I just don’t see how it creates an incentive...sure on paper it’s possible, but it would take Third-World-like corruption for that to come to fruition, and we are nowhere close to that.
If I’m a furniture manufacturer and, if I’m paying a woodworker $27/hour, plus the employment taxes, it might cost me $75 in labour to have somebody make a table.
However, if I only have to pay an inmate $9 to make that same table, that $66 that I could reap in extra profit from each table that I sell that was made by an inmate. If, due to a sweet deal with the state government, I get 20 inmates per state prison, and possibly 5 prisons in that state, that’s 100 inmates per state. Potentially, that could be $6600 per day that I would reap in extra profit. Multiply that by 250 days per year, that’s $1.5 million dollars that I could potentially reap from inmate labour.
You don’t think that is an incentive to get as many people incarcerated as possible?