We imprison far too many people in the US for minor drug offences, but it's definitely not in order to reintroduce slavery...
1) Incarcerates people at a higher rate than any country besides Seychelles
2) Abolished slavery for all persons except prisoners:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted..."
Between local, state, and federal prisons, we're looking at roughly 500,000 imprisoned for drug-related offenses[1]. Yes, the labor of these people is a trivial portion of the overall economy, but it still produces huge profit for those running the show: CoreCivic has a market cap of ~$2.6 billion. They exist to extract value from the lives and labors of the people who their institutions keep under lock and key.
There is a direct incentive for these corporations to increase the number of prisoners in the system, and they leverage their power to pursue that incentive, lobbying for and even drafting legislation that enforces three strike and mandatory minimum rules.[2] They are actively pushing governments to imprison more people, and profiting from the resulting state sanctioned slavery.
[1] https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2017.png [2] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/aug/22/study-shows...
It's still a hugely profitable business on its own for those involved, so that comparison is kind of beyond the point. Pimps profits also make for "a negligible part of the economy" but their profession is a thing.
>Prisoners do work, sure, but that's to pass the time.
If only.
https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-j...
They get to spend time outside prison and interact with people who aren't prisoners or guards. I could imagine volunteering for that if I was a prisoner. That doesn't make using prisoners as cheap labor OK, especially for dangerous jobs, but it doesn't surprise me at all that prisoners would rather do that than sit in a cell.
It's easy to make volunteers out of people if:
1) Their living conditions are so bad in your hellish prisons that that most alternatives seem like heaven.
2) you control their living conditions and can make their life hell if you want to "motivate" them to volunteer.
3) A crappy legal system hands them some of the harshest terms in the world in some of the more BS prisons, and having them volunteer for such work can give them more "points" towards getting our earlier.
What I'm getting at is, volunteering for an inmate is not necessarily the same thing as volunteering is for a free man -- or even the same thing as a prisoner in a place without medieval prison conditions and vindictive attitude towards prisoners volunteering.
Whether that is good, bad or indifferent is a whole different matter, but I think it is safe to say that it is a thing.
AFAIK, Slaves would be categorized as capital expense, which is different than labor and would use a different measure for economic output.
When slavery was a thing It was not negligible. It made up a good portion of the southern economy.
I doubt 1 in a million products are made by prisoners.