Posted by lafond 12/18/2025
I emailed government employees until I figured out who was responsible for license plate records. I submitted a CORA (Colorado Open Records Request) for the entirety of their dataset. I had hoped to get the data on some regular cadence to build a simple online service for others. Unfortunately, they flat out refused and wouldn't discuss options.
When I told my family what license plate I wanted, they laughed at me and said "No one has that, just go get it". And so I did and it worked. I now have what I consider to be the best possible license plate in Colorado: "LCNZPLT"
Occasionally I'll see someone walk by my car, see the plate, think for a few seconds and then start laughing. Mission accomplished!
LCNSPL8
They're not. Both are bad, but at least there's some utility to LLMs.
The attack it prevents is called XSRF, and this security measure wasn't novel in 2006.
I'm sorry, how is it "borderline" slave labour and not straight up forced labour? These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work, or what happens if they say no? It's quite literally known as "penal labour" and I thought most of the world figured out that we're not supposed to treat people like that anymore.
This is an incorrect assumption, at least in my state. It’s a job that they can apply for and opt in to do.
The debate is about their hourly wage.
There is a possibility of forced penal labor, as I understand it, but it’s mostly things like being forced to do cleaning duties, road cleanup, etc.
It's slavery. The South fought hard to include the "except as punishment for crime" clause in the 13th amendment. The US has never fully abolished slavery.
I don't think that's historically accurate. The 13th amendment was passed in the Senate on April 8, 1864 and HoR on January 31, 1865.
At the time, the senate and congressional seats from the 10 southern states were vacant.
So the only fighting the south was doing was in the civil war, which didn't end until May 26, 1865.
The text itself is identical to the text in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery (but allowed for the return of fugitive slaves) in what would later be Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.
> Fees for room and board—yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food—are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
Having a prison job often comes with deals of better behavior and a shorter sentence (!!!). When you're being told that just working for 2 dollars an hour might lower your sentence from 20 years to 15, do you really have a choice?
For example, in Georgia, prisoners often work outside of the prison for well below minimum wage in order to earn "good time". This means they might get more visits to their family. It also increases their chances of parole. However, the labor is coerced as well. Showing up late or not coming in results in in-prison punishments. So, many prisoners work in cotton fields or McDonald's on the promise of an easier life, while most of their wages are siphoned away and businesses get to pay very little.
"Behave a certain way and you will be imprisoned for less/no amount of time" is not slavery unless the law is slavery. The full term imprisonment is just, and being able to shorten it is a privilege.
This is a contested assumption. Prisons and penal systems in US as I understand it are for profit.
Even if you believe this, which I would describe as naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst, you have to understand that the parole is a carrot. It's not real.
Georgia has some of the lowest, if not the lowest, parole stats in the country. They almost never hand it out, even if you are a good little prisoner and work on the field picking cotton for a buck or so an hour. They don't actually want to help society, or prisoners. They just want to siphon money and labor from a population that they know has no options. It's opportunistic. These people are a plague on humanity, a virus of such low lows they must only prey on the most vulnerable. They are the pneumonia of American society.
Words mean things. Slavery is something that is not occurring here. Argue amongst yourselves about the ethics of underpaying for the work, but don't invoke the word slavery.
It’s slave labour, whether you like it or not.
Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
Just the fact that you have a case has ruined lives.
But it doesn't matter, really. Either we have rights as humans or we don't. Qualifying them erodes protections for us all.
Does it, though? One might prefer that over slave labor.
It’s not quite slave labor but it probably should be compensated better at the minimum.
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional. Although inmates are paid for their labor in most states, they usually receive less than $1 per hour. As of 2017, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs. Incarcerated individuals who are required to work typically receive minimal to no job training resulting in situations where their health and safety could potentially be compromised. Prison workers in the US are generally exempt from workers' rights and occupational safety protections, including when seriously injured or killed. Often times, inmates that are often overworked through penal labor do not receive any proper education or opportunities of "rehabilitation" to maximize profits off the cheap labor produced. Many incarcerated workers also struggle to purchase basic necessities as prices of goods continue to soar, meanwhile prison wages continue to stay the same. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.
Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
Most of these are true, but I would push back on the pay angle. If a person is in jail, they are a ward of the state and have no expenses at all. There is no sense in paying them a "living wage" because they don't have to live off it. In any case, most stereotypical prison jobs would not cover the cost of incarcerating the employee.
A common way this works these days in more progressive states is that prisoners who can hold down a remote job are allowed to keep their income, minus paying a tithe for their incarceration:
https://www.mainepublic.org/2025-08-29/in-maine-prisoners-ar...
> Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
Only about 10% of prisoners are in private prisons. The vast majority of them are in some kind of government prison. The US definitely puts too many people in prison, but that's for cultural reasons and not because of some nefarious plan to get cheap labor.
only the last sentence here is true.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
many prisoners receive a bill for their incarceration and will come out of prison with debt, even if they're working while in prison.
it varies prison to prison, but even basic toiletries may not be provided. the most commonly purchased items at commissary are food.
