Whenever you have a captive consumer or producer of marketable materials, you have a perverse incentive to exploit, because the other party has no choice in the matter and must take whatever you offer (if anything). Every dystopian movie makes heavy use of these kinds of story elements.
In the case of prison labor, you essentially have slaves, and can therefore leverage that slave labor to undercut your competitors in the open market. The slaves, meanwhile, suffer the indignity of their forced labor and exploitation for someone else's benefit, which is why we outlawed slavery in the civilised parts of the world.
In the case of captive markets (food, commissary, communications systems, etc), price gouging is commonplace. Food quality is so low that malnutrition is common. Quality is shit but it doesn't matter because the consumers of these products are not empowered to decide, while everyone else involved benefits from their exploitation and therefore has no incentive to fix it.
This is then further exacerbated by trade groups that influence laws to increase incarceration durations and incidence in order to preserve and even expand their supply of captives for further exploitation and profit.
I suggest you look into how Western European countries handle their prison populations for comparison.
s/essentially/literally/
The US laws still allow for slaves by name as long as they're in prison
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
What you described only holds true if:
1. There is nobody overseeing policies regarding prices, compensation and workloads.
2. The “business” or workforce can be grown to increase profit
3. Work is mandatory
Both 1 and 2 point to a private prison system being a problem. They have little oversight, and are incentivized to increase the # if prisoners instead of it being an expense.
Imprisoning someone should be a purely negative action on the state, by having some potential benefit you reduce the costs imposed to the state and therefore incentivize imprisonment.
I would expect there are large percentages of the prison population that might be familiar with these things, also I mean the expectation a job in prison might be getting you ready for is a low paid job in which you are exploited, which once having been in prison in the U.S is probably what you can expect - but I don't know if having that expectation will actually reduce recidivism.
ok but there does seem to be some perception in the world that the prisons in the U.S might be slightly lacking in some of the human rights protections found in EU prisons - you are aware of this concern right?
>Since prison work is voluntary, there is not much space for exploitation.
Again, speaking about the U.S, and I know that in Utah prison work is not exactly voluntary in that the parole board has power to release or make stay to your maximum sentence - so in Utah you go in with a possible 1-15 years, if the parole board wants to let you go in 1 year you can go (but of course be on parole and get pulled back in again later if considered necessary), so how do you get the parole board to consider letting you out in 1 year instead of 15 - well you get a job and work every day and show them that you are good. Other tools are of course used for compliance and to make people work.
This is of course one state and things vary by state the American system, but there are plenty of states considered much worse than Utah for prisoner exploitation so in conclusion, I know things are great in the EU is not going to calm any worries in a discussion about the US.
A system that would improve the life of people after prison without falling for this pitfall would have to entirely remove the profit motive from prison labor (for example by prohibiting the prison to keep any proceeds from prison labor, or by paying inmates competitive rates for the work they are doing, so that overall prison labor is guaranteed to be more expensive than just hiring/outsourcing etc).
Kind of how America went from the slave labor system to the prison labor system seamlessly. There was just too much money to be made.
I think if I wasn't a programmer and only had the skills to work a minimum wage job, crime would absolutely seem more rational.
Yes, all prison labor is bad in all cases.
Why? It's very simple, you're creating a market that incentivizes incarceration. Prison should be about recovery of a human being and trying to create negative incentives so people think about making a crime (this is a bit debatable).
When you create a market for incarceration, what you're saying is "we don't want to lower crime". So yes, it's bad in all cases because we should be creating incentives to lower crime instead of how to make it profitable.
Afaik, prisons jobs in general do nothing of the sort.
By letting prisoners become familiar with expectations of a job, and get used to being paid, managing finances, and spending within their means, they're less likely to be forced to return to crime after they're released.
Despite being 'inhumane', I suspect these programmes lead to better outcomes for people involved in them than prisoners who spend every day in a cell.
Is there data to prove or disprove my hypothesis?