As a couple of commenters on Krebs' site pointed out, this is reminiscent of the Soviet system that Solzhenitsyn wrote about in In the First Circle: https://en.

As a couple of commenters on Krebs' site pointed out, this is reminiscent of the Soviet system that Solzhenitsyn wrote about in In the First Circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_First_Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_First_Circle. (However, in those days, the prisoners were forced to do scientific and technical work for the government, not for private industry.)