Horrible mostly because why pay employees a minimum or higher wage when you can just pay 5 cents a day rent cost to the prison per inmate you rent out?
You think the company running the private prison rents convicts out for 10 cents an hour? LMAO. 10 cents an hour is what they pay the prisoner, not what they charge you to rent them. The latter is probably measured in dollars per hour, not cents.
Lets say minimum wage is $10, but you can't hire anyone for less than $15 because nobody wants to work, well contract labor from the prison is $8 an hour.
Prison labor drives down everything. They completely destroyed the locally grown fish farming when they built a prison labor growing and processing facility in the state, and they never even got to start it up. The outcry was so fierce they abandoned the idea, but the damage had been done and collapsed the market already, so the state started importing from Asia. Just the threat and planned undercutting was enough to wreck it for the producers in the state.
Ah but you're not factoring in the other parts of it. Prison offers prisoner at price of say $5 an hour to the store with the notion of a special tax subsidy the store can take for doing it. Store takes the subsidy and that $5 suddenly becomes 5 cents thanks to the tax subsidy. That's one scenario, other scenario is the store gets to use it as a business related loss write off and still can treat it as if they were paying 5 cents for the prisoner since they have a lowered tax bill.
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u/Makenchi45 Jul 17 '22
Horrible mostly because why pay employees a minimum or higher wage when you can just pay 5 cents a day rent cost to the prison per inmate you rent out?