I was recently released from Las Vegas County Jail (CCDC) where all sentenced inmates, myself included, are forced, by state law, to "work" in some manner in the jail.
In this case, work consisted of 11-hour shifts, 6 days a week, of ultra back-breaking kitchen work. We were not even allowed to have water cups anywhere outside the break room.
They actually yelled faster! faster! as we ran "the line"...I never could get over that one. All that was missing were the whips and the guards with shotguns spitting tobacco.
We processed approx. 10 thousand trays per day, and were constantly harassed and threatened big time by the corporate kitchen staff in charge. It wasn't enough that we were clocking 60-70 hours a week for the grand total of 1 extra tray per meal (not every meal grant you, just the ones we were working during), but you could actually get thrown in the box and lose gain time (more days in jail) for eating a cookie or some trivial such thing.
If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.
I did the math...2 shifts of 28 workers 365 days a year...with overtime and all that, approx $50k per week($2.6mil/year) of free basically coerced slave labor for the Aero-mark Corporation that ran the kitchen.
I'm guessing you mean Aramark (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/prison-strike-protest-ar...) not Aero-Mark Corporation, an aerospace company. Though perhaps I'm cynical enough to believe that the latter's mission statement "The Aero-mark team bases its work ethic on unity, quality, and accountability. We are one company, one team, succeeding together." could be espoused by a company that abuses prison labor. These mission statements too often seem to be used as a sort of counterbalance for the actual behavior of the company: the more lofty the mission statement, the more deplorable the behavior.
It's not boorish. I only learned about this practice of new American slavery from a friend who had come out of prison recently. Not enough people are talking about it, so nobody knows this is what's going on. Please, keep talking about it!
Yes, it's slavery by another name. Assuming you committed a crime rather than being framed up, that was bad, but the you were treated was itself a crime and I am sorry that you were subjected to that. I've been advocating (not very effectively I'm afraid) for root and branch reform of our criminal justice system for years now, and I feel both angry and ashamed to be a participant in a society where incarceration is treated as an economic opportunity for exploitation rather than a tragic outcome to be remediated.
The sentence you receive from a judge is probably not anywhere close to what you will actually sit in jail for. Probation, parole, double time, triple time, good behavior, trustee status, all affect the outcome.
For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? Very commonly 366 days, though it may be as much as a year and a half. That is if you don't get into any other trouble in jail. After that point you will be released on probation.
What the previous poster is likely stating is that if you willingly agree to be a slave for the state you get all the benefits of early release. The defectors that do not want to be slave labor are not given said benefits. An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
> For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail?
You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court.
You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something.
>An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
This is an interesting observation, but here is how thats dealt with; anyone whom discusses a general purpose strike against working is charged with a serious felony "inciting to riot" and is given an "outside charge" and is probably spending years more in prison.
You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court.
Do you think it's appropriate to call out someone for using "jail" instead of "prison", when the meaning is clear, and you made the same mistake just 5 minutes prior?
Yes CCDC aka Clark County Detention Center (aka Las Vegas County Jail) is a jail in downtown Las Vegas where I did my kitchen slave labor recently on a 90-day sentence for basically jaywalking.
If I were to be sentenced for more then a year, I would have been sent to a prison somewhere in the boonies of Nevada away from Vegas.
The OP discussed a "3-year jail sentence", and I simply explained that would not be possible as jail and prison are significantly different institutions with very different implications.
I don't think I am wrong to continually express the difference between the two.
That is a rough story. I hope things improve for you.
Those who support the war on drugs should think about his point:
>...Was this the outcome society wants me to have? To wreck what small success I struggled to get over what amounted to an illegal search and seizure (that's my PD talking, not me)?
Who was the victim of my "crime"? ...
The definition between a jail and a prison is very much depends on what state you are in.
For example in Texas, you've sat in jail for 6 month and receive a 1 year sentence, you will not be sent to prison, you will remain in the jail for the next 6 months. You can remain in 'jail' for years sometimes before being sent to a prison facility, even after sentencing.
In the USA, sentences of less than 1 year are misdemeanors and can be served in a jail. Sentences of longer than 1 year are felonies and are served in prison. Jails are operated under authority of the county in which they are located, prisons under the authority of state or federal government. This is obviously a summary rather than an exhaustive definition.
First of all, I've spent time in jails and in prisons, both state and federal. Calling it jail time or prison time is nitpicking from the inside.
Second, you do get credit for time served, whether you sat in a jail cell or a prison cell. If they don't credit you for time served, you can sue for illegal detention. It varies state-by-state as to whether you earn good-time (gain time) during your presentencing stay, but typically you get it if you didn't have any infractions.
Finally, prisons employ psychologists who actively gauge the population for "low morale" and suggest courses of action for the staff to take to keep the population under control with the least amount of effort/expense. Typically, they will improve the feed a little when the men become unruly. Also, the staff actively works with the gang structures to help keep the peace.
Let me give a concrete example here, direct from experience.
