Why don&#39;t prisoners go through rigorous life transforming training in prisons? A prisoner can be forced to learn and train on what they are naturally/ philosophically opposed to. For instance, in general, prisoners can be taught army-style discipline training, and forced to study, and sit for exams/tests. if someone is jailed for breaking some kind of law, he can be forced to study law books and pass the law test. and so on...
The purposes of criminal justice include (this list is based on the Sentencing Act 1991 in Victoria): Deterrence Rehabilitation of offenders Denunciation ('this behaviour is wrong') (Retribution can also be a purpose.) What the question is talking about is rehabilitation. As discussed in the book 'Starship Troopers', you can't expect a person to improve their behaviour if they are not shown how. Some simple examples in practice include violent offenders being sent to anger management classes, or bad drivers being sentenced to remedial training. Why aren't all offenders put into rehabilitation programs? Some reasons include: Cost. It would be very expensive to offer all the rehabilitation which would help all offenders. Often this kind of thing is court-ordered, so if the judge does not know about relevant programs or does not assess the offender's needs correctly, then the offender will not be sent to them. The offender is unwilling to participate in programs that are available, and there are limits to how much coercion a given society is comfortable applying. There is no 'one size fits all' rehabilitation. Some people need to talk about what makes them use drugs, others need to talk through their childhood issues, others need training so they can get a job and not fall back into bad habits when they are released from prison. Perhaps North Korea has a great curriculum for putting lots of people in a camp and they come out model citizens, but I'm not aware of the details. Can a person really be forced to do anything? Even the army can't do that. The army might put you in prison, but that's redundant for a person who is already a prisoner. You can always threaten to kill them, I suppose, whip them, or brainwash them with electrodes perhaps, but that depends on your principles as a society. I think it's fair to say that, these days, the trend is towards what the question suggests, which is putting as many offenders as possible into rehabilitation. In 2014 it was reported that Texas took the money it would have spent on building a new prison and used it on rehabilitation instead, and there were suggestions that that worked well.
It depends on where you live, but &quot;restrain&quot; doesn't mean telling a person that they have to stay put, it implies either a physical blockage (locking the door) or a threat of force, and neither of those are present or suggested by the sign. We don't know what the consequences are, for example they might report you to your parents or even restrain you if you are a minor (that's who is in most &quot;gym classes&quot;). If you are an adult, the consequence could be some contractual sanction (read the contract) or termination of the contract for breach (read the contract). You can simply ask a supervisor how they intend to enforce this restriction.
A judge can only impose sentences as prescribed by law. Suppose, as a random example, that a person is convicted in federal court of fraudulently mutilating coins, in violation of 18 USC 331. That section of the statute states the punishment for such a violation: ...Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. The scale of fines is to be found at 18 USC 3571; for this crime, which is a felony, the maximum fine would be $250,000 (with certain exceptions, which let us suppose do not apply here). So in principle, the judge may sentence the offender to any of the following: Five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 Five years in prison and no fine Three days in prison and a fine of $6.25 No prison and a fine of $5000 You get the idea. (In practice, the judge is likely to follow official sentencing guidelines, but is not legally required to do so.) But the judge may not sentence the offender to any of the following, because the statute does not authorize it: Death A fine of $250,000.01 Five years and one day in prison Wearing a silly hat for a week Slavery I do not know of any federal criminal statute authorizing slavery as a punishment for any crime, so therefore, a federal judge cannot impose this sentence. Congress could in principle create such a law, and if they did it would not violate the Thirteenth Amendment, but they have not done so. (The Eighth Amendment might be a separate question, as slavery might very well be considered a cruel and unusual punishment by today's courts. And as you point out, such a law might also be in violation of treaty obligations.) (I assume here that &quot;slavery&quot; is understood to be something distinct from &quot;imprisonment&quot;, although I know some would disagree.)
