Ad hominem attack, nice Joe. You know that I sign my name to posts usually, you have met me socially, and you are deflecting from the topic after I called you out on your not doing your own homework (and expecting a woman to do it for you). In polite circles, people of Privilege such as yourself are expected to learn about oppression for themselves. To listen to Black voices. The ones I listen to are all too familiar with jail for profit in many forms (Ferguson practiced another, and there's also Kamala Harris' current bail reform bill you can find FMI).

But here:

A federal judge in New York ruled last year that workers in a related court-supervised work program had no claim to the minimum wage. There, too, unpaid work was offered as an "alternative to incarceration" for minor violations and to ensure that "[d]efendants who do not have money to make restitution should, when practical, pay for their offense through community service."

Even if community service workers received debt reductions based on the minimum wage, this still would be tantamount to seizing 100% of their earnings. That is contrary to federal standards that cap wage garnishment to preserve for workers some gain from their labor and some basis for their subsistence. Yet in Los Angeles and elsewhere, workers even have to pay a fee out of pocket for the privilege of working for free to stay out of jail. These fees go to the courthouse referral agency that assigns defendants to specific work sites.

One final problem: When the criminal justice system supplies agencies with free labor, they have every incentive to use it instead of hiring regular employees. New York's experiment with large-scale "workfare" in the 1990s — unpaid labor to maintain welfare benefits — is instructive. Not only did that effort subject workers to unsafe conditions and harassment, but it also allowed Rudolph Giuliani's administration to cut thousands of unionized public sector jobs by subbing in workfare workers.

Debt peonage may indeed be the lesser evil relative to debtors' prison. But why accept those choices? At issue are government-manufactured debts born in part of racial profiling and "broken windows" policing. Why not change the criminal justice practices that produce these debts? Moreover, debtors' inability to pay is born of unemployment and the degradation of jobs. Only by ignoring a failing labor market can we celebrate coerced, unpaid, unprotected work just because human caging is even worse.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0408-zatz-debt-peonage-20160408-story,amp.html

If you still really don't think folks are profiting off prison labor, you are at best naive (or worse). I merely assumed you were ill read and I'm surprised that you're so biased against me personally that you can't admit when you're wrong or I'll informed.

~Susan