Still missing the point.   That isn't what they are doing.   They are taking jobs that are NOT always unpleasant that people who are not in prison then cannot compete with.     They are not pounding rocks, and doing things to deter being in prison.

>Many of the so-called "victimless" criminals weren't - they pleaded down from far more serious crimes.

SOME not Many.   Well I guess Many and some can be subjective.    Many doesn't have to mean a large % to still be many due to the serious amount of criminals we have.

The Majority of criminals in prison are in for victimless crimes and tend to be products of the war on drugs.   Their crime?   They were caught with drugs.   They were not selling them, and even if they had been people buying the drugs are doing so of their own free will.    Marijuanna for example is far less dangerous than alcohol.    Yet we sell that regularly, and we don't see a person selling it as a criminal.   We do not treat people that drink alcohol or who are caught with alcohol with them as a criminal.

The three strikes law when applied to the War on Drugs is where the vast majority of U.S. prisoners are coming from.   The statistics and the massive acceleration in prison population growth backs this up.

There are also a lot of different studies of these things, and it has even ended up in election cycle politicial empty promises from multiple candidates from multiple parties.    Do they tend to do anything once elected?   Not really just make it worse and increase the acceleration.

If they would look at Portugal which it is likely closing on a decade and a half since they decriminalized ALL drugs.    They instead focused on putting funds into making centers to help people who voluntarily wanted help.   The end result of this is that ALL crime related to drugs is down, all problems related to drugs are down, it cost less, and cases of HIV due to needle sharing and such are down.   When I say down I also say it not compared to just their past, but also when compared to other nations.

I worked for a company that provided furniture kits to inmates in 1994-1996.   The diesel trucks that often showed up were driven there by inmates who drove them in some cases more than a hundred miles to pick up what we were sending back to the prisons to be assembled, finished, etc.

We even shipped the Governor of Illinois desk via this fashion while I worked there.    We sent multiple large full trailer truck loads per week to facilities around the nation.   A lot in Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Texas, etc.

I put together the bills of ladings for the trucks, and the picking lists for the warehouse, later on I took on more roles.    So I had to deal with every truck that came and left.   I also scheduled the pickups when it was by a carrier that didn't happen to be an inmate driven truck...

That was the mid to late 90s.   I left there and went to work for IBM.   Before I left though I could see that the prisons were working on tooling up so they wouldn't have to buy parts and kits from outside of the prisons.    I mentioned it to the people I worked with as I could see it coming.

Sure enough that place and all places like it went out of business.    A large amount of office furniture is now fashioned in prisons.    Their catalogs of the goods and services they produce and make are growing rapidly and are pretty surprising.


EDIT: I wanted to add, I spoke to a few of the inmate truck drivers.   They would just wander around the warehouse while they waited for their load.   We had no security, it was easy to walk to and from the warehouse with no security checks.   There were no security guards.    I often road a bus to work during that time and then would walk a couple of blocks and up to the warehouse... there were always several loading bay doors on both sides of the building open.     

For that situation some in mates find it easier to live in prison than to try to find work and survive once they are out.   I've known at least three different in mates who eventually went and did some stupid crime just to get thrown back in jail.

One of them did rob a bank to get thrown back in.  He went in, told the teller he had a gun, and demanded she give him 50 cents so he could go make a phone call.   That phone call was simply to let his family know he was going back to prison.

We do not rehabilitate in this nation.   We enslave, profit from it, and we put it in remote facilities hidden from the public view so they do not see what is going on.   We make it very difficult for rehabilitation to work as we will treat people that serve their sentence as a criminal for the rest of their life.    Regardless of the type of crime.