Hard manual labor has long been accepted as an appropriate punishment for crimes. Prisoners are deprived of rights... by due process... by a jury of their peers. That's intentional. It's a feature, not a bug.
the difference is that the people getting screwed over were judged guilty of crimes by a jury of their peers or other due process.
Appeals to tradition are probably not the way to go when deciding how we can be a better society.
Most developed democracies have banned forced prison labour; the US is a bit of an outlier here.
Nice sound bite; but not really true.
It's certainly true a process is followed but that process is pretty shitty.
Plenty of people get released after the murder weapon is actually tried for fingerprints and low-and-behold it was somebody else! How does a person go through trial with even the murder weapon being tested? It's not required by the process.
Plenty of people have been convicted because "their bite marks match". Is there actually some peer-reviewed standard of bite marks where if I gave you somebody's bite and a bite mark you could match them together at 90% accuracy? No. How are non-reproducible methods used to incarcerate people? The process doesn't require accuracy.
For more, John Oliver: Forensic Analysis [1]