>>483711>Can that really be true? Given how broken the world is, why is it so surprising to you that shit's not efficient.
>There's clearly an economic incentive for prison labor.It costs like over 60k a year to imprison somebody in the US. It costs less than half to hire somebody for minimum wage. So a hard
NO on that one.
Just compare the physical realities, of a commercial space where people work, plus the homes they live in, to prison facilities.
Regular work places don't need all the stuff to keep people locked up, they don't need sturdy cells, guards, elaborate security perimeters, a search helicopter on stand by and so on. To hire a worker just post a job-listing. To get a prison-slave it requires a bunch of police officers to catch one, and a bunch of legal theater to make up excuses for snatching somebody from the streets and locking them up. It requires bribing politicians for fake laws to keep up a veneer of justice and legitimacy.
Prisons are also a lot less productive, than regular work-places. It's basically random snatched up people that are being made to work what ever productive forces the private prison labor camp happens to have. There is no skill matching. Since there is no pressure to upgrade the production equipment, the tools are obsolete tech that are really labor intensive and have low output.
The only reason why anybody's making money off this is because the costs are socialized and the revenue is privatized.
>I think prison labor exploiters usually aren't paying for the imprisonment; instead the state is paying for that.True, but there's more. All the people that are being imprisoned register as restriction of the labor supply for all the other capitalists. It only persists on legacy inertia. It could not be set up now if it didn't exist already.