This is not a question of about parroted nonsense and cultural norms. I mean what end product do they produce that justifies their existence in the first place.
I’m physically disabled and have been living in a prison like situation for nearly 11 years. How does my situation balance into the ethics of prisons? I’m on a path to homelessness and a premature death due to institutionalized neglect and abuse from US institutions. Criminals are housed and fed in exchange for similar isolation, abuse, danger, insurmountable debt, and a largely unemployable and destitute future. These seem to conflict in ethics.
160 years ago in 1865, slavery was outlawed except as punishment for a crime. This posed a severe shortage of cheap labor, which was solved by creating a plethora of fiddly little crimes targeting the poor and marginalized. The next 75 years, the role slavery filled was instead covered by convict leasing and prison peonage, ending only when FDR issued a circular ordering prisons to stop the practice because we were about to enter WW2 and it made us look like the bad guys. To replace the cheap labor of convict leasing, prisons instead became factories. Prisoners are technically paid now: they dont have access to the money, and it only goes towards paying bail as well as other expenses, but they are technically being paid for their work. Therefore, it’s not slavery! 🤔
This is the pragmatic reason why prisons exist: because slavery is illegal. We made up the moral reasoning because deep down we know it’s wrong. Back in the pre-civil-war era, we also had justifications for why slavery was good: the slaves were incapable of making moral decisions, we were civilizing a barbarous people, etc etc. It was bullshit then, and it’s still bullshit now.
This feels like nonsense to me, looking at the numbers. The U.S. spends something like $80 billion a year on prisons, and prison labor supposedly generates around $9 billion a year. What is that, a negative 81% ROI?
Prison labor like we read about is not humane and would be unconstitutional in a better country, but I can’t see it as the REASON for prisons. Ultimately, people feel good about punishing “bad” people. I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.