Inmates forced to farm gold online in Chinese prisons

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/05/26/chinese-inmates-forced-to-farm-gold-online/

by arb99 • 15 years ago

118 73 15 years ago

thenextweb.com

ignifero• 15 years ago

I m trying to imagine a serial killer killing goblins... That's why it's torture.

ck24• 15 years ago

How about the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the US forced to work for pennies per hour?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl...

If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc.

Makes many millions in profit for the states and federal government, even some judges own stock.

Ironically it's the only labor in the US that can compete with offshoring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Amer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/prisoners-help-build...

http://articles.cnn.com/1999-11-06/us/9911_06_prison.labor_1...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml

teyc2• 15 years ago

So true. In US, it is the chain gang.

ck24• 15 years ago

Actually, Arizona still has real chain gangs and other states had them as recently as the mid-90's.

tseabrooks• 15 years ago

Seriously? We should give a damn about this? You've got to be kidding me. Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S.

Is your complaint that you think people are being incarcerated when they've committed no crimes in order to have cheap labor? I find this notion pretty ridiculous considering you need a trial and jurors to convict someone.

Is your complaint that you think the laws are being created to specifically target people so that they can be incarcerated? In that case stop whining about it and stop voting for the people making these laws.

But I digress, you are right.. It's disgusting that the federal government makes any money on the people they pay to care for whom society has deemed should be incarcerated.

ck24• 15 years ago

At some point in this decade they will hit 1 out of every 100 people are in prison in the US.

If you don't think there is something seriously wrong with that percentage and how two decades ago it was a fraction of that number, then you are far too trusting, isolated or innocent to the world.

Felony laws and prison sentences are made much harsher based on heavy lobbying.

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S.

Yes, which goes directly to private companies that profit off it, creating an economic incentive to arrest as many people as possible and sentence them for as long as possible -- and to eschew any potential course of action that would reduce the number of criminals, such as rehabilitation.

The US prison system is basically designed from the ground up to turn ordinary citizens arrested for minor infractions into hardened criminals. This is why we have more people in prison per-capita than any other country in the world.

moo• 15 years ago

This judge was convicted of jailing youths for kickback money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

There are Hacker News threads that discuss the hundreds of DNA exonerations in the U.S. This hints at the huge problem of lying and frame-ups by the police and judicial system.

Juries are instructed to give a verdict on guilt or innocence not decide on sentencing.

The U.S. has the highest per capita prison population in the world. It is big business.

Kind of a waste of time to fall back on voting when there are so many reactionaries like yourself.

datapimp• 15 years ago

See: mandatory sentence laws. Convictions didn't yield prison time before them at the same rate they do after.

rdtsc3• 15 years ago

> If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc.

Very interesting, I did not know about that aspect and in the back of my mind always wondered why do all these prisoners even work when it pays that little. Why not just do nothing?

Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do, be a part of something, but I guess a system that punishes the slaves (erm...I mean prisoners...) for not working is obviously a lot more effective.

ugh4• 15 years ago

You’ve got that slavery part right. Here is the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “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.”

This led, for example, courts to conclude that prisoners have no right to be payed minimum wage. (I honestly don’t really know what to think about that. I’m not sure whether I have a problem with that.)

M1573RMU74710N• 15 years ago

>Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do,

That's definitely part of it too. I hear (and I would guess everyone can imagine) that prison is excruciatingly boring. So having something to do can help a lot, also working a job can be part vocational training for when one get's out of prison.

Another factor is that when you're in prison, the littlest things become of utmost importance. Life or death (literally) battles are fought over Twinkies and Doritos...so if you have a chance to earn a little money to get yourself some cigarettes or cup o' noodles it's very tempting to take it.

That's the "carrot" that accompanies the "stick".

hugh38• 15 years ago

Is anyone else tired of the fact that on the internet you can't say "Hey, look at this sucky thing in Random Country X" without having someone pipe up and say "Yeah, but what about this vaguely-similar thing in the USA? Huh? Huh?"

Mz4• 15 years ago

An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.

ez774• 15 years ago

How are the Chinese and American situations vaguely similar? Just because one involves computers and the other doesn't? If these counterexamples are not made up, what would it take for you to go from being tired to seriously revising your beliefs on the US system?

ck24• 15 years ago

The difference between many of the corruptions in China vs the USA is that in the USA it's legalized corruption with lobbies that pay congresspeople, legally. So the corruption is out in the open, the average person just doesn't have a chance in hell of changing anything.

In China the corruption is actually illegal but hidden and therefore the abuses even worse because thy are undocumented and unprovable without great sacrifice to somehow prove what happened (and then they will still get away with it).

