Moral hazard, getting money/profit from prison labor creates a incentive to have more laborers contributing their tithe. Or find creative ways to keep high value laborers for longer.
Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds.
Interesting if that’s really true, given how prison labor being slavery is pretty much how it works otherwise.
I’d love to know how fair-market the wages are, becuase I somehow suspect that:
- They’re way lower than someone not in prison would get paid and
- The benefits don’t exist (no PTO, no insurance, no 401k, etc.) and
- The coercive incentives of being able to report your employee to their guards would drive all sorts of abuses
This reads to me as a feel-good whitewashing piece so fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’, but perhaps I’m wrong.
Maybe somebody should make the argument that random businesses benefiting from prison labor is not only unethical for the prisoner, but also for the people that they owe restitution to.
Well, you’ve got great points.
And, here in the US, they’re points that require extra scrutiny of any such situation.
That being said, Norway has done this kind of thing with incredible success, and not just remote work either. So the idea itself is most definitely one that merits a real attempt here too
fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’
I just don’t see any liberal type (I’m assuming you mean progressives – just basically the opposite of trumpets) saying American prison labour is good. But they may say that if decent and meaningful labour at union-like wages has been shown to be beneficial for decreasing recidivism, then let’s trust the science and get some oversight and assessment going to confirm or refute it.
