Brad Plumer had a typically good post on prison labor a couple days ago. He describes how corporations are making a lot of money off of making goods in prisons, where they've got a (literally) captive labor force that they can pay miniscule wages. There's plenty of questions to be asked about whether this creates perverse and horrible incentives for the corporations to support imprisonment of more people (perhaps through maintaining draconian drug laws), but there's also a sort of practical question.
If these corporations are making tons of money off of government contracts, doesn't that mean that the government should bargain harder for more favorable terms? Or to put a harder edge on it, that we should be worried about corrupt politicians giving sweetheart deals to their prison-labor-loving campaign contributors?
