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Manipulating the laws to generate more captives so that you can force them to work for you so that you can make more money is...totally exploitive. That you've

Manipulating the laws to generate more captives so that you can force them to work for you so that you can make more money is...totally exploitive. That you've thrown in higher pay doesn't change that; it just means they'd treat their slaves better. It's also a silly hypothetical, in that it misunderstands the motive for prisoner labor. Replace "prison" with "community center": > Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a community center teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit. Compare potential outcomes. Wouldn't that be a lot easier to run and couldn't you expect much better outcomes? Of course. And it's also true for any other kind of labor; equally paid non-criminals with specific inclinations to the work doing it by choice are going to outperform prisoners if you're paying them equally. Which leads us to the actual reason why prison labor is even a thing at all: because it's coercive and thus artificially cheap. There's no other reason to do it! If prisons had to pay prisoners market wages, there'd be no reason to employ them at all; they could just employ other people. It's just not a valid hypothetical. It's like saying, "we could get rid of traffic problems by not allowing any vehicles on the road."

csallen 13y ago
Slave labor isn't exploitative simply because slave owners campaign against anti-slavery laws. It's exploitative because the slaves themselves are being forced to work against their will. Slavery would not suddenly become more justifiable if its practitioners adopted a vow of silence with regard to its legality. The same applies here. Whether or not prison owners campaign for policies that would put more people in prison is irrelevant to the question of whether those prisoners are being treated fairly.
- icambron 13y ago
  They're not prisoners until they're captured and put in prison. Thus lobbying for more prisoners is a way of exploiting more people, especially the poor, young black men who are most likely to end up in prison. Similarly, lobbying for the capture of more slaves on the west coast of 18th century Africa is a way of exploiting Africans. Additionally--and I suspect this is what the GP was going for--the lobbying effort clarifies the underlying intentions. The people demanding that prisoners work are doing so not under the banner of exploitation, but under rhetoric about prisoners "giving back to society". That prison organizations are lobbying for more prisoners reveals their real intentions, which is why it's used as evidence of the exploitative nature of the penal system.
- mistercow 13y ago
  You do have a point. I think the lobbying to increase the number of slaves makes it more exploitative, but the line really is at the point where working in prison is required. And actually, there's an even more precise and similarly distasteful word that describes it perfectly: "forced labor camp". Some might object that the term invokes a comparison to the forced labor camps in countries with much worse human rights situations than our own. But that seems a lot like saying that house slaves didn't count as "real" slaves, because their lot was much better than those forced to work in mines.

csallen 13y ago

Slave labor isn't exploitative simply because slave owners campaign against anti-slavery laws. It's exploitative because the slaves themselves are being forced to work against their will. Slavery would not suddenly become more justifiable if its practitioners adopted a vow of silence with regard to its legality. The same applies here. Whether or not prison owners campaign for policies that would put more people in prison is irrelevant to the question of whether those prisoners are being treated fairly.

icambron 13y ago
They're not prisoners until they're captured and put in prison. Thus lobbying for more prisoners is a way of exploiting more people, especially the poor, young black men who are most likely to end up in prison. Similarly, lobbying for the capture of more slaves on the west coast of 18th century Africa is a way of exploiting Africans. Additionally--and I suspect this is what the GP was going for--the lobbying effort clarifies the underlying intentions. The people demanding that prisoners work are doing so not under the banner of exploitation, but under rhetoric about prisoners "giving back to society". That prison organizations are lobbying for more prisoners reveals their real intentions, which is why it's used as evidence of the exploitative nature of the penal system.
mistercow 13y ago
You do have a point. I think the lobbying to increase the number of slaves makes it more exploitative, but the line really is at the point where working in prison is required. And actually, there's an even more precise and similarly distasteful word that describes it perfectly: "forced labor camp". Some might object that the term invokes a comparison to the forced labor camps in countries with much worse human rights situations than our own. But that seems a lot like saying that house slaves didn't count as "real" slaves, because their lot was much better than those forced to work in mines.