If keeping people in prison is an economic gain for society, you are going to send people to prison whatever they deserve it or not. And that is the case in the USA.

"He was found guilty in February of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of for-profit prisons for juveniles. Ciavarella who left the bench over two years ago after he and another judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of sentencing youngsters to prisons they had a hand in building." https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2011/08/12/pennsylv...

So over-incarceration cannot be set apart from economical profit for jailing citizens.

> Nobody is arguing you should have to pay kids minimum wage for doing chores...

Children labour is forbidden. And when they actually work, e.g. movie actors, they get paid.

Make society pay for sending people to prison and they are going to be more eager to rehabilitate than to punish. It is not the only factor, but it helps.

Because taking away someone's freedoms is a serious thing. There should be a high economic cost to society for imprisoning people; it serves as a structural disincentive to over-use of prison.

Perhaps the morality of over-using prison should serve as a sufficient deterrent for society, but the facts demonstrate that this is not the case.

America's very serious incarceration problem needs economic disincentives because the status quo proves that this country is apparently not sufficiently motivated by morality.

And even if you don't accept this argument, it still does not follow that we should under-pay prisoners. We should at the very least pay prisoners market rates and then charge them for the true cost of their incarceration. E.g.,

National average salary for firefighters: $49,330 PLUS (good) health benefits.

National average total cost of incarceration: $31,000 INCLUDING (terrible) health care. And keep in mind that a well-behaved prisoner in a low or medium security facility -- likely the case for those allowed on firefighting crews -- will cost substantially less than the amortized per-prisoner cost.

So even if inmates should "earn their keep", the state is still pocketing on the order of 5 figures per year. Worse still, IMO that money would go a lot further preventing recidivism than any amount of rehabilitation or work ethic.

"Chores" and "labor" are categorically different things, and the motivation for the former isn't usually "offsetting their upkeep", so much as it's "instilling a sense of personal responsibility".

This is a specious comparison.

Furthermore, when a farmer's child does chores alongside a paid laborer, what's going on?

1. The right to say "no" without repercussions beyond "not getting paid".

2. Significant statutory protections regarding exploitative treatment.

EDIT: There's also a large body of statute defining what is and isn't okay in the family farm situation.

Have you ever had parents? I realize it's outside the Overton window to do anything about it, but age-based slavery[0] is ubiquitous and the legal default in essentially (I think literally) every country on Earth. It's an even more pervasive affliction than copyright, so I find your ignorance implausible.

0: in the ownership sense; actually using them for forced labor is less common

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please try to address the argument I actually made.

Also, you were responding to:

> a teenager mowing the lawn for their parents

which was about their (owner's) own lawn.

>>>> What's the difference between a teenager mowing the lawn for their parents and someone paid to mow a lawn?

In response to which, I said:

>>> The kid getting paid to mow neighborhood lawns has:

Selective quoting tends to change the context a bit, don't you think?

Then I don't think it really applies to this situation, since just as familial relations are superseding "business" relations in your example, certainly the prison relations change the nature of the business relations drastically.

But I think this is certainly labor, but the distinction between labor and chore is not so clear. I don't think it matters to the inmates, but I found it bizarre how confident HNers are that chores and labor are intrinsically different.

I think we started off on the wrong foot with the comparison. Even government recognizes some difference between chores and labor, as childhood labor is illegal but it's not illegal to have your kids mow the law (afaik).

Its really just an ever so tempting argument of semantics that is at this point distracting me from the real plight of prison laborers. But that's how the internet goes.

Both of them involve "work", but the objectives — the reasons the people doing the work are doing it — aren't the same.

Any argument about upkeep doesn't hold water as well, because these prisons aren't using the money for upkeep, they are making a profit

You can't premise an argument regarding the current general case for prisoners on what's now either a historical, or an edge case for children.

My humble opinion is that this creates a perverse incentive which undermines the pursuit of justice. If we as a society feel that imprisoning people is an sound, effective form of justice, then we as a society should accept the full costs associated with imprisonment. If we are unwilling to pay for such, then we should sit back and think of a more cost-appropriate solution.

The use of prison slave labor encourages more crime (via ambigiuously written laws), harsher sentencing(mandatory minimum sentencing), and recidivism because it is profitable for those in the justice system.

I can see why people would agree with your sentiment; I certainly use to. But now I think it is naive, short-sighted, and doesn't align well with what I feel is the purpose of prison (reformation).

In fact, the government will punish the parents if they try to not take care of their child or punish them too severely for not doing their chores

Let's see how long you can do that before the government and society come down on you

Edit: I don't think "relatively recently" even applies here. Child labor laws were passed long before we had laws allowing things like mixed race marriage, gay marriage, civil rights for minorities, and other social changes. We are no longer an agrarian society that needs mass free labor to survive

Life has more value in well off western countries today. Child mortality is low. Families have few children. So no, you can’t abuse your kids, the state doesn’t like that.

One is a child. They do not have the freedoms which we, as a society, have given them yet due to their age, lack of maturity and lack of means.

Finding a job is tough as an ex-con. Your support network may well be gone, or it may be entirely composed of people who enabled you in the first place.

Most kids have years of supported, gradual transition from unpaid chores to fully-independent adults, although there are obviously exceptions to that. I feel really badly for kids who enter adulthood from foster care.

I don't see this position being articulated here. Can you help me understand how you read the people disagreeing with you as saying that?

and parents usually give a shit about their own kids

What do you think kids on farms do?

Eh, I could argue that, particularly if you're adopting child after child just to use them as free labor, like society does when "adopting" prisoners.

Because slavery is wrong.