Bangladesh considers death penalty for rapists.

[Aegon]

Well, I have quite a bit to say about the American penal system in particular, but... if you don't already see the astronomical difference between the state wrongfully sentencing a man to 10 years with parole vs. the state wrongfully ending his one, only life on the planet Earth, I doubt I'll be able to explain it to you.

I can accept the state's power to imprison. However, whether we the people should permit the state the ability to legally kill as punishment for a crime is an entirely different discussion with different philosophical considerations.

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Prisons should be both humane and exploit prisoners for labor? How are you reconciling those two ideas? Exploiting prisoners for their labor is quite literally legal slavery. Don't believe me? Give the 13th amendment another read.

Yes, they are good for something and if done properly it will give them a sense of purpose. Much better than killing them wouldn't you agree? So avoid immediately trying to mischaracterize something into a flimsy dog whistle please.

Flimsy dog whistle? What? I'm not mischaracterizing anything. It is legal slavery. Are you going to try to dispute that argument or not?

"It's better than killing them" is a pretty horrific way of looking at things and does not, in the slightest, justify slave labor. Think about all the dumb and horrible stuff you could try to justify with that line of logic.

The same could be said of wage slavery and I largely agree with that too. Disabuse yourself of your perfect world where nobody exploits anyone else. We are all exploiters and we are all exploited. Don't believe that? Well, you're not paying attention.

You're talking to a democratic socialist so... broadly speaking I don't disagree with you, but there are varying levels of slavery in a society and to say prison labor is a-okay because we have wage slavery is not a great argument at all. Wage slavery does differ from prison labor significantly. Prisoners are quite physically bound to the prison, are stripped of all freedoms guaranteed to citizens, and do not have the power nor capacity to refuse work. I understand the argument for wage slavery is that nobody can refuse to work since they will suffer and starve to death due to lack of income. This is a somewhat decent argument (disputes by the existence of a social safety net, as pithy as America's might be) but to compare prison labor and wage slavery is to intentionally ignore some pretty massive differences. Also if you wish to do away with the system that utilizes wage slavery, it's odd you would still support another kind of slave labor?

You can call yourself a wage slave all you want but the fact of the matter is you have an unfathomable amount of freedoms compared to a prison inmate.