If you're incarcerated, you've forfeited a lot of other rights too. That's by design, and I happen to have the "extreme" opinion that incarceration should be punishment[1] rather than a cushy lifestyle. I 100% support forced labor (not cruel treatment or abuse) of the incarcerated.
[1] To clarify: there should be an element of punishment (in the form of forgone rights), but there's obviously more to it.
I would generally agree. Just as some people characterize prison labor as "slavery", with all of the connotations that word holds when unqualified, I have also seen incarceration described as "kidnapping". Rather than get bogged down in the minutia of arguing about words I'd simply posit that there are moral forms of "kidnapping" and "slavery".
Locking a murderer in a jail cell is moral, I also see no issue requiring them to work.
Where I do see a massive issue is when incarceration is used by private corporations to enrich themselves rather than enriching the public or individuals whose harm is what caused the incarceration in the first place.
I don't in principle oppose private prisons, though I am wary of them in practice. I think there could exist a model where private prisons would be rewarded based on recitivism, but unfortunately such a system would be hard to create for a variety of practical considerations.
In other times it was said that a woman takes away a job a man might to, or a black man the job a white. You may want to google the "lump of labor fallacy".
Well I might be out of the loop but wasn’t “punishment” proven to be ineffective in preventing (or correcting) unwanted behavior.
No matter how harsh is the punishment there appears to always be crime. What seems to work is rehabilitation as well as inevitability of capture.
So even if it sounds unjust to try to help offenders (even murderers) If we want them to not offend and not murder _more_ we need norway style prisons rather than US ones.
Regardless of what’s effective and what is just though, having prison companies benefit from forced labor is just all ways of crazy regarding incentives and screws the market soo much, normal people now need to compete against slaves, the state / companies now have incentives to there to be _more_ prisoners which would lead to actually _more_ crime in and off itself.
And to top it off, you have big entities that can lobby (bribe) the government to change laws to the detriment of society at large. It just sooo messed up.
And its not some crazy tinfoil hat thing - we can see that “experiment” play out before our eyes - the US penal system is so proven to be so ineffective its silly.
Believe it or not, a huge number of incarcerated people would rather work (without pay) than sit around doing nothing. For the few that don't, you can certainly incentivize it without resorting to torture.
And in fact, one of the common punishments available to prison staff is to bar the prisoner from working if they are getting in fights, etc.
The prisoners wouldn’t mind working for more pay, but most of them do like it considering the options.
Another part is just accounting - if the federal government paid its employees tax free (no fed income tax) it would work out the same (salaries would drop) but the accounting would be different and people would complain.
But why not pay them? Perhaps you cannot pay market wages without a being a competitive capitalist enterprise, but surely there is a point where access to subsidized labor allows you to break even, paying them, say $3 or $5 an hour.
And perhaps you cannot pay them in cash, but why not invest the money for the duration of their incarceration, or pay a stipend to some dependent on the outside, like a wife/child? A $10k/year rate of savings is above what many people achieve outside, and a massive boost to get one's life in order once they get out.
Is it torture when you force kids to do their chores? Surely there are ways. But regardless don’t a lot of inmates volunteer for work? How much is forced?
Your supposedly “extreme” opinion sounds like a very mainstream American opinion. If you’re implying that many people really think your opinion is extreme, I think you’re making a straw man argument.
Unless you’re handing out life sentences for every little crime, the point of incarceration must be rehabilitation. If you fail in that goal, then you’re just putting the burden on future society, when they get back out in some years. Part of rehabilitation might include punishment, but when you start with that, rather than rehabilitation, you’ve already screwed up your national moral compass.
Probably the best way to get a prisoner ready for life after prison is to let them work, pay them a normal salary, and let them put it in a savings account.
That way they have enough money for a deposit to rent a place to live and can cover their expenses for some time until they find a job.
If you force them to work, and don't give them money, then they have no way to start a normal life after prison, will depend on money from the government in the best case, and get back to crime in the worst case.
We need to treat prisoners well. Not just because it's the morally right thing to do, but also because it's the best thing we can do if we want a society with low crime rates, where you can walk through the city at night without being scared that an ex-convict mugs you because they don't have any other options.
You can debate the relative merits of each, but rehabilitation is not the only possible goal. If you lock up a repeat violent offender for X years without rehabilitation, the other factors are still relevant.
> Unless you’re handing out life sentences for every little crime, the point of incarceration must be rehabilitation
I would take issue with the usage of the words "the point". There can in fact be multiple ends or goals of incarceration. Whether you think retributive justice or rehabilitation should be primary or secondary would be up for debate, but I primarily mean to say that you don't necessarily have to pick one or the other in the grand scheme of things (I'd say you'd also have a sliding scale of which is more important).
Working without monetary compensation is the punishment part. But work itself is rehabilitating. I can't think of a better way to help people feel empowered and able, preparing them to be positive members of society when they're released.
Like many things, there's substantial evidence on both sides of the argument. The devil is usually in the details, and this is a case where success or failure seems to be greatly affected by the quality of the programs themselves and the people who administer them.
[1] To clarify: there should be an element of punishment (in the form of forgone rights), but there's obviously more to it.