Florida DOC mandates you must do 85% of your prison (not jail...all jails have different gain time schemes just to make it really confusing) sentence, so that is roughly 5 days a month.
Lets say you score out to 22 months like I was many years ago...thats a total of 110 potential gain-time days off my sentence...great I think almost 4 months!
BUT...let's say I did 13 months in jail waiting for sentencing so I only have to do 9 more in prison.
In most prison systems, I would NOT be able to recover all my potential gain-time because the 13 months county-time did not count for my prison gain time, and perhaps I would only get 9*5 or 45 days gain-time against my sentence.
The State of Florida in 1998, in order to fight disparity in sentencing, created a "scoring system"[0] where every crime in Florida is given a number that corresponds to the number of months in prison that crime could carry.
The scoring system is byzantine as all hell and I challenge anyone to figure it out.[1]
"Scoring out" is simply a term used by Florida convicts to explain how much time they got among themselves I guess. Maybe it was inappropriate to use it here.
Gain-time is a sentence reduction scheme where people get time off their total sentence for staying out of trouble.
No, that poster doesn't know what they are talking about. That said, sentencing is very discretionary so a judge will commonly balance out your total sentence with how much time you've already spent in jail.
Man can we be a little nicer here. He said "no gain time for time spent in jail"
I am not familiar with the term "gain time" but as he uses it above seems to me additional time taken off of your sentence for playing nice. Working dancing to entertain the warden etc.
I took that to mean that while you are in jail you burn down one to one days which is not as fast as the bonus or "gain time" you would get in actual prison.
He may or may not be correct and my guess is it depends on where you at since state and local laws will be applied but...
As for knowing what he is talking about my guess is many prisoners are experts in the system of trying to reduce their stays in prison.
You're being extremely rude. It's hard to make absolutely definitive statements on an incredibly complex and often perverse system like custodial sentencing without resorting to the opaque technical language of legal journals. That is rarely appropriate for a casual discussion forum like HN.
As the other poster actually has first-hand experience of being incarcerated, your dismissive tone in response to some loose phrasing comes off as both nasty and ridiculous.
The poster is talking about post-sentencing "discounts" on prison time served. It's called Good Conduct Time or "good time" for short, in Texas. The way it works is that prison administrators offer inmates early release based upon their behavior. It's a very important and useful prison management tool, one of the only carrots that prison administrators have to offer inmates.
If you follow the link, you'll see that participating in work or educational programs can improve one's good time earning class, allowing an inmate to earn an earlier release date. In contrast to the other poster, Texas requires good time for time served in county jails. Also notable, educational opportunities have been severely curtailed in TDCJ over the last decade.
Right of course..."time served" is a very common sentence for misdemeanor offenses where you could not bond out, and I certainly have an good "idea" what it means.
Also, if you are willing to take a ungodly amount of probation, it is quite possible you will get time-served on your felony charges as well.
I am talking about serious felony offenses where people get sent for multi-year prison sentences, and in those cases, time sitting in jail waiting to get to prison is not eligible for prison gain time.
CCDC gives approx 10 days a month gain time to all sentenced inmates regardless of if you work or not.
Actually working for the jail only provides you the opportunity to LOSE gain time, not get more.
If you refuse to work, you get up to 15 days in solitary confinement (the box, or I simply call it "jail" because its actually jail inside of jail) and lose 5 days of gain time, thus adding 5 days to your sentence.
However, it does not end there...one of the CO's that worked security in the kitchen often threatened to contact your sentencing judge and ask for extra time for screwing up in the kitchen.
It's called 'good time', which you earn as credits for early release. If you refuse to work you get written up and subtracted good time which means time added to expected release date. These disciplinary writeups affect parole potential as well.
The kitchen is also considered one of the better jobs, a bad job would be Hoe Squad, which means a chain gang led out into 35C heat to work the fields while guys on horseback yell at you to work faster.
The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
>The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
Is there any documented evidence of this happening?
I worked for TDCJ for a couple years, there were plenty of strange and sometimes salacious scandals. They often failed to make the news. That being said, no CO that I knew wanted inmates to know where they live. I only know of one case of a prison officer taking an inmate to their own home, and that was rumored to have been for sex. That doesn't mean a thing didn't happen though. CO's and other prison folks are very insular, and don't usually discuss things outside their tribe (well, not current affairs anyway).
There is limited on-unit housing for officers, and inmates are responsible for maintenance of those.
It is not unheard of for inmate work-crew supervisors (officers) to buy their workers a hamburger or take-out meal; this is usually during or after a shift of unusual duration or a situation that deserves a little recognition.
There are special cases. My grandfather, a county sheriff, was granted custody of a TDCJ inmate by the director. The inmate worked as a porter in the county jail, and occasionally was my babysitter for short periods of time. This was in the '70's.
They aren't actually adding anything to your sentence, but are just taking away 'gain time' that has been earned for good behavior. You can accrue gain time and eventually earn early release. However, they can also take this away for bad behavior.
