The vast majority of criminals in our prison system are there for victimless crimes. That means they did not rob a bank, in fact they didn't hurt anyone. In fact, a lot of them are in there due to putting substances in their own body and being hit with the three strikes rule.
If the people in prison were there due to harming others or property belonging to others then your points might be valid.
However, this practice also greatly impacts people OUTSIDE of prison that have committed no crime as they cannot compete with the slave labor of the prisons. So it also hurts people that are not even criminals.
When it was pounding rocks and hard labor those were jobs people don't want. Yet had you read what I wrote you'd see that this has not been the case for some time now and it is getting worse. Do you for example make web pages? Well so do inmates, and their cost might undercut yours. Not to mention government agencies are often mandated they must get a pretty high percentage (the document I am thinking of I saw last year said 60%) of their goods and services IF AVAILABLE from the prison industry.
Some of the older posts I link share links to numerous catalogs that show what you can buy from some places in terms of services and products. I likely only did Colorado and California, though I may have also hit upon Texas. These programs exist in every state within the U.S.
Many of the so-called "victimless" criminals weren't - they pleaded down from far more serious crimes. Why should these folks just sit around watching tv?
Did you read anything I wrote?
The vast majority of criminals in our prison system are there for victimless crimes. That means they did not rob a bank, in fact they didn't hurt anyone. In fact, a lot of them are in there due to putting substances in their own body and being hit with the three strikes rule.
If the people in prison were there due to harming others or property belonging to others then your points might be valid.
However, this practice also greatly impacts people OUTSIDE of prison that have committed no crime as they cannot compete with the slave labor of the prisons. So it also hurts people that are not even criminals.
When it was pounding rocks and hard labor those were jobs people don't want. Yet had you read what I wrote you'd see that this has not been the case for some time now and it is getting worse. Do you for example make web pages? Well so do inmates, and their cost might undercut yours. Not to mention government agencies are often mandated they must get a pretty high percentage (the document I am thinking of I saw last year said 60%) of their goods and services IF AVAILABLE from the prison industry.
Some of the older posts I link share links to numerous catalogs that show what you can buy from some places in terms of services and products. I likely only did Colorado and California, though I may have also hit upon Texas. These programs exist in every state within the U.S.
Many of the so-called "victimless" criminals weren't - they pleaded down from far more serious crimes. Why should these folks just sit around watching tv?