3rd Nephi 2

[Calm]

1 minute ago, bluebell said:

Do you see it as enslavement when we do that today with our prison system?  

If they are forced to do so by threats of solitary confinement, not being provided food, etc, yes.

If people are provided basic care (food, shelter, protection from harm) no matter what, so they could safely say no, no, not enslavement.

[Bernard Gui]

2 hours ago, bluebell said:

Do you see it as enslavement when we do that today with our prison system?  

Please elaborate. My BIL made license plates when he was incarcerated in the NM State Prison. Was he a slave? I often see WA state penal system vans parked along highways and freeways with inmates (men or women) out on the shoulder and in the meridian picking up trash. Are they slaves? I haven't seen any evidence of them out doing hard labor breaking rocks lately.

Edited November 2, 2020 by Bernard Gui

[Bernard Gui]

2 hours ago, Calm said:

If they are forced to do so by threats of solitary confinement, not being provided food, etc, yes.

If people are provided basic care (food, shelter, protection from harm) no matter what, so they could safely say no, no, not enslavement.

No one forces Sister Gui to go to school every day to support her old geezer retiree husband. But if she refuses to go, should she still get paid or be given free food and money for the mortgage? Granted, being married to me may be akin to solitary confinement.

Edited November 2, 2020 by Bernard Gui

[Bernard Gui]

3 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

...to strengthen the Nephite defenses. That’s what prisoners of war do. Rarely are they treated humanely. Most often they die from neglect, starvation, or exhaustion. I think the record shows  Nephite military leaders on the humane side. Prisoners either drain the resources of their captors, work for them, or are exchanged for other prisoners. The latter was the go-to goal of the Nephite leaders. For example, Helaman offered an exchange of prisoners, but the Lamanites refused. Moroni was able to negotiate a favorable exchange. 

There are numerous examples of Lamanites putting Nephites, including women and children, into bondage, often at the instigation of Nephite traitors. On the other hand, the Nephites often sought to liberate and protect innocent Lamanites.

We need to find that lost Book of Laman.

Of, wait! It has been found! 🙂

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1952286.The_Lost_Plates_of_Laman

Twice!

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Laman-Mette-Ivie-Harrison/dp/0998605247/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&hvadid=77927912225644&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=book+of+laman&qid=1604344398&sr=8-1&tag=mh0b-20

 

 

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Bernard Gui said:

No one forces Sister Gui to go to school every day to support her old geezer retiree husband. But if she refuses to go, should she still get paid or be given free food and money for the mortgage? Granted, being married to me may be akin to solitary confinement.

She has the choice to refuse and look for a different situation. 
 

People don’t choose to be in prison nor are they allowed to walk away from it if they don’t like it.

If they are then forced to work or suffer hunger, thirst, or be exposed to the elements, I consider that enslavement. If we take on the right to punish people for their mistakes and crimes by imprisonment, we take on the responsibility in my view to provide basic needs. 

I think it much better if they work and they get fair compensation such that if the prison gets a profit off their labour, they get a substantial portion of that profit. In no way should prison labour ever be structured so the government or private business makes enough money off of it, it benefits them to keep people imprisoned imo.

Edited November 2, 2020 by Calm

[Bernard Gui]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

She has the choice to refuse and look for a different situation. 
 

People don’t choose to be in prison nor are they allowed to walk away from it if they don’t like it.

If they are then forced to work or suffer hunger, thirst, or be exposed to the elements, I consider that enslavement. If we take on the right to punish people for their mistakes and crimes by imprisonment, we take on the responsibility in my view to provide basic needs. 

I think it much better if they work and they get fair compensation such that if the prison gets a profit off their labour, they get a substantial portion of that profit. In no way should prison labour ever be structured so the government or private business makes enough money off of it, it benefits them to keep people imprisoned imo.

Of course they choose to be in prison. My BIL spent a few years in the slammer. His making license plates saved NM the money of having an outside agency to do it, so I guess technically they profited and he was their slave. 

Edited November 3, 2020 by Bernard Gui

[Calm]

16 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

Of course they choose to be in prison. My BIL spent a few years in the slammer. His making license plates saved NM the money of having an outside agency to do it, so I guess technically they profited and he was their slave. OK.