First, as Mark Johnson said. Second, the job of police and prosecutors is not to put people into jail, their job is to put guilty people into jail. If you go to the police and tell them that you beat up a person, then before they investigate, they know that either you are guilty of assault, or you mistakenly believe that you are guilty of assault, or you are a phantasist who enjoys confessing non-existing crimes to the police. The police will either investigate which one it is, and may prosecute you either for assault or for wasting police time, or they may decide based on your behaviour that there was never any assault and not investigate further. I suspect they will at least question you about details of the claimed assault, to decide whether the crime is real or not.
School districts / states do generally have the power to set the curriculum including the viewpoint that will be officially conveyed. One well-known major restriction on such viewpoint restrictions is that the schools cannot restrict the free exercise of a religion, and cannot take a position on a religion. Apart from the religion third-rail, schools have pretty free reign in setting the curriculum, see Evans-Marshall v. Tipp City for one instantiation. In this case, the teacher assigned various books, including Heather Has Two Mommies, one of the books that prompted an outcry. The upshot of that case is that a teacher cannot invoke the First Amendment to override policy. This article (draft version, easier to handle) (published version, annoying footnote structure) reviews the topic, and section III covers prior cases. It notes that the cases of Lawrence, Windsor, Obergefell do not address the constitutionality of these education laws, though the reasoning in the prior cases might be applicable if there were a suit over curriculum. There is an implication that some of these rules have been enforced in the past, but most of the evidence is in the form of news stories (Beall v. London City School BOE is not available in the open). The article does engage in a somewhat deeper study of enforcement in Utah, where it was enforced (until it was repealed). Enforcement is necessarily indirect. The law require school districts to have a particular curriculum; violation would come when an individual teacher taught contrary to the prescribed curriculum. Those laws do not contain any provision like "a teacher who violates these rules gets fired", instead, punishment is via the general rule that you have to teach what is in the state-mandated curriculum. Rather than officially terminating a teacher for violating this curricular guideline, districts use vague reasons for non-renewal such as "due to problems with communication and teamwork" (from Evans-Marshall).
In British colonies and their successors It is hard to prove a negative, but in the British colonies and their successors, I believe that the answer was probably no. Indentured servitude came close to the concept of selling oneself into slavery, although for a fixed term of years. The 13th Amendment recognizes the possibility that slavery or involuntary servitude could be a punishment for a criminal offense, although I've heard of only a few instances in which permanent slavery was actually a punishment for a criminal offense (see, e.g., one case from 1659 in what is now New Mexico but then was part of Old Mexico, mentioned below). On the other hand, the equivalent of indentured servitude, which was sometimes called slavery, was imposed with some regularity, most often for offenders with African descent, prior to the adoption of the 13th Amendment and into the post-Civil War era, was more often a punishment. And indentured servitude remained a not uncommon punishment and continues to be used, for example, with sentences of hard labor being common in military justice, mandatory prison labor (especially "chain gangs"), and sentences of useful community service being common in civilian criminal courts, all constituting indentured servitude to some extent. Both voluntary military service and military conscription are also forms of indentured servitude in economic substance and in their legal effect, but these forms of commitments to involuntary military service are not treated as indentured servitude for purposes of the 13th Amendment. N.B. In this answer I use the term indentured servitude to refer to involuntary service and labor for a fixed period of time, rather than for life, whether this entered into as a voluntary contract or as an involuntary punishment. But, historically, people who I define as indentured servants for the purposes of this answer (especially if this service was imposed as punishment for a crime and the individuals so sentenced were of African or Native American descent(, were often referred to as slaves. The term indentured servant was sometimes limited to voluntarily entered into arrangements, with the term slavery sometimes used for both short term and permanent involuntary labor not entered into voluntarily (in a manner similar to the use of the term mortgage to specify a voluntary security interest in property and the term lien to specify an involuntarily created security interest in property, although this semantic convention is also inconsistent). But, the historical usage is not very consistent anyway, and I understand the word slavery as it is used in the question to be limited to permanent involuntary servitude, rather than temporary involuntary servitude, so I use only a restricted sense of the word slavery in this answer, consistent with the way the word is used in the question. I've also never heard of