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[ask_alexa]

"Hi, this is Dominique DiPierro. Leave a message."

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[ninefox]

Jedao knocks on her door a few minutes later, holding his onion-dome collapsible tea set by its golden ring in his other hand.

[ask_alexa]

Dom opens the door with a cheerful smile.

"Hey there. Nice to meet you. C'mon on."

Her cabin is her New York apartment—small, cramped, slightly shabby. It's a stretch to say that it even has more than one room—there's a sort of living/dining/kitchen zone with a sink and a suggestion of a counter, a couch, a small table shoved against the wall with two chairs. Her bedroom is plainly visible, with the bathroom just adjacent. Everything is clean and neat; there's just a sense that the whole place is about two-thirds of what it ought to be to accommodate Dom and her things.

"It's nothing fancy," she says. "But make yourself at home."

[ninefox]

Jedao is used to shipboard accommodations, so the smallness attracts less of his notice than some of the ways the space is less efficiently used. He takes one of the chairs, and starts unfolding the tea set on the little table. He hands her the teapot, black glossy ceramic enameled with golden chrysanthemum buds.

"Thank you. Can you put water in here?"

[ask_alexa]

"Sure thing." Since he'd mentioned tea, Dom had already turned on her electric kettle, and it's steaming away now. She takes the teapot, pours and discards a splash of water to warm it first, then fills it and brings it back to Jedao.

[ninefox]

He sets it to steeping, then unpacks more of the set, saucers and cups and little dashers for milk and sugar shaped like half-hatched eggs, the beaks poking out for spouts.

"You know, one of the very first things I did here was ask people about prisons. I mostly got 101 level countercultural scoffing, and I still don't understand."

[ask_alexa]

"What don't you understand?" Dom asks, but before he answers she holds up a wait a sec finger. "Caveat—any answer I give you is going to be flavored by the fact that I'm American and our prison system is deeply fucked and arguably just slavery under a different name in a lot of ways."

[ninefox]

"Well. That makes more sense than I thought, anyway."

He props his chin in his hand. "I understand killing people. I understand reconditioning their behavior. I don't understand putting them in boxes and not doing anything with them. But slavery is something. Why another name?"

[ask_alexa]

Dom sits down across from him and sighs heavily.

"Because technically slavery is illegal. Has been since the 1860s—a century and a half ago, that is. But what happens now is, a lot of prisons are privately run, and the people incarcerated there are given menial jobs to do and paid pennies for it. And the owners of the prison pocket the profits of whatever gets made.

"There are prisons in other countries that are truly rehabilitative—like, they have programs to counsel and educate offenders with the goal of eventually releasing them into society again if they're not completely un-salvageable. But the US is not good at that."

[ninefox]

"And they don't make it legal again because...?" he asks, as though this were the obvious next step. Then he clucks his tongue, and preempts her answer. "Or is it more profitable with the need to maintain appearances artificially constricting the market?"

[ask_alexa]

"General worldwide opinion these days is that slavery, per se, is bad," Dom says dryly. "I mean—it objectively is, of course, and so when you call it by the name, it's illegal. And we as a society like to pat ourselves on the back for having figured that out, and fought a war over it, with the anti-slavery side winning. But you nailed it there with the thing about profitability, and as long as it can be dressed up as 'rehabilitation' or 'punishment', most people are willing—or at least able—to shrug and look away. And as long as people get put away for bullshit offenses, there's never a shortage of people to keep the system running."

A rueful look.

"I don't often get to air my opinions about mass incarceration in my day job, so forgive me if I get a little vehement. Or sarcastic. It's that or start screaming, sometimes."

[ninefox]

"I knew lawyers were the same everywhere," he mutters triumphantly. No shortage indeed.

"Talk to me about the dressing."

[ask_alexa]

The lawyers comment gets a short, humorless laugh.

"Well, an example. Stamping out car license plates—um, in case you don't know, metal plates stuck on the back of a car that show where the car is registered and identify it as such. Indisputably menial work. Potentially dangerous, since you're working with sheets of metal and the tools to shape and cut them. If you call that work 'rehabilitation', then you can say you're teaching the prisoners a trade, so when they're freed they can get a job as ..." She shrugs extravagantly. "Well, as what, that's their problem once they get out. If you call it 'punishment', then you say they're stuck doing repetitive labor because they did a bad thing, and this is how they pay their debt to society. Realistically? It's neither. There's no useful skills learned, and it's hardly an effective deterrent. But it's a grimy little job that has to be done, so why not do it on the cheap with incarcerated felons as labor."

[ninefox]

Jedao drums his fingers on the little table, frowning slightly. Debt. It doesn't - align.

"If the excuse is reparations, why call it punishment? Or do you have uses for pain that nobody admits?"

[ask_alexa]

Dom exhales as if she's just been hit in the chest.

"Jesus, you're sharp," she says. Reminds her, in ways different to Peter, of Minister Zhang. "Well, one thing I think is that—okay, you get a guy in on some stupid petty theft or drug charge. He spends a year doing bullshit work. Gets out, can't find a job because he's a felon. He's got a buddy that can find him work knocking over a bodega. He does it, gets caught, and boom, he's back, doing the bullshit work. You keep these guys beaten down, never give them a real chance ... and there's your unofficial slave labor force. And eventually he'll do something stupid and either get murdered or kill someone and get executed, or he'll just overdose or have an accident. And none of that works without the pain."

[ninefox]

"Ah. The noose," he remarks, in a tone that might as well be, 'Ah, of course.'

"Thank you. That's very illuminating."

[ask_alexa]

"Is it? It's all pretty grim, I don't deny it." She smiles wryly. "I wasn't planning on starting off your education with a rundown on the prison system. What else do you want to know?"

[text]

[routemistress]

permission to give your inmate throwing knives for xmas please

Re: [text]

[ask_alexa]

Permission granted. I think he'll be responsible.

Re: [text]

[routemistress]

at least not any less than he would be without them, anyway.

also, fabulous. thank you <3 <3