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
Just to really fuck up your life when you get out
In particular, to force you back into crime, to be able to pay for that debt.
Absolutely, I mean I’m already a felon, what’s one more barrier to credit and gainful employment?
I wish i knew why you were being downvoted but nobody offered a counter point. Bankrupcy seems like a logical solution for this situation.
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.
Where did you go, if you don’t mind me asking? It’s certainly something we’ve talked about…
I hopped around Southeast Asia until I landed in Japan.
It’s not easy here, and it’s not without its own problems, but it works much better for me.
(I’d probably still be in Singapore were it not for the heat. The food is 10/10 and dirt cheap, but I missed seasons.)
(I knew that answering this question would make the jerks upset somehow.)
It’s unfortunate you left… When good people leave, we’re stuck with more of the bad gaining power.
If we lose this country to the bad people even more than it’s already been lost, then the entire world may pay dearly as a result.
If he left a solid red or blue state, it doesn’t really matter. Our minority representation, first pst the pole voting and electoral college means that a lot of smart people from cities or solid blue areas can leave and nothing will change.
Plus OP’s an outlier, most of us can’t afford to relocate like this.
Yes, but the more I live and hear things about the states it starts to sound like satire or as if it’s a joke to see what other people will believe.
You’re just getting older, haha. The longer we live, the more we can’t help seeing what’s right in front of us.
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.
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
Were you responding to me specifically or just sharing this information in general?
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 PrisonMegaCorp make sure they rot in prison forever… I’m Jack Jefferson and I approve this message.”
Prison reform can happen in the United States, and it can be used as a platform by Earnest politicians like Bernie Sanders or AOC.
Prison abuse and reform happened in other countries, and there isn’t any evidence for inherent American exceptionalism
People are people, so positive prison reforms can happen in the States too.
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.
In Finland low risk prisoners can even get (or keep) a job. They drive a loaner car from the prison to their job in the morning and then drive back to prison in the afternoon.
Oh here in America they have to hold a job. If they work really hard they may even make a few dollars a day
As someone who’s lived in the US her life everytime I hear about other first world nations it sounds so idyllic that if you put it in a Utopian Future Sci-Fi novel I’d laugh and call it hopelessly optimistic and just incredibly naive about how humans work…
But… no… people outside of America actually live like this…
This is not a cry for help (It totally is, I hate it here)
But for real though, if America wasn’t a world power (at the expense of its citizens’ well-being) or if there were other world powers strong as or stronger than it that weren’t Russia or China, I would not be even slightly surprised if it offered amnesty to US Citizens fleeing Late Stage Capitalism, at this point it’d be morally justified…
The UN actually did surveys here and found that Americans (especially in rural areas) experience levels of poverty that said UN believed to only exist in the worst case scenarios of 3rd World Countries. The problem is THAT bad…
God I hope there’s an afterlife, that may be the only way any of us see true freedom… escaping reality itself.
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.
Not always.
Regardless of the fact that prison education is clearly beneficial for the prison population and wider society, many prison education programs experienced significant budget cuts. States with large prison populations had cut prison education funding by 10%, on average. On top of this, further research has shownthat states with medium-sized populations slashed education budgets by an average of 20%.
The introduction of the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative helped fund additional programs in 2016, although access to postsecondary education in prisons remained limited because the scheme served a maximum of 12,000 prisoners annually. Since, the program has enrolled 22,000 participantsand 130 colleges in the scheme, although only 7,000 individuals have earned credentials. Due to this, many of the 2.1 million people who are currently incarcerated in the U.S. are denied access to education.
However:
To find out how people who have been in prison feel about this situation, we conducted a survey of 100 people who have recently been incarcerated. Surprisingly, they told us that they were generally happy with the education opportunities presented to them. Overall, 74% of our respondents told us that they disagreed with the statement “I had no access to educational programs/education whilst incarcerated.”
As well as being offered an education, many of our respondents told us that they were actively encouraged to take part in these programs. More than 60% of respondents disagreed with the statement “I was not encouraged to participate in educational programs whilst incarcerated.”
So access to education seems to be one of those things that is at least partially lip service. Education might be offered, it also might be substandard compared to a regular school. However, if it is offered and decent, inmates who have participated in getting a GED or better education state that it did help with avoiding recidivism and having better mental health.
You can, just not a degree specifically but you can get certifications and a ged in prison
I commented this elsewhere, but a lot of those certifications are not worth anything because if you are a felon you cannot get that state license.
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.)”