even a single instance of someone selling themselves into slavery in the U.S., despite being a fairly avid history buff who minored in history in college. Another piece of circumstantial evidence that argues against the existence of a mechanism for selling yourself into slavery is the fact that the U.S. Constitution, all the way back in 1789, already provided for, as a basic function of government, for bankruptcy, and the institution of bankruptcy was one with British law antecedents going back to 1705 (which has a quasi-criminal character but mostly the same effect) that existed in the American colonies as well. Likewise, the U.S. Constitution also prohibited punishments involving a "corruption of blood" which held descendants responsible for the acts of their ancestors even if those acts amounted to treason. U.S. Constitution, Art. III, Sec. 3, ¶ 2. Self-enslavement for "honor" is very akin to a feudal oath of fealty, which was strongly rejected as part of the Independence movement of the United States including language in the 1789 U.S. Constitution, and it was also an institution that never had much currency in the Americas because many of the early colonies were of a corporate or religious nature, rather than an aristocratic one, unlike many early Spanish colonies. These historical circumstances eliminated the main circumstances motivating historical examples of an institution of submitting oneself to slavery. Another historical fact that strongly argues against there being an institution of selling oneself in slavery was the strongly racialized nature of slavery in British colonies and their successors. Indentured servitude was for white people, slavery was for black people, and there really wasn't much of a cultural or conceptual need for mix up these two models. Doing so would have undermined a cultural axiom of racial supremacy which was important to sustaining slavery as an institution in the United States. This may also be a reason that there was not a strong institution of enslaving either European descent or Native American prisoners of war in North America, even though some Native Americans were enslaved on a more ad hoc basis by people of European descent. If I recall correctly, early attempts to enslave Native Americans were also not very successful as an economic proposition for the would be slavers, for whatever reasons, further racializing slavery as an institution in North America largely limited to people of African descent. The discussion at the link above illustrates the parameters of the situation: When Europeans arrived as colonists in North America, Native Americans changed their practice of slavery dramatically. Native Americans began selling war captives to Europeans rather than integrating them into their own societies as they had done before. As the demand for labor in the West Indies grew with the cultivation of sugar cane, Europeans enslaved Native Americans for the Thirteen Colonies, and some were exported to the "sugar islands." The British settlers, especially those in the southern colonies, purchased or captured Native Americans to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. Accurate records of the numbers enslaved do not exist. Scholars estimate tens of thousands of Native Americans may have been enslaved by the Europeans, being sold by Native Americans themselves or European men. Slaves became a caste of people who were foreign to the English (Native Americans, Africans and their descendants) and non-Christians. The Virginia General Assembly defined some terms of slavery in 1705: All servants imported and brought into the Country ... who were not Christians in their native Country ... shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion ... shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master ... correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction ... the master shall be free of all punishment ... as if such accident never happened. — Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705. The slave trade of Native Americans lasted only until around 1730. It gave rise to a series of devastating wars among the tribes, including the Yamasee War. The Indian Wars of the early 18th century, combined with the increasing importation of African slaves, effectively ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Colonists found that Native American slaves could easily escape, as they knew the country. The wars cost the lives of numerous colonial slave traders and disrupted their early societies. The remaining Native American groups banded together to face the Europeans from a position of strength. Many surviving Native American peoples of the southeast strengthened their loose coalitions of language groups and joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection. Native American women were at risk for rape whether they were enslaved or not; during the early colonial years, settlers were disproportionately male. They turned to Native women for sexual relationships. Both Native American and African enslaved women suffered rape and sexual harassment by male slaveholders and other white men. The exact number of Native Americans who were enslaved is unknown because vital statistics and census reports were at best infrequent. Andrés Reséndez estimates that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico. Linford Fisher's estimates 2.5 million to 5.5 million Natives enslaved in the entire Americas. Even though records became more reliable in the later colonial period, Native American slaves received little to no mention, or they were classed with African slaves