We still have slave labor in the USA, just throw people in prison and strongly suggest to them their lives will suck less if they work for 30 cents per hour. If they want to go outside, they can get $1 an hour but they risk death.
The real danger would be the possibility that this is incentivizing the government to increase the prison population in order to reap the fruits of greater prison labor.
Of course, that's all to say nothing about the national disgrace that 5% of the world's population has 25% of the world's prisoners.
California prisons are horrifically overcrowded, literally they are under court order to reduce it, so your qualifier fails.
It is not. The power differential between the prisoner and the state is so great that any consent is null and void. As such it can never be voluntary. It is the same reason a prisoner cannot voluntarily have sex with a guard, except the relationship between prisoner and state is even greater of power difference than that between prisoner and guard.
Taking the drug war into account, it does become painfully clear that the present system is morally reprehensible, arguably even amounting to a continuation of African-American slavery, in a modern form.
In my original comment, I only had the hypothetical scenario of prison work in mind. It should have been a lot more obvious that actual context summarily demolishes any argument for it.
You do know that the private prison system is literally leaning on state governments and threatening them with breach of contract for not keeping prisons full, right?
... and that not only does the US have the highest per capita incarcaration rate of any country in the world, but California has an even higher per capity incarcaration rate?
... and that many US corporations have business models which rely on prison labor?
Assuming you are correct, I retract any sympathy my other comment displayed toward these kind of work programs.
Cursory DuckDuckGoing yields many more.
David Ball, an assistant professor in criminal justice at the Santa Clara University School of Law, says inmate firefighters are part of a long history of prison labour in the US, pointing out that when Congress passed the 13th Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, it made a specific exclusion for penal servitude by including the phrase "except as a punishment for crime".
As outright slavery - the treatment of human beings as property - once was.
An argument is often made that if a prisoner is contributing work that is essential to the operation of the prison, that is easier to accept than an economy which relies on prison labor.
There are wildfires in California every single year. That means that every single year, some prisoners - likely nonviolent - will be asked to risk their lives for $1 a day.
$1 a day.
I bet some of those folks only crime was selling weed.
-not saying I am in support of the situation (or that I'm not) ...