I‘m heavily involved in the self-hosting community and I already run a bunch of services at home but I was wondering if anyone has experience with self-hosting jail?
Apologies for the wall of text incoming but there’s a lot to consider!
Pros:
- It’s a lot of fun to self-host and you learn a lot
- I see an opportunity here because there’s always crime happening which means business generates itself.
- I could probably run some targeted ads on social media platforms to promote crime and attract more potential customers
- The customers can be incentivized to work which is rewarding for them since they can give back to the community.
- They could produce merch helping me cover the cost of self-hosting, win-win!
- I looked into the economics and actually they don’t really ask for money, they are very generous and just want to give back!
There are also some cons though:
- The starting costs are pretty high, I would have to expand my house significantly
- NIMBYs, I can imagine they would cause trouble if they learn that I self-host a jail even though it’s a lot of fun and potentially generates jobs for the community. There can be many sticklers in the better neighborhoods.
- Death penalty. Some states have it and I find it very inefficient to kill your clients. They could do work instead.
- I would have to be careful to avoid such places
- DEI. I looked into the system and it’s not very diverse. We would have to educate the recruiters from law enforcement to do better.
- They seem very biased in their sourcing process. I would like this to be a place for everyone and I don’t think they are sensitive at all regrading this topic.
- Plus they seem to be randomly shooting potential clients which is super unprofessional and inefficient?!
- Vibes. I watched some movies and there’s a lot of issues with jail culture. I would have to invest a lot into educating the clients to battle e.g. homophobia which seems common or also fascism.
- Apparently there’s some labor union called “Aryan Brotherhood“? And labor unions are mostly separated by race? This is obviously not okay.
- Maybe it’s not good to allow unions in the first place as they struggle to foster an inclusive environment and there seems to be a lot of in-fighting
Any ideas? Anyone done this before? As a European I’m still new to the US system but was fascinated that it’s possible to run private jails, it’s much more inclusive than the socialist place where I’m from. There, the government has a monopoly on incarcerating people, totally disregarding the fact that it’s a lot of fun to self-host and incentivize them to work at almost no cost! It’s hard to try out new stuff in a place without freedom :(
I think you need to factor in lube costs, and once you do, it stops making financial sense.
We could start also producing live and start a channel on social media. I’ve seen this one influencer making toothpaste at home and people loved it. We could pair this with elements of ASMR which seems popular as ever on TikTok. It could be some kind of startup-hub where against a little fee the clients could work on their own social media projects.
Imagine these guys doing it wouldn’t you love it:
Dear Lord, why did it take me a solid minute to understand. I’m getting old and easily fooled by shitposts.
I had a tab open to see what the hell this was and if I could self host this too
is it really self hosted if all the prisoners aren’t hosting it themselves? I think you’d have to be a prisoner also to consider it self hosting.
The prisoners would need to run individual jails, or it would be co-hosted.
It’s probably still self hosted if you share it with your family and a few friends.
That would need to be decided by a court
Got me there! Let’s rather call it decentralized, could make it a blockchain I see a lot of potential actually for something like a jail token that increases in value with the amount of clients
There are also some cons
Iswydt
Well some practical notes, there are at least two states that completely ban private prisons, (New York, Illinois), and many other states restricting them. Also if you want American Federal contracts, you can only house immigrant detainees going forward (thanks to Biden). While not the EU anymore there are also private prisons in the UK if you would like to start closer to home. And also there are public/private partnerships available such as in Alabama where you can work as Sheriff and get to run the jail as seen fit and pocket the difference in reimbursements.
Regulation surely is on the rise! Thanks a lot for the heads up, I escaped state mandated healthy insurance and unemployed benefits because I’ve been looking for freedom, but where’s that freedom when I want to self-host jail? They say that if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere but apparently you can’t even make a living there pursuing your passion.
I will look into UK or Alabama, what I like about both is that they seem very family oriented! Of course there’s cultural differences with the UK royals loving family a lot whereas in Alabama it seems like a grassroots movement, but I believe both could be very valuable in supporting the jail community
bald french man said once that factories, schools, barracks, hospitals are prisons so maybe self-host that instead?
Just use docker/podman containers: They’re way easier to use and correctly configure than jails.
Podman quadlets will even spin up containers as systemd services. You could automatically assign solitary confinement containers to new inmates on the fly.
Love it! I want to run jail rootless to avoid any breaches but was worried that I’m not able to do user management properly.
Any idea on networking? I heard a lot about that in jail and it’s a pain in the ass. I’m worried a malicious actor could control of one of the solitary confinement containers and there’s a breach and the containers start communicating, or even worse they take over my instance :(
Aryan brotherhood as a labor union lmao.
