I know you're desperately trying to get someone to say "slavery" here, but it's not. Not really anyway.
The use of prison labor is covered under the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution;
Which says that some may be used as a slave if they have been duly convicted of a crime - but new crimes are created every day. Smoking weed was not always a crime and selling hemp was a major legal industry once. Sometimes being poor is a crime and there are lots of places where it's ALMOST a crime to be black. Look at the prison populations.
And, if you have ever had anything to do with the legal system you may have noticed this, judges and juries and the police are not perfect and omniscient. They have biases and make mistakes (or outright lie). You don't innocent to get off but more horribly you don't need to be guilty to go to jail. People with lots of money and political connections can get away with their crimes and, worse, frame poor people - because, after all, somebody has to pay for the crimes.
And are crimes created just to target certain sectors of the population? Yes they are - and the lower classes are much more likely to run afoul of the law because the laws are written by the upper classes in ways to exclude the things that the upper classes do. You may not have heard of Jo Walton, but you may know the phrase "one law for rich and poor" - but the full quote is:
There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.
And that's the truth.
First, you have a government which can no longer afford it's excesses.
Why could the government not afford this excess when it could afford it before Walker? Because Walker gave the money away to his backers. We have already been down this road in another thread. Walker created the crisis so he could bust the unions - it's really that simple - and it's not a new pattern. The right wing agenda over the last few decades has been to cut taxes on the wealthiest to cut government revenues, then to cut services which the government can then no longer afford and then repeat.
Meanwhile, you have a lot of government people being paid 2 to 3x the normal wages PLUS massive unionized benefits packages to do grunt work.
You have CEOs being paid TEN THOUSAND times the normal wage to run fraud syndicates. There's the problem. The unions are only making the kind of wage that normal people should be making. The median income in the US is about $50,000. Half of the people make more than that, half of the people make less. To properly flatten out the income curve that is killing the consumer economy (buying power is relative) either we need to raise everyone else's pay or find a way to tamp down on the top. Someone once said that you don't strengthen the weak by weakening the strong but in fact you do when strength is about relative incomes. Wealth is only created by people working and when you have a system that ends up with vast numbers of people not working because most people don't have the money to fuel that work then you have a problem with your wealth distribution.
At the same time, you have minimum security inmates already sitting in jail for crimes -- for which they've been duly convicted and sentenced --
and which you can always get more of any time you want by fiddling with the laws...
doing nothing but costing massive amounts of money for upkeep, while the only thing that prison is teaching them is to be better criminals (or how to commit crimes to stay "on the dole" as it were).
I'm not for inducing hardships on hardworking, honest citizens, but I have zero problems with replacing overpaid union workers with prisoners and here's why in a nutshell.
So you ARE in favour of inducing hardship.
1) The laid off union workers qualify for both unemployment AND -- in most cases -- job or college training to make them better employees in the future. The federal government provides school opportunities for most displaced employees, unless they happen to be rich to start with.
Job training and school are the biggest jokes there are in a bad economy. You can learn whatever skills you want but that won't produce an employer that will hire you. Look at all the kids getting out of college these days who have BSc.s and better who can't find work and they have several competitive advantages over your average middle aged guy - no family, low expectations, young enough to push around and lots of youthful energy and enthusiasm. He also doesn't have a mortgage and kids in school to pay for - all of which is already in the budget of these "union fat cats" so expect foreclosures, kids dropping out of (apparently useless) college etc. You are not just kicking the union guy but also his family and all the people he hires to do his lawn/plumbing/car repairs and all the stores he buys his clothes/food etc. Money doesn't just go to these guys and stop - they spend into the economy. On the other hand, when you give money to the rich it DOES stop. They sit on it, put it off shore and lend it to other countries.
2) At least the inmates who're doing the work now have the chance to actually pay back to the state for their "free room, college educations, and board". Not to mention that at least some will be learning a trade that they could actually use on the outside (like landscaping and road construction) if they ever get back there.
Many of the low security criminals shouldn't even be there. Some of the laws are stupid and most of the sentences are too long. There has been a "tough on crime" mentality in North America for decades now that has done nothing but stuff private prisons. Politicians can't seem to resist extending sentences to make themselves look tough but each time they do they solve very little in the terms of social problems but cost states billions. Many of the people in prison should be out in the world doing productive work (which they could be doing in a well functioning economy).
Furthermore they will not learn ANY marketable skills because all the skills they are learning will be skills that, when they get out of jail, will be being done by other people who are still in jail at a price no-one can compete with because it is government subsidized.
The simple fact is that we (neither Wisconsin nor anyone) are no longer in the position as a country to live in a unionized, bargained, over-privileged system. Cuts MUST be made, and the same work still has to get done somehow. In the mean time, I feel it's about time SOMEBODY put the overcrowded prison population to work doing something that actually pays back to the community they owe.
If the members of the community had the money then they could hire the people who would be in prison to do the things that need to be done and the people who would be in prison would not need to go to prison. Paid productive people who feel included in society and who feel like they can contribute and do OK by playing the game will play the game. The harder it is to play the game and get by the higher the motivation to cheat. There are some hard-cores whose brains are fundamentally broken who will always do bad stuff but they are a minority. BUT putting people in jail does not fix people - it makes them worse - and even if you use them as slave labour it doesn't fix them - because they know they are being taken advantage of. They may be criminal but they aren't stupid.
Now, follow the prison worker model to its ultimate conclusion.
People are working for the government but "the government" decides that it can't afford them so it "hires" some prisoners. Now there are some out of work people who need money to cover all the bills that they have been covering. Most will lose the things that they have worked for all their lives - houses, savings, spouses. Some will kill themselves, some will find lower paying work, some will subsist on handouts because transferring prisoners into the labour market didn't create any new jobs. Some of those guys will end up in jail. Now you have more jail workers so you can replace more government workers. Repeat.
And if you found you had a need for more workers you could just pass laws against being poor. It's not like that sort of thing hasn't already been done before. This is how you create a "legal" slave class - it's not new but we had thought we had got rid of it.
Since each round of this system dumps excess workers into the system who have to compete against each other and with "free" labour, each round pushes down wages for everyone (except for owners who find their profits go up - until a deadly point when they find that they can't get customers and they can't push wages lower than zero to make up for that fact). Meanwhile everyone believes that their employer values them because they are better at the job than everyone else but in the end the only thing that really matters is who is cheaper.
The more prisoners doing work the less good paying work there is for people who aren't in prison. It helps the rich guys who don't want to pay their fair share into keeping the country running but it kills everyone else.
I doubt that they are yours.