They can’t walk from it. It is called prison for a reason.

[Bernard Gui]

6 hours ago, Calm said:

They can’t walk from it. It is called prison for a reason.

Did they not choose to do something that put them there? Because they can’t walk away makes them slaves if they are required to work? I guess I don’t get your point.

[Calm]

58 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

Did they not choose to do something that put them there? Because they can’t walk away makes them slaves if they are required to work? I guess I don’t get your point.

Not just required to work, but have the threat of food, shelter, or protection being withdrawn if they don't.

If a guard were to on their own assign prisoners to certain jobs that got income somehow and then force them to give most of their pay to the guard or suffer being beaten up while 'resisting' an order or be placed in solitary by order of the guard if they refused Tom work, if the guard ate any food that was brought to the prisoner's cell, etc., most would agree that the guard's treatment of the prisoners was immoral and they were in essence his slaves if the other guards refused to listen to their appeals and there was no other way for prisoners to appeal.  Immoral torture to force the prisoner to work to put money in the guard's pocket.

Now extend that to a prison where if you don't work, you don't eat, you don't get basic essentials for living.  Enslavement.  Sure they could avoid suffering by working and turning all their earnings over to the bosses, they are prisoners after all...why should they be rewarded for work, why should taxpayers have to pay for their room and board and their protection from other prisoners or even sadistic guards when they committed crimes against society?  

Perhaps because society chooses to take almost total control over their lives, there is a moral responsibility we do not treat them as our property who exist for our financial benefit as opposed to our brothers and sisters.

If when they refuse to work, guards look the other way if other inmates beat them up; if when they refuse to work, they starve as food is withheld and they have no way to get it from another source; or if they are be put in cells without heat in cold weather...all that is essentially a form of torture or suffering imposed on them by prison officials if they refuse to work in my view.

To me that type of treatment raises imprisonment to enslavement especially when misbehavior resisting such treatment is used to justify tacking on additional years of imprisonment.

A person who chooses to take a job which promises a good salary, but ships them off to live in a company town, where they charge for food and shelter so much they end up further in debt each month and they are threatened to be thrown in jail if they try to leave without paying their 'debts'...that is enslavement even though the person chose to take the job, move to the town.

Someone signs up for their government's military.  Expectations are the government will provide adequate food, shelter, protective gear, training, medical care, etc.  Instead they are given no training, inadequate clothing and protective gear, sent off to far places and threatened to be shot if they attempt to leave or refuse orders to go out on work gangs.  I see that as a form of enslavement and the alcoholism rampant in the Russia military reported in the remote areas suggest those living that life felt somewhat the same way.

In these cases, real and imagined, the group/people in charge have accepted a moral responsibility to care for the other and then used immoral practices withholding basic humane care to force their charges to act in ways that benefit those in charge and not the individual.

I am not suggesting all work routines in prison are automatically enslavement, but because of the restrictions placed of the individual, crossing the line and using enslavement is a potential trap for those who view prisons as a money making venture or those who see prisons as providing them an opportunity to reward their own sadistic desires (a guard who blackmails prisoners with threats of beatings, false charges to extend stay, etc. to get sex whenever he demands it....he is using the prison system to create slaves for himself, if the system allows him to do such without punishment or not even stopping him, the system is complicit in the crime).

Edited November 3, 2020 by Calm

[Bernard Gui]

17 minutes ago, Calm said:

Not just required to work, but have the threat of food, shelter, or protection being withdrawn if they don't.

For example, if they refuse to work, guards could look the other way if other inmates beat them up; if they refuse to work, they starve as food is withheld and they have no way to get it from another source; or they could be put in outside cages or cells without heat in freezing cold weather...all essentially a form of torture or suffering imposed on them by prison officials if they refuse to work.

To me that raises imprisonment to enslavement.

Well, we leaped from the Nephites supposedly making slaves of Lamanite prisoners of war to atrocious prison conditions. You lost me some where in between. Of course prisoners should never be abused, but requiring them to work is not slavery as far as I am concerned. Are you saying those are the conditions in American prisons? Being a criminal in prison should not entitle one to free food and lodging. IMO.

[Calm]

7 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

His making license plates saved NM the money of having an outside agency to do it, so I guess technically they profited and he was their slave. 

