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.

Top private prison companies see profits amid administration's immigration crackdown

~ https://abcnews.go.com/US/top-private-prison-companies-profi...

Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics

  Two corporations, GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, Inc. (CCA), manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US.

  These contracts are extremely lucrative; in the 2017 fiscal year, GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined revenue of more than 4 billion dollars.

  Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are invested in mass incarceration because incarceration is profitable for them.

  Such corporations ensure that correctional facilities are in demand through a variety of techniques, including minimum occupancy clauses and political lobbying efforts.

~ https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/prison-contracts/