I tend to agree with that. Prisoners are not there to make profits for companies but to pay their debt to the public. Making them into free labor for business invites large scale corruption into the legal system that has enough already. They can be worked plenty hard without going down that road.
Isn’t it possible that the money the companies pay to the prisons go towards the prisoners’ meals and housing, instead of making the money come from tax payers?
“Prisoners are not there to make profits for companies but to pay their debt to the public. Making them into free labor for business invites large scale corruption into the legal system that has enough already. They can be worked plenty hard without going down that road.”
Your reasoning is abominable. The cost of housing inmates, especially life-without-parole violent murderers like the example in this story, is excessive and cannot be recouped by prisoner labor. The economics of convict labor are abysmal, so much so that throughout written history it has been used sparsely and only for generally non-violent and tractable offenders, or for suicidal tasks for which there was no free-market equivalent labor source.
If convict labor were a net economic advantage, it wouldn’t have taken long for past tyrants and totalitarian oligarchies to criminalize birth and enslave the whole population in prisons - the only reason we haven’t seen that before isn’t because murdering dictators are squeamish or overly sympathetic to criminals, it’s simply because you can’t throw too many people in gulags and prisons before the costs involved drag your entire nation into poverty.
Our version of convict labor is even more inefficient than historical models in that we are not allowed to brutalize or kill in order to keep the population of prisoners in line or keep costs down, nor are goods and services derived from convict labor allowed to compete with private goods and services in the wider economy. The only lawful purchasers of prison-manufactured goods are other government agencies.
Further, your mythical “debt to society” is fuzzy-brained nonsense. Criminals are in prison to punish them, to deter other criminals, and to reduce crime in the community by incapacitating and segregating criminals away from society that would otherwise re-offend. In ages past we accomplished all of those tasks via execution.
The only thing convict labor can do is slightly lower the cost of segregating threats like this animal away from the community. There is no profit involved. There’s a reason long prison sentences were unheard of until the modern era: the costs involved are so prohibitive that when you are faced with a career criminal it’s simply far more efficient for society just to put them down like rabid animals. Only the phenomenal wealth and abundance of industrialized societies can support a large prison population - everyone else has to resort to rope and firing squads to get rid of trouble-makers.
Our society is no longer willing to hang horse thieves, nor even execute murderers as a general rule, so the only solution to excessive criminal predation is expensive incapacitation. Convict labor, even mythical solutions like convict slavery, cannot make this a costless, let alone profitable endeavor - all it can do is lower the price-tag of keeping wastes-of-flesh like this story’s example off the streets when you and society as a whole are too squeamish to execute them.
Private companies only make a “profit” from housing convicts because it costs them a little less to do so than the government due to free-market efficiencies, so the government can split the difference with a private company and both come out slightly ahead. This mystical profit is still a net loss to society, the tax payer, etc., it’s just a less significant loss than letting an amazingly inept and inefficient government bureaucracy do the same task.
The guards get a paycheck, the wardens get a paycheck, and society pays. It’s just when the guards and wardens are private contractors society pays a little less; just as society pays a little less when inmates are put to work. There’s nothing in that equation that will ever, EVER, support a profitable prison-slave-trade, nor is there anything there that could allow a runaway prison-industrial-complex to start enslaving average Americans. All it can ever do is make it a little cheaper to tolerate the continued existence of people that your ancestors would have executed.