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

    • @aeronmelon
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      937 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        387 months ago

        Where did you go, if you don’t mind me asking? It’s certainly something we’ve talked about…

        • @aeronmelon
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          7 months ago

          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.)

          • @[email protected]
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            67 months ago

            Do you have to struggle with the insane only work, no life, salary man/woman problems? Or did you find something that doesn’t follow that “life style?”

            • @aeronmelon
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              47 months ago

              No, I see it but I don’t have to deal with it.

              It’s also not as much of a constant as it used to be.

      • @[email protected]
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        37 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          47 months ago

          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.

    • @6mementomori
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      97 months ago

      isn’t every country made up after all?

      • @[email protected]
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        47 months ago

        But this has begun sounding like made up details, like someone heard how we feel and they decided to play into those concerns to see how much we’d believe before calling them out.

      • @[email protected]
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        97 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          27 months ago

          You’re just getting older, haha. The longer we live, the more we can’t help seeing what’s right in front of us.

          • @Raffster
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            37 months ago

            Nah, it’s exactly the other way around. Except for a tiny minority. All the others have to ignore what’s around them in order to not go insane.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              7 months ago

              I can understand why it seems that way, but the broad American public supports civil and labor liberties, green energy, healthy and equitable policies in general; it’s the vocal minority that is subverting the will of the more fair-minded, rational and compassionate majority(sure would be nice if more than one out of every three or four people voted).

              And I don’t even think most conservatives believe in the policies they support so much as they don’t comprehend what they’re supporting and they are afraid of relinquishing control over what they narrowly perceive as “power” and “freedom”.

              The ones I’ve talked to don’t.

              • @[email protected]
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                27 months ago

                I feel like most of them only vote R because they’re getting bamboozled into believing that the Rs stand for conservative, Christian, family values.

                • @[email protected]OP
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                  7 months ago

                  Anecdotally, ignorance and fear seems to be significant factors supporting conservative beliefs.

                  When I tell a liberal something that they aren’t expecting or that they didn’t know, they’ll respond with “what? How do you know that? Really?”

                  Then with a conservative, I usually get “No, no. Really? Well, I don’t know about that, anyway…”

                  And that’ll be some hard truth or contradicting statistic that the conservative doesn’t want to address or learn about because it will fly in the face of a fear or ignorance based belief.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    17 months ago

                    This is probably not the point you intended, but I basically read that as Conservatives are against growth, personal or otherwise.

                    Which is just sad. That sounds like an unrewarding life. I doubt they want my pity but they kind of already have it when I look past the hatred and think about how they’ve been swindled.

          • FlashMobOfOne
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            17 months ago

            I’d like to believe that. Social Media did a great job of reprogramming people.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              27 months ago

              Media did a great job before that, and humans tend to get conservative as they age, so I think there’s a lot of factors working together to make people more cynical than they ought to be.

    • @Mango
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      47 months ago

      It’s real and I’m here. Pls save me.