There is, however, a very clear conflict of interest caused by allowing the justice system to benefit financially from the people they imprison.
Courts do by giving different sentences based on sentencing guidelines, the nature of the crime, and the individual circumstances.
The fact that the USA has the largest prison population per capita in the world, and by a fairly large factor, is solid evidence that slave labor for prisoners is bad.
Our legal system has facilities for extracting reparations from criminals. Let's use that instead of continuing slavery.
If we determine, as a society, that convicted criminals should "pay" for their crimes, that should be a civil matter determined by civil processes, not the fancies (and profit motive) of a prison corporation.
About a decade ago, The Economist ran an article highlighting how the folks owning the prisons lobbied for harsher laws and such, as they made so much money off the "free" prison labor.
The details are a bit fuzzy given it's been so long since I read it, but one example that stuck with me was US citizen who had been in prison for several years, due to transporting normal fish, crabs or similar in a plastic container, which apparently was against the law in the Caribbean country he was visiting (IIRC to protect endangered species from illegal export).
He was prosecuted and imprisoned back in the US, due to some law that was initially intended to be used against drug cartel folks.
Of course, not saying that this applies to all of the prison population.
Why paying someone if you can get slaves who do the work for free.
That damages the economy on multiple levels, not to mention that a demand for slave workers leads to unnecessary imprisonment and cases like this
This article is about what the government produces using their slave labor though.
We all understand on a fairly commonsense level that the number of prior offenses tells you something about the likelihood of future offenses and also informs one's willingness to tolerate the marginal offense. If this last of your partner's indiscretions drives you to leave the marriage and your friend says to you, "wow, man, you left a marriage because they came home late one time?" we all understand why that's a ridiculous characterization of what happened. And, yet, when someone with a long rap sheet commits a relatively minor crime and is punished harshly because of their prior offenses we have to endure headlines like, "Man sentenced to prison for stealing candy bar." This headline makes the same mistake as your incredulous friend.
The modern backlash against 3-strikes laws, etc, seems to me to be deeply confused. Our language is full of idioms like, "the straw that broke the camel's back," because our willingness to tolerate an offense is obviously informed by the number of previous offenses.
How could one's priors possibly not matter?
The only qualification I'd make is that I think a prohibition on use for parolees is totally unobjectionable and this is an area where criminal justice reformers lose the plot. Probation and parole are just that -- you're by definition under a watchful eye. The state is saying, in effect, you have not yet demonstrated to us that you can handle free society and until you have you can't get drunk or high.
Not only does that strike me as totally reasonable, I'd say that anyone who finds themselves in that situation who nevertheless figures, "why not just get drunk/high, anyway" is a person sending a strong signal that the court was wrong to trust them.
Imagine yourself on parole. Would you risk it? Exactly.
Because the prison doesn’t have to pay fair wages, it takes work from others that would earn better wages—this unfairly concentrates wealth in the hands of prison owners at the expense of free workers who are competing in the same market.
There are plenty of alternatives, and it doesn't take much cogitation to come up with much more reasonable ones than the one you propose.
I forget the URL, but somebody last year posted a link that let you search court cases and I did a search for "confidence interval" (CI). One of the top searches was written by a judge and wrote about how if the forensics industry doesn't care about CI for their results then they don't think it should matter for their cases. Which I basically interpret as, the judge doesn't care if forensics don't bother to check if their methods work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kye2oX-b39E [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpYYdCzTpps [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f2iawp0y5Y
That does not validate slavery.