[ThrustVectoring]

The law isn't some fixed thing that we, as a society, have no control over. If you read the history of the War on Drugs, we essentially criminalized a good chunk of what African Americans do, with the very thinly veiled purpose of oppression.

[silassales]

Okay and I very much agree that this is a problem, but that is an entirely different problem that needs to be addressed with a less corrupt law system. Not related to using prisoners to work instead of letting them rot in a cell.

[ThrustVectoring]

No, it's highly interrelated. The ability for the judicial system to extract rents via prison labor alters the incentives for having and enforcing oppressive laws. Currently, forcing people to work on goat farms through threatening to imprison them is limited by economics - the police, prosecutors, etc only have so much resources, and the marginal prisoner costs the system money. When that's no longer true, things can end up dystopian in a hurry.