America's for-profit prison system has effectively enslaved millions of Americans - primarily black, brown, and poor Americans - to the enrichment of massive corporations. Those corporations have the legal right to torture any of their prisoners who refuse to work; they can be put in solitary confinement, which the UN classifies as torture.
Those corporations also lobby politicians to increase their supply of slaves by imprisoning more and more Americans. They provide generous campaign donations to highly-placed politicians in both parties.
But one thing that's also interesting is that those work camps (which is what for-profit prisons really are) exert downward pressure on the wages of ordinary American workers. If you can rent the services of slaves for a fraction of the cost of hiring a non-slave worker, what good businessman would hesitate? And what does that do to the bargaining power of free workers?
This seems to play into it as well:
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