> The US definitely puts too many people in prison, but that's for cultural reasons and not because of some nefarious plan to get cheap labor.
the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery contains a single exception: prisoners.
the largest maximum security prison in the united states is a slave plantation, operated continuously since the 1830s. they still farm cotton.
Paying to stay in jail should be done on an availability of funds, like bonds are (mostly), else it costs the tax payers. The shell companies that operate these prisons shouldn’t be allowed to charge inmates per diems if they are receiving tax payers dollars for them.
People think it’s all murders and rapists when that’s only 5% of the population at most. Most are in there for petty crime, drug charges, 3 strike rules, administrative chains, or mental health issues.
Yet for 27¢/day, will pick cotton for a local textile.
This is true. I 100% agree with you that this is awful and should not be allowed.
> the largest maximum security prison in the united states is a slave plantation, operated continuously since the 1830s. they still farm cotton.
Fair, but only 12% of prisoners are even maximum security to begin with, and you don't end up there for slinging a little bit of pot.
On that note, I also think we send far too many people to jail and should rewrite the laws to fix that.
Point blank, the system is not meant to prevent or discourage crime, it's meant to enact torture for people we feel deserve it. Whether that helps our society does not matter at all - nobody cares if a rapist leaves prison just to rape again, so long as they are sufficiently punished for it. The punishment is more important than real, tangible outcomes, because ultimately we've built it so the punishment is what makes us feel good and safe.
Joking aside, read the 13th amendment https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ and pay close attention to the bit that reads, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the United States, involuntary labor, slavery, and locking someone in a cell are all equally not allowed. And all equally allowed - as punishment for crimes of which you have been convicted.
If you think that this is ripe for abuse, you'd be exactly right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing. We got rid of chattel slavery - and immediately accomplished the same effect with the black codes and convict leasing. As the name suggests, this was overwhelmingly directed at the same black people who had just theoretically been emancipated.
But if your case has not been officially lost, you can't be set to forced labor either.
(Of course our BS system in many places still charges exonerees after the fact despite the fact that it was a wrongful conviction.)
This happened in Oregon to my kind of brother in law. (Married to half sister of my half siblings - what do you call that?)
He's Native American, so the local police thought that they could target him with a BS charge. They lost. The private jail that he'd been kept in, now that they weren't getting paid by the state, sued him for the cost of keeping him. Incidentally the counter sheriff is on the board of directors for the private prison in question.
Can you spell conflict of interest? Of course you can! Can you spell corruption? That too, wow!
Can anyone do a danged thing about it? Of course not! As long as they are only targeting people that nobody likes, like Native Americans, their victims won't get the time of day in our wonderful United States of America.
(I really wish I was making this up.)
The Grand Ronde reservation is in rural Oregon, mostly in Polk County. This is where the event that I referenced took place. It is very strongly conservative, with a long racist history.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
2. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L8oj3-vdJ-8
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2023/05/16/giulian...
I knew one guy who was doing a 30 day jail sentence for some misdemeanor and was told they would reduce it to 14 days if he worked in the kitchen. He took the job and lost most of his thumb in a very unsafe meat slicer. This put his 17 year career with UPS in jeopardy since the nerve damage made it hard for him to handle things.
I'm far older than 9 now, and the tip of my left thumb still gets very cold in the winter and if I directly bump it into something, it hurts a whole heck of a lot.
Rant is because while that moment sucked pretty hard (I immediately put my thumb in my mouth, eating the bit of thumb apparently..) it didn't take very long for me to realize that any lower and it would have certainly been a life changing event.
Bad aim, but in the best way possible.
I can only imagine the difference. Has to be harsh.
Well you’re making the assumption that prisoners are forced to do this work rather than opting to in order to make a little money for snacks and/or make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board.
Plus you don't really have choice in the labor you perform, no choice in where you perform it, no choice in when, you aren't really paid, you can only spend money in the commissary (at insanely inflated prices).
Sure it's not a slave on a cotton field getting whipped for not meeting quota, but it really isn't far from that.
It can be a bit more explicit than that: in Colorado, inmates can earn 10–12 days per month of "earned time." Earned time shortens the time until eligibility for parole. Section D in the linked document (from the linked department policies page section 625-02) gives examples of behavior that can add up to earned time. For instance, a day of work at a disaster site is worth a day of earned time (D.4.a.1)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q6IXf-yWnbA3Ujjejola7fiwijv...
Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.
That ship sailed post American Civil-War. We've made it part of our culture. Every prison charges their inmates to be there. Per Diems. It used to be tax payers but... they found out they could double dip.
And if it never sells, the profit margins for the slave drivers decreases.
I mean, I really, this post is trying to justify slave labor. Is that not... A little bizarre to find yourself doing that?
My point is, it's not the employee and where that employee makes the product, it's the company that abuses that employee to make the product for you.
