Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/06/victorian-crank-machine-a-soul-crushing-gadget-designed-to-break-prison-inmates.html
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Reboing! /s
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Modern times all they would need to do is add in the reality show elements and you essentially have this:
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We have machines to do this now
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Being a bit of a Victorian crank myself, I am horrified at the prospect of a machine that makes more of me.
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So that’s why Brendan Behan called the prison guards screws in Borstal Boy. Now I get it.
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… more sources seem to say it’s just from earlier prison slang for cell keys
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expected to complete a 10,000-14,000 revolutions per day on the crank, often working late into the night by candlelight if they fell behind quota.
Lugubriously wonder if there was some sort of Victorian mechanical counter attached? Since one doubts they’d take the prisoner’s word for it. (…torture meets fitbit™)
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Don’t tell the republicans. They’ll want to implement it in FL, TX, LA, etc.
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Minimum wage in prison is lower than that.
“In the US, the average daily minimum wage for non-industry penal jobs was US$0.86 in 2017” – Wikipedia
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More on prison labor:
IK-2 is called a “labor camp” for a reason. Griner and her cell-neighbors worked “10-, 12-, or 15-hour days, around the clock,” she writes, in a sweatshop-like chamber with no ventilation or heat and no bathroom breaks beyond short mealtimes. Her job was cutting fabric and sewing buttons for Russian military uniforms with fellow inmates—a quota of 500 uniforms a day. For the towering Griner leaning over a low table, the labor was not just punishing and exhausting but back-wrecking.
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They could’ve at least had prisoners roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again.
At least that teaches them something about Greek mythology.
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We should banish all the looms of Preston jails, and substitute nothing but the tread-wheel, or the capstan, or some species of labour where the labourer could not see the results of his toil, - where it was as monotonous, irksome, and dull as possible, - pulling and pushing instead of reading and writing, - no share of the profits - not a single shilling. There should be no tea and sugar, - no assemblage of female felons round the washing-tub, -nothing but beating hemp, and pulling oakum, and pounding bricks, - no work but what was tedious, unusual, and unfeminine.
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I have no doubt that the Tories already have plans to bring this back to UK prisons. It’s exactly their kind of thing.
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I guess they hadn’t discovered the power of random reinforcement, ala
where the poor dude had to fill out sweepstakes entries in hopes of winning his food.
Victorian Crank Machine, didn’t they open for Bowie once?
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