I agree with most of your provisions. Number 4 has some problems. I don’t mind enforcing hard labor on inmates. The reality is that that forced labor sometimes takes work away from, undercuts, legitimate private contractors. I was involved in a State Capital renovation that required that a certain percentage of the work had to be completed by the wood shops in the prison. I had to do all the drawings, layout, engineering etc that was then shipped off to the prisons so that their taxpayer funded machines could do the (at that point) easy stuff. Just another tax that goes unrecognized.
Good point but ‘hard labor’ is even more effective when it does not involve anything productive. The French had a system where convicts rode something akin to an exercise bike. Had to ride so many miles per day to get fed. Produced nothing which denied the convicts the satisfaction of productive work.
i don’t ant inmates doing anything like this. working people need jobs, and the state is always making more and more laws to turn innocent people into criminals, so i can see how this could be abused by government and private prison companies.
Used to have a County 'Workhouse' where I live. It was for men sentenced for a year or less.
It both kept them out of the State Penitentiary (hard time) and gave them a chance to learn a trade (as well as sober up --- many were stone alcoholics) and turn their lives around.
They had an auto body shop there where they fixed county cars. They had a wood working shop where they built furniture for county offices. They had a shop where they made signs for the county parks etc. and even had a farm where they raised their own food and enough left over to feed the county hospitals.
Some stupid idiot could go into that place after getting caught steeling a car or whatever and could learn how to fix them instead and make a living by doing so. The idea was to give them an alternative to what they were doing. It didn't work all the time, but it worked a lot.
Nothing like that left now.
I read a report on it once and they had a document from the guy who was the head of it back 100 years ago when they had the inmates making brooms complaining that the politicians were all over him for 'competing' with private broom makers.
In today's world, that can't happen. Today, high paid unionized government employees fix the county cars and make the county signs. The food and furniture all go to 'the lowest bidder" -- who happens to be connected politically. Maybe next, we'll have $100k a year SEIU broom makers on the government payroll. ;~((
Go to jail now, and all you get is free HBO and lots of free lessons on how to be a better criminal.
There was a recent book that argued that prison labor became a secondary workforce, and employers were always pestering prison officials for more workers, incentivizing sheriffs to put people in prison (mostly itinerant or poor blacks, in the South -- the author didn't expand his scope to include thrifty, moralizing New England or the industrial North) and keep them there for minor infractions --- very much as Chinese prison labor is kept busy today and used to benchmark all Chinese wages (by sapping and undermining them).
When the Supreme Court forbade employers to exploit prison labor in this way, a well-known Atlanta brickworks went broke in less than two years, although the proprietor's family, having made their pile, continued to be prominent in Atlanta society down to this day.