[aredox]

Public prisons's use of forced labor is not better than private ones.

And people in prisons (private or public) count towards total population in counties, giving them more weight in elections, despite none of the prisoners having chosen to be there voluntarily nor having the right to vote. https://www.vera.org/news/how-mass-incarceration-shapes-our-...

[slillibri]

True, but there is this mythology that all prisons in the USA are private prisons controlled solely by corporations, which is wildly untrue. Public prisons aren't much better than private prisons, due to the fact that they are just punishment and not rehabilitation. On your second point, undocumented immigrants also count in the census and give more weight in representation and elections, even though they cannot vote. In a perfect world, we would expect elected officials to represent all of their constituents, not just those who voted for them, but we are far from that.

[aredox]

>On your second point, undocumented immigrants also count in the census

Except immigrants choose where they want to live.

The prisoners are where they are because the party in power (usually Republican, borderline neo-Confederate) creates laws that lead to extensive incarceration (such as "three strikes") and is the one which decides where to build prisons, which results in biased elections in their favor. Which reeks of the pre-civil war rules that slaves count for political weight.