Everybody faces this dilemma: work for the job or face worse consequences. You can spin it negative if you like. What alternative is there to this? Not let anybody reduce their sentence with public service, to serve some armchair philosopher's notion of what's 'extortion'?
The stated base case is never the base case. This is an economic fact. When the government says employers have to pay 10% of your wages as payroll tax, employers pay you 10% less. When Amazon says free shipping unless your order is under a certain amount, they raise prices on everything else. When your bank gives you 3% cashback on your credit card, every merchant pays a 5% credit card interchange fee and raises their prices 5% to pay for that. And when we parole people at half their prison sentence, the sentence is twice what we think they deserve.
I think having the option helps firefighters, helps prisoners, and helps society.
Everyone is better off.
Firefighters get additional support combating a huge problem, prisoners get shorter sentences, in society gets better fire prevention leading to fewer lives and Land Lost
Professional firefighters have to compete with prisoners for pay depressing firefighting wages.
Prisoners have to do dangerous work and suffer long term health consequences for no compensation. Reduced sentences don’t count because the base sentence can be set to whatever the state requires to meet slave labor demands.
Society loses because slave labor artificially reduces the cost of natural disasters. If slave labor is required to make an area safe for habitation then I submit that is not a safe place for habitation.
I think the means are ethical, as well as the ends.
At the end of the day, I dont think each of the things you said are true. I dont think there is wage competition, I dont think the state is setting sentences based on labor demands, and I dont think there is an impact to locations of habitation.
As stated elsewhere, I think penal labor is just and moral in concept.
However, I do agree that the moral hazards are too great around combining it with for-profit prisons and corporations.
I think the one area where I would find private employment acceptable is work release programs at market rate, provided the pay goes to the prisoners instead of the state. I think these programs should be expanded, and could help with child support, victim restitution, and stability upon release.