So no, not justifying slave labor, but I am justifying using prison labor (at minimum wage) to give them a chance at rehabilitation and/or restitution.
Most inmates are incarcerated due to circumstance. They lacked the ability to better their lives and required monies to live, so they resorted to crime. Given a chance, many inmates get degrees behind bars, learn skills, write books, practice art.
I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious.
As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands.
The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now.
It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain.
If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich.
If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car.
But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate.
I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche.
All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
(One classification of "upper class" is someone who has never had to buy their own furniture because they inherit it and pretty much everything else they need.)
Also, my vanity plate is $0 more than a normal plate. Why wouldn't I?
No price difference for the yellow on black plate when you want personalized.
In the most ironic twist of all - Ontario did away with license plate renewals a few years ago, and now, I would actually consider a vanity plate..
I've always wondered if a regular plate was better for avoiding speeding tickets - a vanity plate is much easier to validate, IMHO.
The issue turned out to be drain covers in the field of the view of the cameras, which the system was detecting belonged to car 11111.
The Frost Report sketch explains it quite well:
Lol, wasn't slavery outlawed in the US, or were some states still allowed to keep it? That's absolutely bananas if true.
The contention is about how much they’re paid per hour.
Sorry, do you have a source for that? The requirement to work is a major point of contention, and a very quick check with this[1] directly contradicts your claim in the federal system: "Sentenced inmates are required to work if they are medically able. Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper. Inmates earn 12¢ to 40¢ per hour for these work assignments."
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/work_programs.j...
> Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper.
Meaning some prisoners work in the kitchen preparing food for other inmates, others are on clean up duty, and so on. You could argue that nobody in prison should have to participate in anything inside their community and that’s a valid debate to be had.
In my state, the jobs that provide things outside of prison are applied for.
> They work as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They washed hospital laundry and worked in mortuary services at the height of the pandemic. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, athletic equipment, and uniforms. They cultivate and harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and work in meat and poultry processing plants.
> From the moment they enter the prison gates, they lose the right to refuse to work. [...] More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/2022-06... (relevant quotes are found on page 5)
Not 100% true it seems, but happy for someone else to correct me.
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
This a good reminder to all Americans to read the Constitution. The amount of bizarre understandings (not necessarily this one) that I see is very high.
[1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
The numbers I saw said 47% of inmates had a violent crime under federal or state classifications.
Often it is not.
Often, they too are a victim of our judicial system, and we can't just ignore them due to the peers we locked them in with.
That's the fact. You can't argue jail time is automatically fair only because it has been added in the sentencing.
Its legal, and that's it. Civil forfeiture is also legal. Slavery was legal (and is still legal in us prisons).
Doesn't make it justified.
You didn't, but I'm taking your stance to its logical conclusion.
GP: > they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society.
Your response: > Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
Be that as it may, this is our system. Through a series of laws we have defined due process for our people, and people who end up in prison are a result of this due process. Like it or not this is the best we were able to do.
If we are going to say prisoners should be given more privileges because some prisoners do not deserve to be in there, then why are we holding them in a prison to begin with? Being confined to prison is a thousand times more punitive than not receiving pay for making a license plate.
A better reason for arguing that prisoners should be paid for their work is because it is more humane. That's a better argument than some people are in prison unjustly.
I'm actually in favor of prison reforms. Prisons' number one goal should be to reduce recidivism. I see that as the entire point of the prison system: reducing crime. If a person leaves prison and re-offends, we have failed to do our job.
Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
Prisoners already lack freedom in many aspects. "Sitting on their asses" like if they were sipping cocktails on a beach is a bit a misrepresentation don't you think? I wouldn't exchange the possibility to move and do what I want for possibly any amount of money, nor for being able to "sit on my ass" in that sense. Would you?
Besides the moral arguments - which I will say, they are so obvious that it feels incredible even having to discuss why enslaving prisoners is wrong - you can make economic arguments. For example, that having cheap or borderline unpaid labor compresses the salary in that market, or that this system creates a dysfunctional incentive to increase prison population for private profits.
Maybe that's why the US is one of the countries with the highest incarcerated population in the world. The highest among western and larger countries.
I understand though there is a cultural barrier. I am from Europe and in most countries here prison has a rehabilitation purpose, which is what most benefits society, and prisons are not private entities.
I do find that questionable.
1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism.
2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings.
A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
Then we have people who demand to double down on the punishment and wonder why these people never stop breaking the law.
Americans are a marvelous bunch. Thanks Dog I live in a first world country.
Is it that the latter can be called "slavery" that makes people upset?
So it's not about which one is worse, it's about not supporting something that could lead to corruption or an unfair system.
Next steps would be to make it LLM assisted and to generate common number/letter replacement combos
Most endpoints now only give you a list pre generated numbers to choose from, AND that endpoint is rate limited to the tits with reCaptcha. No more script kiddies.