What would have been done to him if he refused?

[Calm]

2 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Are you saying those are the conditions in American prisons?

As far as I know, those extremes of withholding food or medical care of protection, no, though I would not be surprised to hear of pockets of such in poorly run prisons.  There are revolts on occasion claiming poor quality of conditions.  And there is tempting potential there if prisons are used as cheap labour, that people who shouldn't be imprisoned or at least for an extended period of time are sent or kept there for the profit.

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, we leaped from the Nephites supposedly making slaves of Lamanite prisoners of war to atrocious prison conditions. You lost me some where in between.

I was asked a simple question and I gave a straightforward explanation of what kinds of conditions would move mere imprisonment into slavery in my opinion...if boils down to what level of force is used on someone when they have no options to resist beyond doing nothing at all and dying or at least suffer dreadfully.

If prisoners of war are put to work and beaten or killed if they don't work, that is enslavement, imo.  Given the conditions of the day, that the Nephites hadn't started the war in order to get slaves (though I wouldn't be surprised if this was a story told to rile up Lamanites to further attack), that the Nephites were also fighting for their own lives and lacked the basic need of safe shelter, so how could they provide it to those under their care, I don't see enslavement as an unreasonable or even immoral though it is an inhumane one in that it treated the prisoners as objects, not as individuals who have the same rights as the Nephites themselves saw themselves entitled to.   

At a very basic level of survival, enslaving someone who is attempting to capture or kill you in order to use their labor to prevent that very thing is just and reasonable in my view.  But that justification melts away as soon as the threat is removed and it becomes not about saving the lives of your community, but using their forced labour for profit, to increase power and wealth, have a more comfortable life, etc.

If Moroni at the end of the war, did not turn over the prisoners and instead claimed to keep them as hostages to prevent further invasion, but then put them to work on government and personal projects without giving them a fair payment for their labour....long term enslavement. 

Hopefully not something Nephites did, but known to have happened.  For example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_in_the_Soviet_Union

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By the summer of 1944 the Soviet forces had reached the Balkans that had ethnic German minorities. State Defense Committee Order 7161 of December 16, 1944 instructed to intern all able-bodied Germans of ages 17–45 (men) and 18-30 (women) residing within the territories of Romania (67,332 persons), Hungary (31,920 persons), Yugoslavia (12,579 persons), which were under the control of the Red Army. Consequently, 111,831 (61,375 men and 50,456 women) able bodied adult ethnic Germans from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were deported for forced labor to the USSR.[3]

During the 1945 military campaign in Poland the Soviet Union interned suspected Nazi party members and government officials in camps in the Soviet-occupied areas east of the Oder-Neisse line. Persons held in these short-lived camps east of the line were subsequently transferred to NKVD special camps in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany or to the Soviet Union for forced labor[4] By May 1945 the NKVD had selected for deportation to the USSR 66,152 German civilians who were considered suspected Nazi party members and government officials, as well as 89,110 able bodied adults (mostly men) for forced labor. In early 1947 the Soviets sent an additional 4,579 Germans from the Soviet occupation zone to the USSR as forced laborers.[5]

The Soviets classified the civilians interned into two groups; the first Group A (205,520 persons) were "mobilized internees" who were able bodied adults selected for labor; the second Group D (66,152 persons) "arrested internees" were Nazi party members, German government officials and suspected agents, and others considered a threat by the Soviets.[6] Soviet records state that they repatriated 21,061 Polish citizens from labor camps which indicates that not all of the internees were ethnic Germans and some could have been ethnic Poles.[7]

The Soviets sent about three-quarters of the laborers to the Donets Basin to work in the reconstruction of heavy industry and mines, and about 11% to the Urals' heavy industries. The workers were housed in concentration camps under armed guard. The working and living conditions were harsh and according to Soviet records about 24% of those interned died. Forced labor turned out to be inefficient and unprofitable since many of the women and older men were not able to perform heavy labor. Repatriation started as early as 1945 and almost all were released by 1950.[8]

 

Edited November 3, 2020 by Calm

[Calm]

Looks like it is debated in the US:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/

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Some viewers of the video might be surprised to learn that inmates at Angola, once cleared by the prison doctor, can be forced to work under threat of punishment as severe as solitary confinement. Legally, this labor may be totally uncompensated; more typically inmates are paid meagerly—as little as two cents per hour—for their full-time work in the fields, manufacturing warehouses, or kitchens. How is this legal? Didn’t the Thirteenth Amendment abolish all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude in this country?

