I got a fascinating and enjoyable delivery in the mail today. Prison Songs volumes 1 and 2 the Allan Lomax Collection. These are recordings from actual inmates between the 1930s and 1970s. The liner notes have historical footnotes, and full interview transcripts. In a word these discs are awesome.

After reading the liner notes I got an idea for a paper topic. Prison labor camps between the slavery era and the 1970s are remembered as having horrific conditions. Inmates were physically punished, overworked, underfed, etc. These descriptions are what penology scholars think of first when they write about prison labor as a policy suggestion. In addition to human rights concerns, this introduces an obvious concern over rent-seeking. Applied prison labor can yield high financial profits and capture opportunities to whomever holds the authority over allocating prison labor.
I want to hold the usage of prison labor constant but change the legal paradigm surrounding it as a theoretical experiment. I have in mind these state run southern prison camps that were essentially no different from slave plantations on the one hand, and the incarceration practices that I’ve been reading about in ancient Athens on the other. Athens had a court and legal system motivated and administered by private individuals. Criminal sentences took the form of financial debts and the practice of incarceration under default was a private responsibility. In the restitution-based Athenian system, criminals were held under compulsive labor conditions but under arguably “better” conditions. Sentences were shorter and I’d be willing to bet criminals were better cared for in terms of food, clothing, and shelter. Thus I could make the case that a restitution based system can support compulsory prison labor while avoiding torturous conditions.
I’d bet that other private criminal law case studies would report similar conditions to Athens.