with no distinction. For example, in the case of "Sarah Chauqum of Rhode Island", her master listed her as mulatto in the bill of sale to Edward Robinson, but she won her freedom by asserting her Narragansett identity. Little is known about Native Americans that were forced into labor. Two myths have complicated the history of Native American slavery: that Native Americans were undesirable as servants, and that Native Americans were exterminated or pushed out after King Philip's War. The precise legal status for some Native Americans is at times difficult to establish, as involuntary servitude and slavery were poorly defined in 17th-century British America. Some masters asserted ownership over the children of Native American servants, seeking to turn them into slaves. The historical uniqueness of slavery in America is that European settlers drew a rigid line between insiders, "people like themselves who could never be enslaved", and nonwhite outsiders, "mostly Africans and Native Americans who could be enslaved". A unique feature between natives and colonists was that colonists gradually asserted sovereignty over the native inhabitants during the seventeenth century, ironically transforming them into subjects with collective rights and privileges that Africans could not enjoy. The West Indies developed as plantation societies prior to the Chesapeake Bay region and had a demand for labor. In the Spanish colonies, the church assigned Spanish surnames to Native Americans and recorded them as servants rather than slaves. Many members of Native American tribes in the Western United States were taken for life as slaves. In some cases, courts served as conduits for enslavement of Indians, as evidenced by the enslavement of the Hopi man Juan Suñi in 1659 by a court in Santa Fe for theft of food and trinkets from the governor's mansion. In the East, Native Americans were recorded as slaves. The colonial legislation from Virginia from 1705 quoted above, in particular, argues that Europeans could not generally be enslaved in Virginia, although the distinction was formally religious rather than racial. But, the religious aspect also had a caveat omitted in the quote from the 1705 CE legislation from Virginia above that muddy the waters of religious v. racial or national origin discrimination: all servants imported and brought into the Country... who were not christians in their native country, (except... Turks and Moors in amity with her majesty, and others that can make due proof of their being free in England, or any other christian country, before they were shipped...) shall be accounted and be slaves, and such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to christianity afterward. Thus, Jews and Muslims and deists (true atheism as opposed to deism from very rare in the Enlightenment era and only became common after Darwin) who were were free "in England, or in any other christian country, before they were shipped" were still not considered slaves in Virginia in 1705 CE. And for that purpose free simply meant, not a slave. Thus, Jews from England were considered free in England, even though they did not have full citizenship rights and were subject to de jure discrimination there from 1655 CE when they first returned to England after Jews were expelled from England in 1290 CE (in connection with the religious movements associated with the Crusades), through at least 1829 CE. Most people in Africa during the colonial era in North America, who were Christians, were Ethiopians or Egyptians, neither of whom were a major source of New World slaves. Also not unrelated is the fact that early attempts to use indentured servants and hired farm hands of European descent in the American Southeast were not very successful because the mortality and disease rates of these servants, especially due to mosquito born diseases to which they had little natural immunity, was so significantly greater than that of African descent slaves who had some natural immunity to these diseases, making white slavery an economically unattractive institution to establish. Periodic rounds of "moral panic" related to the nebulous and often not very well grounded fear of white slavery that has recurred throughout U.S. history at regular intervals also argues for the racialized nature of the institution in the U.S. and its predecessor British colonies. In sum, there is very good reason to believe that it was never possible to sell oneself into slavery in the United States or in the British colonies that preceded it, even though it is hard to prove that point definitively. was legally enslaving a free, willing US resident or immigrant legally impossible by any means or was this simply something that was not done for social or practical reasons? I do not believe that this was expressly provided for by statute, but most law at the time was common law rooted in British case law anyway, which makes distinguishing between something that was "legally impossible" and something "that was not done for social or practical reasons" harder to distinguish in common law jurisdictions than in civil law jurisdictions based upon continental Europe. Colonies of Civil Law Countries I am less confident of the status of this possibility in the case of Dutch or Spanish or French colonies in North America. I know from historical accounts of French North America that slavery, while it existed, was much less racialized with a significant community of free people of color. And, all three of those countries had legal systems with their roots in Roman law that was "received" by these countries in the early modern