Not quite. In the shining promise of freedom that was the Thirteenth Amendment, a sharp exception was carved out. Section 1 of the Amendment provides: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Simply put: Incarcerated persons have no constitutional rights in this arena; they can be forced to work as punishment for their crimes.

Angola’s farm operations and other similar prison industries have ancestral roots in the black chattel slavery of the South. Specifically, the proliferation of prison labor camps grew during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, a time when southern states established large prisons throughout the region that they quickly filled, primarily with black men. Many of these prisons had very recently been slave plantations, Angola and Mississippi State Penitentiary (known as Parchman Farm) among them. Other prisons began convict-leasing programs, where, for a leasing fee, the state would lease out the labor of incarcerated workers as hired work crews. Convict leasing was cheaper than slavery, since farm owners and companies did not have to worry at all about the health of their workers.

In this new era of prison industry, the criminal “justice” system, the state determined the size of the worker pool. Scores of recently freed slaves and their descendants now labored to generate revenue for the state under a Jim Crow regime.

* * *

More than a century later, our prison labor system has only grown. We now incarcerate more than 2.2 million people, with the largest prison population in the world, and the second highest incarceration rate per capita. Our prison populations remain racially skewed. With few exceptions, inmates are required to work if cleared by medical professionals at the prison. Punishments for refusing to do so include solitary confinement, loss of earned good time, and revocation of family visitation. For this forced labor, prisoners earn pennies per hour, if anything at all.

Angola is not the exception; it is the rule.

Over the decades, prison labor has expanded in scope and reach. Incarcerated workers, laboring within in-house operations or through convict-leasing partnerships with for-profit businesses, have been involved with mining, agriculture, and all manner of manufacturing from making military weapons to sewing garments for Victoria’s Secret. Prison programs extend into the services sector; some incarcerated workers staff call centers.

Well, it appears food nor medical care is not withheld, but can solitary confinement...viewed as extreme punishment by many if extended...be truly considered "safe shelter"?

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With few exceptions, inmates are required to work if cleared by medical professionals at the prison. Punishments for refusing to do so include solitary confinement, loss of earned good time, and revocation of family visitation. For this forced labor, prisoners earn pennies per hour, if anything at all.

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Given the scope and scale of prison labor in the modern era, one could reasonably expect some degree of compliance with modern labor standards. However, despite the hard-won protections secured by the labor movement over the past 100 years, incarcerated workers do not enjoy most of these protections.

Employment law makes the status of the worker as an “employee” a critical distinction. If you are an employee, you get protections; if not, you don’t. Courts look to the character of the relationship between the parties and aim to assess, first, whether the employer has sufficient control over the work conditions and, second, whether the relationship is primarily of an economic character.

Incarcerated workers are not expressly excluded from the definition of employee in workers’ protection statutes like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or the National Labor Relations Act. However, in the cases where incarcerated workers have sued their prison-employers to enforce minimum wage laws or the FLSA, courts have ruled that the relationship between the penitentiary and the inmate worker is not primarily economic; thus, the worker is not protected under the statutes. By judging the relationship between prisons and incarcerated workers to be of a primarily social or penological nature, the courts have placed wage and working condition protections out of reach for incarcerated workers.

 

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Incarcerated persons or, more specifically, the “duly convicted,” lack a constitutional right to be free of forced servitude. Further, this forced labor is not checked by many of the protections enjoyed by workers laboring in the exact same jobs on the other side of the 20-foot barbed-wire electric fence.

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Yet those costs are not fairly calculated. The American criminal-justice system is rife with fees that shift the financial burden of incarceration to the charged and convicted and their families. Like the “company store” in isolated mining towns which overcharged workers of old, prisoners are left open to similar forms of exploitation.

Then there is the high percentage of mentally disturbed in prisons.  When people with mental health issues are incarcerated instead of receiving appropriate care and than forced to work, this seems less like restitution to society and more slavery to me.

Edited November 3, 2020 by Calm