the difference is that the people getting screwed over were judged guilty of crimes by a jury of their peers or other due process.
Appeals to tradition are probably not the way to go when deciding how we can be a better society.
The whole thing is sickening to me
Most developed democracies have banned forced prison labour; the US is a bit of an outlier here.
Nice sound bite; but not really true.
It's certainly true a process is followed but that process is pretty shitty.
Plenty of people get released after the murder weapon is actually tried for fingerprints and low-and-behold it was somebody else! How does a person go through trial with even the murder weapon being tested? It's not required by the process.
Plenty of people have been convicted because "their bite marks match". Is there actually some peer-reviewed standard of bite marks where if I gave you somebody's bite and a bite mark you could match them together at 90% accuracy? No. How are non-reproducible methods used to incarcerate people? The process doesn't require accuracy.
For more, John Oliver: Forensic Analysis [1]
If only... they don't even need an excuse, the 13th amendment has a literal exception for "punishment for crime" :)
It doesn't sound like this is a job training program where valuable skills are being taught in a learning environment. It doesn't sound like they care what the prisoners are likely to be able to do when released, as I don't think a 65 year old farm hand doing piece work for his retirement is going to reduce recidivism. Finally it's all in an environment where the prisoners are punished for not working, which is done nowhere outside of a prison, so what type of work _ethic_ are you actually building here.
This is a paper thin excuse to deprive prisoners of their civil rights.