era basically when political leaders as the Middle Ages started to fade away, started to use Roman legal treatises to justify their resolutions of disputes without formally adopting this as a positive source of law (the Netherlands is a bit more muddled as it was also a major participant in the home grown institution called the "law merchant" devised by merchants serving as arbitrators, especially in disputes between merchants, some of which ended up influencing British common law). Anyway, in these countries, Roman legal sources that recognized the concept of selling yourself into slavery would have been available and could have been considered good law. Also, because these countries, especially Spain and France, had much less of a vibrant commercial tradition in the early modern period, it is quite likely that the institution of bankruptcy that developed comparatively early in Britain came later there, potentially necessitating a way to settle debts that could not be discharged and which might otherwise burden descendants (many places in continental Europe had descendants liable for the debts of their ancestors into the early modern period). So, if it were ever possible to sell oneself into slavery at all in North American history, in what ultimately became the United States, it probably happened in French North America, former Spanish colonies, or in Dutch Manhattan, with the first two probably much more likely to have occurred than the last one. Even there, however, I cannot think of a single historical or literary account that recognizes even one example of such a transition in personal status. A short account of French slavery law also provides no precedent for anything remotely similar to this practice. This is particularly notable since the French apparently largely borrowed from Dutch and Spanish practice. In Pre-Colonial America The possibility of selling oneself into slavery did exist in the legal and cultural circumstances of some Native American tribes in North America, where the institution was less like the chattel slavery of the early English slave traders. As explained at the link above: Many Native American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America. Native American groups often enslaved war captives whom they primarily used for small-scale labor. Others however would stake themselves in gambling situations when they had nothing else which would put them into servitude for a short time in some cases for life; captives were also sometimes tortured as part of religious rites, and these sometimes involved ritual cannibalism. During times of famine some Native Americans would also temporarily sell their children to obtain food... Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment. Various tribes also practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; full tribal status would be restored as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society. Obtaining prisoners was also a strong interest for Native American warriors as for the qualification of being considered brave this was especially an interest of male warriors in various tribes. Other slave-owning tribes of North America included Comanche of Texas, the Creek of Georgia; the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, who lived in Northern California; the Pawnee, and the Klamath. Self-enslavement seems to go hand in hand with slavery not having a strong racial component.
In the US, police do not put a person under house arrest, instead, the courts do, as an alternative to standard imprisonment (either awaiting trial, or serving their sentence). The police are not involved at all; the courts cannot be sued for lenient sentencing. If a person leaves their house (even to buy a bottle of milk), they will have violated the terms of their more lenient sentence, and will be arrested and sent to regular jail. Generally, police are not liable for damages, especially when they fail to be omnipotent in their efforts to prevent others from doing wrong.
There is a potentially infinite regress of questions regarding the constitutionality of restrictions imposed under these "emergency" circumstances. The basic legal principle is clearly established: laws restricting fundamental rights are subject to strict scrutiny. The specific details of a particular law and surrounding circumstances have yet to be discovered by the courts. If it is necessary to the purpose of saving lives that meetings of more than 10 people be prohibited, then the "compelling interest" test probably has been satisfied. That is basically a medical question, and the courts have a limited interest in scientific controversies, instead they are interested in whether people who make legal decisions do so rationally (is it reasonable to think that such limits would accomplish that compelling government end). Is it reasonable to think that restrictions lasting two months are necessary? The Black Death lasted at least 4 years. In the current circumstances (very limited hard knowledge this disease), it's hard to say what government actions could not be excused based on necessity. Summary execution is, at least in the current knowledge context, probably not going to pass strict scrutiny. As already explained in other thread on the topic, there is no "churches are above the law" constitutional provision. The appropriate question in the Florida case is not about the First Amendment, it is about the Due Process clauses – is the arrest lawful? We will, no doubt, see. On the face of it, he violated the law, so he can be arrested. I understand that there is a team poking holes in the order.