Sometimes it's used by the state itself for cost savings, as in California under then-attorney general Kamala Harris (now Vice President):
> “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers from Harris’s office wrote in a filing.
Well, the upper middle class who have higher tier jobs. Not the working middle class. (In USA everyone is "middle" class, because most are too proud to have class consciousness.)
“In 2015, just 8% of the nearly 1.53 million state and federal prisoners in the U.S. were in private facilities” [0]. Prison slavery is not concentrated in and won’t disappear by closing private prisons. [1]
IIRC the first prison in the US was established in Auburn, NY specifically because slavery had been outlawed and some sociopath was like “ok, yeah, technically, but if we just convict them of a crime first...”
Private businesses pay private prisons far more than the prisoners get paid but less than legit labor driving out fairly paid labor.
Everyone who is benefiting lobbies far stricter laws and harsher sentences not for societies benefit but so their labor force can grow.
This slave labor is disproportionately taken from minorities and the poor who it is more acceptable to enslave. Mostly by patrolling areas which have lots of minorities and shaking them down in hopes of finding drugs. See the fact that black and white people do drugs at the same rate but white people are far less likely to be prosecuted.
In one case they actually caught 2 judges taking bribes from private detention to hand juvenile offenders maximum sentences. Effectively selling other people's kids.
Banning private prisons only removes a fraction of the incentive.
It's not just private prisons. Public prisons also sieze prisoner labor for sale to private customers or for government work like makit license plates.
When the prisoners make the prison owners (public or private) more money than they cost, there is pressure to imprison more people and for longer. That can lead to pressure on the enforcers to look harder for infractions… but they might turn a blind eye to infractions by their friends and bosses[0]. Pretty soon, you get feudalism.
[0] Seven of the candidates in the last Tory leadership contest (including the winner) admitted to using drugs. The government has no plans to decriminalise recreational use of any of those substances: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/high-tories...
Do you see anything wrong with having the most incancerated population in the world (25% of the global prison population for just 5% of the world population), or having the most horrendous prison conditions in all the western world?
Do you see anything wrong with blacks and latinos being overrepresented?
Do you see anything wrong with being such a backwater that you still have the death penalty, not to mention BS like "three strikes" laws?
Do you see anything wrong with forced prison labor undercutting regular businesses in the same areas?
The idea that they should earn their keep implies that residing in prison is something of positive value for the prisoner that they should feel obligated to give something back.
Kept well supplied with labour thanks to Kamala Harris and her draconian persecution of marijuana related “crimes”.