[kelseyfrog]

Not untrue, but it's important to also point out the prison labor system as an economic factor that incentivizes maintaining or expanding itself. Independent from our collective riches, if the marginal return on leveraging prison labor is greater than that of non-prison labor, then the finance argument makes itself.

The reason that it's important to point this out, is that prison labor is an element of growing civilizational real wealth and this nuance is important.

[wongarsu]

At the same time, a criminal system that doesn't try to rehabilitate and reintegrate deprives society of skilled workers, at best delegating them to slave labor in the prison system. It gets even worse if you add unpaid work that prisoners would perform if they weren't imprisoned, like raising their children.

I suspect on a societal level the US justice system costs more than a system without prison labor and a focus on rehabilitation (Sweden gets mentioned frequently, but most of Western Europe qualifies). The US system self-perpetuates because of the profit it brings individuals, not because it's beneficial to society.