20 ms·

You might even say that's the whole purpose, historically and economically, of prisons in the first place.

• derefr 4y ago
  Under this view, presumably historical nations that made most of their money from trade, and didn't rely much on local production (the Netherlands, say; or Portugal; or Hong Kong under British rule), would see little-to-no local economic benefit from a marginal slave laborer — and so just wouldn't bother to establish any prisons / penal colonies. And also, likely would find it hard to sell these criminals on to other countries, given their known criminality / disobedient attitude. Is this accurate? If so, then what did such countries generally do with their criminals? Exile them?
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > You might even say that's [ed: forced labor] the whole purpose, historically and economically, of prisons in the first place. Generally, no, that would not be accurate. OTOH, prisons were, before fairly recent history, generally of fairly limited use. Forced labir definitely, and as a direct replacement for chattel slavery, is the original reason for mass incarceration practices in the United States (though overtly, directly using it for that purpose has since fallen out of favor.) Different systems have different hiatories of penal practices and have used similarly described institutions for different purposes.