It's a worse option for everyone: - Pushes down wages for other workers doing similar labor, by taking demand out from the normal market - Because the prison

It's a worse option for everyone: - Pushes down wages for other workers doing similar labor, by taking demand out from the normal market - Because the prison itself (or, more likely, the prison-industrial-complex corporation running it) is seeing a huge profit from these ventures, it provides a perverse incentive to keep their labor pool 'strong', be it through lobbying for harsher sentences, or encouraging shot quotas amongst their guards/COs. - Conditions prisoners towards working less for equal work (we shouldn't encourage the idea that -any- class, race, or creed of human being is worth less for the same amount of work)