Forced prison labor is somehow perceived as "okay" in the USA because it's documented and in the light and some people can say "OH THE PRISONERS DESERVE IT, THEY SHOULD PAY US".

In China the same people say its not okay because it's not documented and the cannot feel good about why the people may be in prison (in the USA apparently all people in prison are very guilty of moral laws, regardless if the law is just or not, because there was possibly a "jury").

But the USA has political prisoners too - on the mild side for example, not paying your taxes - isn't that political after they have taken all your assets to pay the debt? Should Wesley Snipes be forced to work for 23 cents per hour now? What about if you are arrested at the DNC or RNC for protesting and the patriot act or similar is thrown at you and you have to serve in prison for year? Is it okay for that person to be forced to work for 23 cents per hour? Aren't they a political prisoner?

hessenwolf2• 15 years ago

Meh. Worse ways to be tortured.

code_duck• 15 years ago

Of course, but incarceration is supposed to be the punishment itself, not extra abuse from the guards. The article does note "the inmates were kept playing until they could barely see things and missing the daily quota would result in physical punishment and abuse."

hessenwolf2• 15 years ago

True. I am just being somewhat defeatest with respect to the inevitability of torture in such a jail. I'd rather be farming gold until my ass hurt than some alternatives.

flexd• 15 years ago

Grinding for gold all day but you never get to keep any of it? That is pure torture. Not only do they force you to play that game for so long all day but they also take away the only 'reward' you get for playing. I would go crazy for sure.

kennu• 15 years ago

But you could still grind rep!

dstein• 15 years ago

I would've thought something like Mechanical Turk would be more valuable. Mining WoW gold sounds like something that could be fuuly automated. Why not have them do things that require human insight instead?

VladRussian• 15 years ago

Stalin invented it before you :) The main problem with your idea is that people capable of valuable insight are notoriously rare in the prison population. Stalin though was able to work such problem around. Google for Soviet Union "sharashka", in particular "sharashka Korolev USSR space program" :)

rmc• 15 years ago

Blizzard (the company that owns & operates WoW) doesn't want people to automatically do gold mining, so they try to stop it. A lot of 'gold mining' is "move you character around, click on this pig 10 times to kill it, collect the little bit of money/goods it drops". In order to automate it well you'd have to solve a lot of computer vision problems. Probably cheaper to just use cheap labour.

duck• 15 years ago

In this case it would be free labor.

kahawe• 15 years ago

From my own experience with gold farmers, they have gotten much smarter and efficient which at the same time means it is much harder to automate than the regular WoW "farm bots" that will run around and kill pigs. Also, blizzard actively monitors your PC with the infamous "Warden" cheat prevention.

Back in the "Burning Crusade" days I got an in game whisper (message) with an obvious spam for Chinese gold. I whipped out google and found a few phrases in Chinese and began chatting back, asking where they are from, how are they doing etc.

Sure enough after a couple of tries, they would reply and tell me they were from Wuhan, I believe. Next they invited me into their group, told me to come with them.

They were two Frost Mages and went into the "Underbog" dungeon and proceded to clear the first room with nothing but "Frost Nova", "Blizzard" and "Arcane Explosion" spells - so they kept an absolutely deadly group of 6 hostiles completely immobilized and killed them more or less slowly with "area of effect" spells. But ultimately it yielded them a better result than killing regular monsters would have.

It was absolutely hilarious to watch and help them and it is a very fond memory of an otherwise actually quite boring and repetitive, non-extraordinary game.

And my point being: with blizzard constantly working on making it harder for the gold farmers, they have to constantly come up with new tricks; with the introduction of the "diminishing returns" on root effects, this would not have worked anymore, for example.

arctangent• 15 years ago

In the 22nd century, when everyone has supercomputers embedded in their heads, prisoners will be forced to mine bitcoins...

hornokplease• 15 years ago

Original story discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586469

riobard• 15 years ago

Somehow I was thinking about those game-addicted kids…

olalonde• 15 years ago

I bet my little cousin would turn himself in! :)

joshu• 15 years ago

Well, that's it. I no longer have to read science fiction.

cliq• 15 years ago

"A former prison guard turned inmate"

wait what.

hugh38• 15 years ago

What's the problem? A dude was a prison guard. Then he (presumably) committed a crime. Now he's an inmate.

Jd• 15 years ago

Original article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-...

DougWebb• 15 years ago

About $800 for 300 inmates playing 12 hours each? That's about $0.25/hr for each of them. Is gold farming in these games really that unproductive? Who would do that voluntarily?

nicpottier• 15 years ago

Lots of places have daily incomes below $2 a day.

That said, there isn't a huge overlap between those places and cheap electricity, internet and computers.

But I guess China is one of them..

Inmates forced to farm gold online in Chinese prisons

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