>what good does it really do to prevent him from being able to function on the outside?

From whose perspective?

Part of the problem is that some powerful groups are incentived to keep people coming back to prison. Private prisons reap profits, politicians get an easy way to drive fear in their constituents, telcos can charge an arm and a leg for phone calls, commissaries clean up by charging exorbitant prices for toothpaste and ramen, etc.

Until we start connecting positive outcomes for those groups to positive outcomes for the prisoners, it'll always be an uphill battle.

As Upton Sinclair used to say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Keeping people in prison forever is also a very “law and order” position which plays well with certain groups, and is very easy to sell: you don’t need any sort of nuance, you don’t face empathetic conflicts, etc…

Private prisons comprising a much smaller percentage of inmates than people realize.[0]

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

Now do private companies providing the phone call service. Now do commissary. Now the computers where you pay per minute to write and read emails. Now do UNICOR (like forced labor for McDonalds Corporation who has UNICOR do the CAD work for their franchise store remodels all the way to CAD work being done on the new World Trade Center).

I've done that research, and companies like JPay have incredible monopolies, and make a good amount of money.

But that isn't what people refer to, and not the point I made. The common misconception is that private prisons themselves are the issues. Sure, the ancillaries are terrible, but relatively small by comparison. Sure, the government isn't providing those services, so private companies stepped in and monopolized. Regardless, they are providing a service for money. Not as shocking and horrible as it's made out to be.

Turns out that every problem can be solved with one more level of indirection also works for privatization.

At some point if people keep attacking harming, and or murdering others. They just need to be put some place they won’t harm others.

Too many people rob / mug others and get arrested dozens of times only to be back on the street quickly. A single person can traumatize hundreds.

>besides the fact that he's kept away from the public so he can't commit more crimes.

Even this part is a failure. Prisoners can and do commit crimes that victimize other prisoners, guards, and sometimes the outside public.

The problem runs deep. Prison "slavery" is codified in the US Constitution's 13th Amendment:

> 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.

Is it any wonder that "enterprising" organizations take advantage...?

While I think there is a definite issue with prisons being used as a source of labor, I also don't see how you can have prison without it being slavery. At the very core, putting someone in a limited area they do not want to be in, forcing them to stay there under threat of violence, and forcing them to behave seems to be a form of slavery.

Even if we were to consider a nice prison focused around rehabilitation and not exploitation, there are still things the prisoner is forced to do. They are forced not to leave. They are forced to follow certain rules. They are forced to move between locations at certain times of the day. They may be forced to attend classes or do specific types of labor like cleaning their rooms or common areas. Unlike a job where you might be 'forced' to clean, but you can always quit, quitting is rarely a choice for the prisoner and will result in worse punishment. Even if the prison does not directly profit off the labor of the prisoner, this level of control seems to be a form of slavery. Rarely do I see slavery defined as requiring profit to be made off the slave, though slavery rarely happens where it isn't found to be profitable by the person doing the enslaving (based on the enslaver's own view of what counts as profit).

If we were to fully ban slavery even for prisons, then for even nice prisons to continue to exist we would have to define some other non-slavery action which would include having control of where a person lives, how they live, when they sleep, and all the other powers of a prison. In such a case, it would then be possible for a state to allow this non-slavery even for people not convicted of a crime, because it isn't slavery and thus isn't a violation of the 13th amendment. Generally things like kidnapping laws as they currently exist would prevent any private entity from doing this, but exceptions might be carved out. On realistic example would be teen rehabilitation camps which already can border on the legal limits of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. Some stories from these places already sound like they might be crossing the line, though that might only be allowed as long as they are dealing with minors with parental approval. I could reasonably see a state extending such treatment until the teen is 21 or such.

Oh defining a framework that defines incarceration is hard so we should just have slavery. Got it.

Random anecdote. Slavery means NO days off. If you are sick, you have to get up at 5:30am and go wait in line outside in the freezing snow for sick call (you also have to do this for 'pill line' if you have any meds, though you aren't charged the $5 a pop for that). Sick call costs $5 a visit. You make $5 a month. Then the doctor says 'drink water and take an aspirin' and clears you to go to work. Aspirin is only available from the commissary in large overprices bottles about to expire. You are REQUIRED to throw the bottle away when it is expired or you will get a shot for 'contraband'. You can not share aspirin with others. Hopefully you planned ahead and saved your $5 for 2 months to afford a bottle of aspirin in case you got sick, and it hasn't expired before you get sick. When you get to work, sick, no exception is made for your physical condition. If you work HVAC you're still climbing ladders in the snow to the roof.

Slavery means I was forced to shovel the compound with a shovel with a broken handle so exposed fiberglass that cut me up. I was issued a 'navy uniform' which is what we wear in the feds. So short sleeve shirt, thin khaki slacks, thin socks. And you get a light non-waterproof jacket. You want long underwear? Commissary purchase (4X monthly pay, $20 pants OR $20 shirt). Gloves? Commissary purchase (2 months pay $10). Hat? commissary purchase (1 months pay $5). So I shoveled snow for hours, soaked to the bone, in whiteout conditions, no hat, no gloves, with my hands bleeding. That is slavery. And I had it good. I was able to get the shovel fixed through connections, boy was the cop that made me do that pissed when next time I pulled the shovel out of the locked tool closet and somehow it was fixed even though he kept 'forgetting' to put in a work order.

