Yes, I understood that. I think that's a fair response, although I don't think it's a definitive proof that it plays no role whatsoever. It suggests it could only have a limited role. But, like I said, it was a guess. It's mostly just free association: I read that article recently, found it interesting, and want to apply it to things. :P

OP is treating prisoners like a line item on a balance sheet.

They're people, not assets to be utilized, and people are generally not too keen on active participation in state-sponsored slavery.

The gulags didn't pay for themselves, either. They made extremely inefficient use of the slave labor provided. That's when the forced labor activities weren't outright murderous. How many millions of people died while constructing the roads through Siberia, for instance?

I'm sure there are plenty of prison programs already in place with the goal of having inmates use their time for positive things. $50/day a little under minimum wage, and think about how useful your average minimum wage employee is. Now add to the fact that they're literally forced to be there, and have a proclivity toward violence or some other form of debauchery that was looked down upon by society.

Keep your trinkets and flip flops coming from Thailand. Find some other way to keep people from landing themselves in prison and let costs go down naturally.

Why are people so keen to use the word slavery for things that clearly aren't slavery?

Because that's the insinuation from the OP.

The guys in the clink due to drunk driving offenses and working day release for a real wage in your plastic factory are the exception, not the rule. OP wants to know how to turn the other 98% of inmates into cash as well.

The products and services they'd be able to safely provide are already limited, much less doing so for a lower cost than you can get it from current foreign sources. So the only way to make that equation balance back toward the prisoners is to reduce (eliminate) the wage cost. Ergo, slavery.

The labor isn't free.

And no, the Gulags didn't pay for themselves. Removing millions of potential taxpayers is a costly affair.

Insightful, thanks. This answers all my questions.

quote]And no, the Gulags didn't pay for themselves. Removing millions of potential taxpayers is a costly affair.[/QUOTE]

I'll just assume that despite no sources or explanation, you know what you're talking about. And I'm sure most people in the US who spend significant time in prison are very valuable contributors to the tax fund both before and after incarceration.

This paper is specifically talking about the period from 1929 to 1938, but it concludes that the economic disadvantages of the gulags outweighed their advantages: https://www.academia.edu/33632103/Ho..._1929_and_1938. Basically they could have been an advantage if they were more efficient. But it turns out its expensive to let your workers just get sick and die.

This article also agrees: http://factsanddetails.com/russia/Ec...ntry-5165.html

Thanks. Mentioning the gulags in the OP was more of an aside, but it's still somewhat informative. I don't want to sign up and download the first article, so maybe it has specific and itemized expenses, but I'm skeptical that just letting people in gulags get sick and die would be more expensive than giving them healthcare. I assume slaves in the US in the 1700s were profitable, or else people wouldn't have owned them, so the USSR being unable to utilize gulag slavery for profit seems dubious. Maybe that quote is accounting for the cost of the whole enterprise of sending people to mines and building infrastructure that ended up being unprofitable, while had the gulagers just been working on projects less speculative or poorly planned, they would have been profitable. And more to the point of this thread, if the gulags drained the equivalent of $1,000 per person per year from the Soviet economy, that would be a tremendous savings over our average of $30,000. And again, for the keyboard warriors in this thread, I'm not making any normative statements about turning prisons into gulags, just curious about the economics of it.

You were the one who stated that the labor was free.

I don't know what the prison population of the US has to do with the prison populations of the Gulag. The gulags were a political instrument as much as a judicial one, and the party could send you there without going through the courts. If you and me had had this conversation back in CCCP and somebody overheard it, we'd probably both be at severe risk for ending up in one. Me for questioning the ethics of the state and you for questioning its efficiency.

But other than that, you could probably make a decent increase in the amount of prisoners in the US prison population who become taxpayers, if you bothered to make an effort. Of course such things means looking at people as just that, and not free labor.

Right, that was implied in one part of my post. Per capita cost is rooted in required living conditions by law in the US...

If the US wanted to, it could eliminate pay and give no ****s about the living conditions gulag style and US economy would not lose $1k an inmate. It'd churn a profit

Also, just a side note because I was curious myself, Cali's ridicuhigh per capita cost is partly due to the courts ruling overcrowding in prisons unconstitutional. They were forced to reduce their population and the rising cost of labor to maintain and secure the facilities combined with the labor force not reducing in proportion to the reduction in prison population = more per inmate in cost...

Which was implied in another part of my post. The per capita cost drops when you close a prison and said closed prison's population relocates to a facility that can take them in. (Relatively) same labor cost for the prison but an influx of new inmates = less per inmate in cost

Two things come to mind. 1) In the data and analytics age, fed gov't (or perhaps state by state?) could track and analyze all prisons in the state or country (like a sortable stats website type thing like in DFS) so as to shift around prisoners to keep each prison at max capacity and short of overcrowding wherever it's required by law. Think cleaning out clutter to create space. Nationwide, I'd imagine a lot of prisons could actually close for lack of necessity as a result.

2) Privatize all prisons. Private sector will max out productivity of inmates on profit motive alone, and a network of prisons working in conjunction with one another could add to that. Think moving inmates with certain skills to one prison and other skills to another, thereby optimizing the "work force" capacity to produce a certain thing or complete a certain project or provide a certain service.

There was a thread about homelessness in the old forum where I put forth an idea of a stadium size facility that the homeless can function within and receive shelter. The facility would have some sort of system and the people using the facility would participate in its maintenance, subsidizing it's own cost, etc etc...

If we rethought how prison facilities are built, then perhaps an idea of a stadium size facility or campus could somehow allow prisoners to build things more efficiently or just build bigger things. How feasible that is who knows, but prisons all around the country have their inmates doing all kinds of different things as we speak. Different locales dictate different production...A nationwide network could revolutionize productivity and service specific needs for specific locales, only now Cali can produce something for Alabama, etc

Even if you ignore the enormous societal cost of the CCCP worker camps, consider that it couldn't even turn a profit in a vacuum even if half their prison population were pretty much ordinary citizens with a far broader skill-set and education level than an average population of actual criminals. So you're probably hoping for a lot if you think indenturing US prison inmates is going to turn a profit or become revenue-neutral.

Then again, looking at the economy of a prison in a vacuum is a bit like watching a ball-game with no players. It's sort of missing the point.

Weren’t these gulags you all are talking about run in a socialist society?

Only the victim of a blindered propagandistic education like that common in the US would consider Stalin and Brezhnev "socialist".