All true, but on the flip side they get free room and board...

Joking aside, read the 13th amendment https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ and pay close attention to the bit that reads, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the United States, involuntary labor, slavery, and locking someone in a cell are all equally not allowed. And all equally allowed - as punishment for crimes of which you have been convicted.

If you think that this is ripe for abuse, you'd be exactly right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing. We got rid of chattel slavery - and immediately accomplished the same effect with the black codes and convict leasing. As the name suggests, this was overwhelmingly directed at the same black people who had just theoretically been emancipated.

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qingcharles 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's not free everywhere. Many institutions in the USA charge you for your stay. You can stay in jail for a year and have the case dismissed and still be on the hook for thousands of dollars in rent.

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btilly 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

True. If you win your case, the taxpayer no longer pays. Lots of places have those pay to stay laws.

But if your case has not been officially lost, you can't be set to forced labor either.

(Of course our BS system in many places still charges exonerees after the fact despite the fact that it was a wrongful conviction.)

	▲	qingcharles 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sadly, you can even be set to forced labor even if you're unconvicted, based on SCOTUS case law. A jail can legally force you to perform "housekeeping chores" to maintain the facility.

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HWR_14 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Where? I've never heard of that

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btilly 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's called pay-to-stay. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-stay_%28imprisonment%29 for more.

This happened in Oregon to my kind of brother in law. (Married to half sister of my half siblings - what do you call that?)

He's Native American, so the local police thought that they could target him with a BS charge. They lost. The private jail that he'd been kept in, now that they weren't getting paid by the state, sued him for the cost of keeping him. Incidentally the counter sheriff is on the board of directors for the private prison in question.

Can you spell conflict of interest? Of course you can! Can you spell corruption? That too, wow!

Can anyone do a danged thing about it? Of course not! As long as they are only targeting people that nobody likes, like Native Americans, their victims won't get the time of day in our wonderful United States of America.

(I really wish I was making this up.)

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actionfromafar 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

And that's Oregon... there are worse places, too.

	▲	btilly 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oregon has a huge political tension. Portland is solidly blue. The rest of the state is solidly red. In the 1920s, Oregon was one of the centers of Klan activity. Today it is a stronghold for the Proud Boys. The Grand Ronde reservation is in rural Oregon, mostly in Polk County. This is where the event that I referenced took place. It is very strongly conservative, with a long racist history.
	▲	renewiltord 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, the governor of Oregon was a Klansman in the 1920s.

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20after4 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Smells a little bit like the Kids for Cash¹ corruption scandal from a few years ago. Just last year, President Biden commuted the sentence of one of the corrupt judges who had been convicted for sending kids to a private detention center in exchange for kick-backs from the owner of the facility. For some reason presidents love to pardon despicable evil people, way more often than they ever seem to pardon people who genuinely deserve mercy. Trump is the worst offender of all in this regard, it seems like he's selling pardons to anyone who will pay the price²³.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

2. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L8oj3-vdJ-8

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2023/05/16/giulian...