>Oh defining a framework that defines incarceration is hard so we should just have slavery. Got it.

That is not my argument.

My argument is that incarceration is a subset of slavery. Accepting one specific subset of slavery doesn't mean bringing back chattel slavery or legalizing sexual slavery. You ideally want to prevent any loopholes and keep a very specific limit on what is allowed for prisoners to avoid horrible things we see in modern day prisons and in prisons for the past.

>Slavery means NO days off. If you are sick, you have to get up at 5:30am and go wait in line outside in the freezing snow for sick call (you also have to do this for 'pill line' if you have any meds, though you aren't charged the $5 a pop for that). Sick call costs $5 a visit. You make $5 a month. Then the doctor says 'drink water and take an aspirin' and clears you to go to work. Aspirin is only available from the commissary in large overprices bottles about to expire. You are REQUIRED to throw the bottle away when it is expired or you will get a shot for 'contraband'. You can not share aspirin with others. Hopefully you planned ahead and saved your $5 for 2 months to afford a bottle of aspirin in case you got sick, and it hasn't expired before you get sick. When you get to work, sick, no exception is made for your physical condition. If you work HVAC you're still climbing ladders in the snow to the roof.

Even if you banned any labor, you could still have prisons who have extremely unreasonable charges for goods and services due to the, quite literal, captive audience. Imagine your same situation, except there is no work to get paid. You either have to have an external source of money from before being put in prison, have someone sending you money, or this gets added to a bill that eventually the government will have you repay once you are out of prison. No labor for profit, but still all the problems you point out.

>Slavery means I was forced to shovel the compound with a shovel with a broken handle so exposed fiberglass that cut me up.

Conditions of tools provided in prison are also independent of any notion of labor from profit. You can have a prison where people are given horrible tools for their daily rehabilitation tasks even though there is no profitable labor occurring. If you have people running the prison seeking to torture prisoners, they can do so even in a situation where there is no labor for profit. These are obvious bad things as well, but I don't see how these things being bad relate to my question.

UNICOR at my spot did CAD work for McDonald's remodels (along with a textile sweetshop). With COVID they made UNICOR only dorms (something they are not allowed to do) with of course special privileges (which they are not allowed to do, they can't 'treat you better if you take this job that makes us money'). Also, the UNICOR cops got bonuses based on the local UNICORs performance. But yeah, that whole things doesn't get abused, people don't get forced into it. Why would a cop do that, just because his bonus depends on you 'volunteering' to work overtime... or in dangerous situations. His compassion DEFINATELY overrides greed for that sweet sweet bonus money. And if you quit you are still in his dorm until transferred, and of course he doesn't punish you at all for putting his bonus at risk.

When you walk into some store, why don't you just take whatever you want and walk out? Perhaps you have some virtuous reasons: maybe find stealing ethically wrong, or maybe from a philosophical point of view since if everybody stole at their discretion that society would collapse, or maybe you just don't want to have a reputation as a thief. But what if somebody didn't care about anything at all like that? And try as hard as you might, you simply couldn't convince him of your train of thought. What then?

All that's really left is deterrence. In the past (and in the present in many places) if you steal then the first time something like a finger gets cut off, and the next time the hand comes off, and the third time - well don't steal three times. But of course that's barbaric, so we need to do things that aren't barbaric, but what? And so enters the idea of prison. Rehabilitation is of course ideal, but in reality some people simply can't be rehabilitated. So what do you do then?

Separation of those who can and cannot be rehabilitated would ostensibly be ideal, but it's interesting to consider that in doing this you'd effectively be going full circle and recreating the asylum type systems of times long since past. It's unclear that this would be desirable even in the best of times, and we're certainly not in the best of times.

I don’t think people think through the “deterrence” angle very well though. In order to make deterrence effective you need to have people who really stand to lose something, but like I was just listening to C.R.E.A.M last night (funny enough while playing chess) and Method Man raises an interesting point: “life in the world no different from a cell”. For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs. You can make prison progressively more horrible, but you can also make life outside of prison progressively better with IMO a similar effect. In the US we rarely discuss the anti-crime effects of social welfare policies, but they’re quite real. In a world without the kind of serious poverty we accept all over the US even 5 year prison sentence is a massive loss, because life outside is so much better. In a world where people are living in $10 a day then maybe 5 years in prison isn’t such a huge price if the upside risk appears big enoug

>For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs

This isn't the case because outside of prison you have upwards mobility. It is easy to escape poverty if you put in the effort. In prison you are stuck there for however long your sentence is.

> It is easy to escape poverty if you put in the effort

I think this is a nontrivial assumption