’t mind seeing reinstituted is giving lashes instead of jail time—after it’s over the criminal is free to get on with their life, and we don’t have to fork over millions of dollars to keep them incarcerated for years.
Why do many conservatives think projecting emoti9ns onto progressives is an argument?
“Look, the liberals are pissed off, so our guy must be right!”
Did either I or the article say that? It merely points out that a number of Leftists are
very unhappy with the civility some Democratic senators have demonstrated during the hearings—especially Feinstein, because if the Democrats win the Senate she becomes the chair of the Judiciary Committee unless she is removed. They are afraid that she’d oppose eliminating the filibuster so they can pack the courts.
Rich wrote:Life without Parole is life long slavery. Whether the government gets any useful work out of the prisoner is entirely secondary. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks may not have got useful work out of all their prisoners but they were still slaves. We may think that many people deserve imprisonment, but that doesn't make it any less slavery.
So to be clear, Europe’s abandonment of the death penalty for life in prison is the reinstitution of slavery? For that matter, why would a time limit on the punishment make a difference? Which would mean that any prison time at all is slavery.
Slavery only seems so clear cut in modern western societies, because we have relatively well defined rights and relativity abundant opportunities for success if we are not imprisoned / enslaved.
Slavery
is clear cut—it is the ownership of human beings, whether by individuals or the state. But as the southern states proved after they lost the war, slavery isn’t the only form of involuntary servitude, which is why the Amenders made sure to include a prohibition of involuntary servitude except for punishment for crimes in the 13th Amendment. So no reinstituting serfdom.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke