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?
So you, a lowly furniture manufacturer, is going to have to power to influence whether or not a person is found guilty in a court of law, or even to determine their sentence?
Right there is the flaw in your reasoning. You assume the inmate can do as good a job, and as fast a job, as a skilled and experienced woodworker. If an unskilled idiot could do the same job as the $27/hr woodworker, you would save even more money by putting the factory in a right-to-work state, and hiring minimum wage labor.
The value of prison labor, is that the employer can invest time in some of the prisoners to get them skilled, which will give them a trade once they get out of prison.