[quote=@catchamber]Can you rephrase this?[/quote]

You're going to argue (I suspect) that prison labor is a good thing because it provides extremely cheap production of goods. Then these goods can be sold to the public at a lower price.

That's not how it works.

It's true that prisoners earn something like $.30/hr on average in this country. But if you think goods are being sold at a lower price most or all of the time, you're delusional. $.30/hr worker salaries just means that a corporation can sell goods at the same price and pocket even more money from the transaction, instead of paying ordinary workers minimum wage to produce those same goods.

Also consider this: even if the public was receiving cheaper goods from the privatization of prisons as a source of cheap labor, we're still paying higher taxes than we would without this privatization. Why? Because the private prison complex wants more people in prison, and it wants them to stay there longer. And it costs about $400,000 per year, per prisoner, to keep these people fed, medicated, sheltered, clothed, to provide their utilities, etc.

Basically prisons are run like a business now, designed to turn .72% of the population basically into slaves who will work almost for free. And they don't even have to feed or house these slaves themselves, since we, the taxpayers, are doing that for them. Imagine a cotton plantation in the 18th Century south where slaves work for pennies [i]and[/i] are provided their daily necessities by other people. The plantation owner is not eager to give that up. Remember, back then, the most valuable slaves were young males, because old/crippled slaves couldn't work as hard, but they ate just as much food as anyone else. Older slaves were more expensive to keep, therefore, than young ones, because with young slaves the owners got much greater returns on their sunken costs.

This stipulation doesn't exist anymore because the plantation owners aren't the ones who pay out of pocket to feed and clothe their own slaves anymore. So they can just throw anyone in jail at all, and none of that shit will matter.

Why do you think no one is in a hurry to decriminalize marijuana and other hard drugs? Because having even a trace residue of one of these drugs on your person allows them to enslave you for that $.30/hr paycheck for four years (or whatever the sentence is for Possession nowadays). Without bullshit laws that can throw people in jail for totally trivial shit, that super-cheap labor force dries up.

These people are the reason the USA has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the entire world, and also why we have the highest recidivism rate in the world. If we actually cared about fixing this country, we'd stop treating prison as a place of punishment and start treating it as a place of personal reform. We'd stop the profits of prison labor from going into businessmen's pockets, using it instead to rebuild infrastructure and fund shrinking educational facilities. We'd put an end to people profiting off the prison complex, so we can have fewer prisoners, get them out of prison sooner, [i]and[/i] make sure that more of them reintegrate into society instead of becoming repeat offenders.

We don't think your opinions are ridiculous because we're cunts and assholes and we don't "get it." We think they're ridiculous because you're fourteen years old and you don't think about the broader consequences of the "genius solutions" you wish to deploy. Often enough you're not even addressing the people who are actually responsible for these problems!