Okay, I fully understand that using prisoners as unpaid labor is basically slavery and how badly this reflects on petty criminals or the falsely accused but….why exactly should I feel bad about convicted rapists being used for slave labor?
Because slavery is inherently wrong rather than conditionally wrong. It doesn’t go from evil to right based on who’s being enslaved.
That’s fair.
More importantly, if you have any use – any at all – from sentencing a person (I don’t mean rehabilitation being a net gain, but stuff like performing medical experiments on prisoners), it’s inevitably going to skew the judgement, even if it’s unconsciously: I should let the guy go on a technicality, but he’s obviously a real scumbag, and kidney transplants are rare, so…
Yeah. Why should you feel bad about convicted rapists being treated badly? Because for-profit prisons have been busted bribing judges to send them prisoners. Which means that at least some people “convicted” of crimes were convicted and sentenced only because it was economically advantageous to someone else – they would not have been treated that way otherwise.
Which, statistically, means some of them are innocent. Which is to say: Yes, some rapists walk free. But some convicted rapists are not rapists at all. Thanks to the decades-long FBI scam of claiming they had working analysis of hair to determine whether hair samples matched people (since debunked; at least one person was convicted based on hair that more modern science can prove came from a dog, not even a human being at all), we have estimates of bogus conviction rates ranging from 5% to 30% or higher, with “exonerated by DNA evidence” being a very common outcome for death row cases that get examined again with newer evidence.
But also: Even if they really did do the thing, even if they are really that bad, slavery stays wrong.
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