Obviously some sentences are not eligible to earn gain time.
It might be that your actual sentence is 10 years, but the state may expect to send you to prison for the first 5 and have you live on probation or parole restrictions for the last 5. So the judge might tell you to serve 8 years in prison. That gives the state some years of leeway to both add time to your prison sentence for being difficult and to knock some off for being cooperative.
No matter which way you slice it, the sentence is still 10 years, and the state can decide how much of that is spent in prison, and how much outside as a less-than-entirely-free person.
If you can manage to serve your entire sentence in prison without actually committing additional crimes, you might be able to walk out the front gates and never have a single day of probation, but I put the likelihood of that ever happening at just above infinitesimal. People in prison would mostly rather be outside and on parole/probation.
You only need a judge's help to keep someone in prison past the actual length of their sentence.
IANAL and IHNBAP, so I may be up to 100% wrong about this.
Prisons have a certain amount of gaintime (small reductions in sentencing) that's there to be withheld at the prison's discretion, specifically in order to motivate work and good behavior.
You can easily verify the existence of such conditions in the penal system without needing to know the specific facts of an individual person's situation.
Private prison contracts are structured to basically provide taxpayer-subsidized slave labor.[1][2] It is just another Reagan-Thatcher era privatization scam.
At some point blaming administrations 30 years ago for practices continued by subsequent administrations becomes deeply dishonest.
California for instance (referenced multiple times here) has had many governors since the Reagan days and could have ended the practice on a state level, and at a federal level the pendulum has swung to both sides on multiple occasions. Any of these administrations could have made it a priority, but did not.
I think I need to one up your boorishness. I don't think you are likely to break the law again right? That sounds like an effective correctional system. Sure it sucked. But jail/prison should suck.
Wow. Someone, whom you've never spoken to before, shares a personal story about their treatment in prison, and your reaction is "well you deserved it, treats you right". That's a fairly uncouth attitude to have towards one of your hacker peers.
Well no that's not my reaction. You shouldn't jump to conclusions that you want to exist. He had a bad time in jail. He is now unlikely to break the law again, right?
But maybe I'm wrong. Given his other comments it sounds like he's been in jail/prison more than once.
People are also unlikely to break the law again if they have an ok time in jail (it's never going to be good) while learning productive skills and being reintegrated into society without prejudice.
I wouldn't be glad someone had a bad time in their life.
Following that example, people would then break the law in a serious way every time they want to make a career change. Heck you get free training, room, and board! And a brand new set of skills and a job when you get out.
Some people need to have a bad time in order to get them to behave. If you know without a doubt, that breaking the law will lead to having a very bad time, you are going to avoid breaking the law. If you see it as a viable career move, wouldn't you be more likely than ever to break the law?
That sounds like a bit of straw man arg here. Jails shouldn't be a pleasant experiences doesn't meant implies that every experience in jail is okay or productive.It certainly doesn't justify us the tax payers subsiding slave wages...
> Some people need to have a bad time in order to get them to behave. If you know without a doubt, that breaking the law will lead to having a very bad time, you are going to avoid breaking the law. If you see it as a viable career move, wouldn't you be more likely than ever to break the law?
People probably need both, "proportionate" consequences to their action and mean and method to avoid the following the same path...
Prison should be run by the state to accomplish its aims (whether rehabilitative or retributive). Outsourcing it and attaching financial gain to it just encourages abuse.
Certainly they could have whipped him daily and that too would have discouraged future lawbreaking but at some point we have to ask "is this justice or abusive?"
That is arguably a violation of the 13th admentment:
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Unless the work was part of the sentence (which I think is totally fair, as a term of restitution) I don't see how what they did was legal. You might want to talk to the ACLU.
>...Also, "The Thirteenth Amendment has also been interpreted to permit the government to require certain forms of public service, presumably extending to military service and jury duty.”
That’s a handy excuse to use to justify involuntary servitude. I guess they feel the part about "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,“ wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
I was recently released from Las Vegas County Jail (CCDC) where all sentenced inmates, myself included, are forced, by state law, to "work" in some manner in the jail.
In this case, work consisted of 11-hour shifts, 6 days a week, of ultra back-breaking kitchen work. We were not even allowed to have water cups anywhere outside the break room.
They actually yelled faster! faster! as we ran "the line"...I never could get over that one. All that was missing were the whips and the guards with shotguns spitting tobacco.
We processed approx. 10 thousand trays per day, and were constantly harassed and threatened big time by the corporate kitchen staff in charge. It wasn't enough that we were clocking 60-70 hours a week for the grand total of 1 extra tray per meal (not every meal grant you, just the ones we were working during), but you could actually get thrown in the box and lose gain time (more days in jail) for eating a cookie or some trivial such thing.
If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.
I did the math...2 shifts of 28 workers 365 days a year...with overtime and all that, approx $50k per week($2.6mil/year) of free basically coerced slave labor for the Aero-mark Corporation that ran the kitchen.
[edits]