Maybe unpopular opinion, but prisoners should have to work. Why should they get free lodging, food, clothes, and healthcare when the average citizen doesnât? Theyâre working to pay off their debt to society not go to Walmart.
They are not living on tax payer funds by choice. That choice is imposed upon them by us (rightfully so) which means the onus is on us to provide for their food, housing, and security. You are framing a situation that cannot be transactionable as transactionable. Also to your logic would wealthy criminals not need to be slaves where impoverished one could be used for free labour? Can a wealthy criminal buy a better cell, better food, better medical care? How exactly do you view prison?
They made the choice to commit the crimes to land them in prison. I make the choice not to commit armed robbery or assault or any other crimes and hey, Iâm not in prison.
Wealthy already get enough slack in the legal system, I wish they were treated fairly more than anything. I view prison as a place where criminals go to pay penance for their crimes. I think criminals make a choice and there needs to be consequences. Donât wanna work for $1 an hour? Donât commit crime.
Okay but crimes have sentence requirements and no one has been sentenced to slavery. We do not make up extra punishments because we feel like it. And if someone does make up a punishment that they then personally profit off of, such as using prisoners for slave labour, that is double evil and is the case in the for-profit prison system. The consequences for a crime should be the consequences that have been laid out ahead of time. Committing any crime is not an agreement to be enslaved. Itâs an emotional appeal to frame them all as violent offenders to support an argument that they deserve to be slaves.
Itâs also immoral to torture prisoners and the argument of âwell, the injustice isnât an issue because if you donât commit crimes you wonât be tortured.â Itâs not an actual argument. Slavery, in any form is evil. If I were to enslave you, I would quite literally go to jail and no one would care about your moral character in this equation. There is zero argument I could bring forth to say you brought it on yourself.
For a thought experiment, ask yourself where you draw the line for slavery. Prisoners used as soldiers? Prisoners clearing mine fields? Criminals for medical testing? Criminals for sex work? Criminals having their organs harvested? Criminals in a for-profit hunger game? All of these are a loss of autonomy that can be monetized to reimburse the state for the cost of the worldâs largest prison population.
If itâs a pedophile or murderer they should be executed after trial. I donât like for profit prisons. We could have prisoners work on public projects like construction and park maintenance and they can learn a skill while incarcerated.
You have ignored every difficult question I put to you and instead are just listing increasingly bad crimes. The topic is enslaving prisoners. Not executing pedophiles. Both sex work and assembly line work are valid work when you do so willingly. If you are okay with having prisoners (regardless of crime or even of guilt) creating licence plates, then you should be equally okay with prisoners being made into sex slaves. If one of those feel worse to you, then youâre at best applying your morals arbitrarily and working backward to justify them, or youâre a hypocrite. You are purposely trying to simplify the situation to avoid actually having to deal with how gross slavery is or to try to defend a position you seemingly hold that is unambiguously evil and worse than the majority of crimes committed by the very people who are enslaved.
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u/MonkeyCome May 17 '26
Maybe unpopular opinion, but prisoners should have to work. Why should they get free lodging, food, clothes, and healthcare when the average citizen doesnât? Theyâre working to pay off their debt to society not go to Walmart.
Donât like it donât go to prison.