It is worth trying though it will strip some very powerful people of their slave labor.

The thing I find often that anytime you suggest and alternative they can often be WHAT IFed to death. "What if you let a serial killer run free?" That single question can be used to justify imprisoning millions of people and a large amount of them are likely in prison for victimless crimes. In other words, what they are prison for shouldn't be a crime in the first place.

Now you used the term "Hard Labor". That was indeed a deterrent if that labor was something that no one outside of prison wanted to do. It ceased being this quite some time ago. We are possibly sending more jobs into prisons than we are outsourcing them, but people don't really know about it as it is kept quiet. My posts the other day covered that with some specific examples to back that statement.

There are a lot of different ideas for how to deal with justice, and injustice. The problem is that just like with our education system we try to pretend that there is ONE SOLUTION that is suitable for all crimes and all prisoners. This is not true for the justice system just like it is not true for education.

One box does not fit all.

Speaking of this topic can often bring out the "just kill them" crowd that think we are whining about prison being unfair. That is not the case at all. The fact of the matter is there are people in prison who should not be. The jobs in prison are not exactly HARD LABOR anymore and it is much more like a vocational technical school now days. The more inmates they have the more new markets they can push into, the more programs they can start competing with the businesses who are outside of the prison system. The difference is the competition does not get to use slave labor, the prison does.