In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

If we get serious about actual rehabilitation in prisons instead of punishment there’s never been a better time to be able to learn just about anything on your own time. But we’d have to stop dehumanizing criminals. Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.

We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.

Not a fan of private prisons, but prisons (public or private) don't make money. They are a massive cost to the government. Incarceration is expensive (Google gives me a median of $65K per prisoner per year), and the percentage of prisoners that are able to earn more money through labor than the cost to lock them up is probably very low.

It might cost the government $65k to imprison someone, but that money isn’t disappearing. It’s going into the pockets of all the private businesses running the prisons who take a hefty profit

There seems to be a presumption that private prisons are widespread. And while not rare, they are only 8% of prisons. There is widespread use of profit-seeking vendors like food suppliers or phone companies though.

I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).