this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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No, being greedy is why America still has slavery, technically. As a whole they could get a ton more profit and save on costs if the system cared to develop prisoners, reduce prison populations and make them more productive members of society.
Individual and short-term profits are gained through this exploitation. The fix isn't to eliminate profit "waste money" then everybody loses. The solution is to address the externality in the market, thereby making it so that everyone can profit.
I assume you're making the argument that a motivated worker does better work and if they do better work they're more productive and thus make more profit. However, a motivated worker also costs more so really the profit maximum is somewhere between worker production and how much you're paying for the worker. Now imagine how little the prison worker is paid. Different sources give different numbers but all of it ends up in the ballpark of $1/h. The federal minimum wage is $7.5/h. That means a minimum wage worker would have to be at least 7 times more productive than the prison laborer and that's just the floor of what you're legally supposed to pay. If we talk about the average american we're talking about needing to be around 10-11 times for efficient than a prison worker.
Slave labor is the most efficient way to make a profit. because you're effectively paying nothing to produce something that you could sell at market value.