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It's never been about helping people
(lemmy.nz)
That's called slave labour. Here you go again USA.
They've just re-instituted slavery.
It never went away, they just eliminated private ownership.
Prisons are privately owned, no?
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If a person has a criminal conviction for homelessness, how likely they are to pass the background check with that conviction?
It feels like poor->homeless->convict->unemployable->indentured servant is the expected career transition.
It's been known for 50+ years that incarcerating a person is the most criminogenic you could do to them. It increases crime. It solves none of the problems it uses to nominally justify its existence
Can I have some sources? I believe what you just said but the studies might actually say something slightly different.
Source is a college course from 20 years ago 😭 so I don't recall specifics, but the idea is that prisons don't so much as reduce crime as contain it, or shift it around.
I'm not sure you'd see that in reported crime stats in an area though
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How does 16k permanently house and feed someone? Is that yearly cost? Where?
Mass housing dorms, basic shared facilities and cheapest tasteless grub for a person for 16k yep would work. Also I doubt any of them would reject volunteer labor or learning vocational crafts so they can survive have roof and warm food.
I have a family member who chooses to live homeless and after many years of being around him and others in the homeless community I can tell you that many would reject this. On a positive note, some would welcome it.
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Elon Musk said he'd end world hunger if that were something that could be done. The United Nations World Food Programme did the math: $6.6 billion per year. That's it! You can guess how much the world's richest man has donated toward this cause...
Last I heard he NEGATED $43.8 Billion dollars of aid by cutting USAID, causing the deaths of 4.5 Million Children around the world.
How Much Would It Cost to End World Hunger?
The U.N. World Food Programme feeds over 100 million people facing severe hunger in more than 120 countries and territories every year. In 2021, WFP did this with a budget of $9.6 billion dollars, which was still $5.2 billion dollars short of their total funding requirements. Clearly, ending world hunger will require more money.
Back in July of 2021, former U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley mentioned it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
Edit: I should add, that they should still do it. Split it between the billionaires. Fuck, Elon is worth a trillion dollars
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Prison (hell #1) and homelessness (hell #2): the two whips of the capitalist state to lash us into wage labour slavery. "No underpaid job can be too bad to accept, or do you want to risk not be able paying your exorbitant rent, risk to become homeless? Sell your labour for the lowest price so some capitalist can make 2-3 times the profit of what you gain, which is bareley enough to pay another capitalist your rent." This is what the capitalist state enforces by holding up these two hells. We don't have a prison system by accident, homelessness is not a natural phenomenon. They exist by design. It's not about the money that prisons cost in comparison to what housing a homeless person costs. The money for prisons is a fair price to pay for a capitaliat state given the MUCH larger sum of money that its capitalist class can extract of us by making us obedient and doing the even shittest job for the shittest pay to suck the most possible surplus out of our work. Become communist. Sabotage. Seize the means of production. Be a grain of sand in this machine.
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How do they even tell if you're homeless? It seems like a pretty fallible conviction to ruin someone's life.. Like what if your bus got delayed?
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I would like to permenantly house and feed myself for $16k. I have cash. Tell me how
It’s likely a room in a boarding house, and food through a volunteer kitchen - so that $16K is still being subsidised through private charities and/or local + state Government grants.
Don’t mistake me, though - I’m all for these types of programs. They’re a hell of a lot better than a swathe of people being homeless on the streets, or incarcerated in an overcrowded prison.
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The South loves slavery, more at 11. This is why the US should have punished the Confederacy as the treason it was instead of coddling them.
I just wish President Grant had punished the South more during Reconstruction but it wasn’t that popular at the time unfortunately and his corrupt administration certainly did not help.
They don't care because the breakdown is:
The tax-payer is out 66k in order to imprison the homeless That 66k goes to a prison, the prison makes money The imprisoned person is enslaved to prison labor, which the prison then leases out. The prison makes money.
The prison lobbies politicians to be "tough on crime" and pass laws that criminalize more and more things instead of helping people, that way the prison will make more and more money.
The people would be happier, healthier, and pay less in taxes if we just helped people, but we never will because helping people doesn't make prisons money. Same thing for policing. Police, as an institution, did not begin as law enforcement. They began as slave catchers. Their attitude and overall goal has remained the same. The police exist to ticket and fine people wherever possible in order to generate revenue, and, when able, arrest and charge people with the goal of filling prisons with slave labor.
If you eliminate the part of the 13th amendment that says 'except as punishment for convicted crime' and make slave labor illegal period, and in fact, make it illegal for any entity anywhere to profit off of incarcerated persons, you will eliminate a metric shit ton of problems in the U.S.
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A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
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Important to note this isn't new or restricted to red parts of the country. Vagrancy laws, laws against loitering, etc are all ways of criminalizing the poor to ensure we are all loyal wage slaves, and to a lesser extent feeding the prison-industrial complex. Many Steinbeck novels touch on this so it was a prevalent cultural touchstone in the 30s
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You're not counting the value of the slave labor.
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Yeah, why don't these guys just stop being poor and homeless?
/s
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You mean the crime is punished with enslavement.
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All of America's laws are based on what puritanical, religious losers want.
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Republicans are a cancer to this world
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
1194 points (99.0% liked)
Work Reform
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