What do you think about chain gangs, where prisoners are chained together and they do work like cleaning up the roads for example? I have no problem with it myself, because they do help change a person. It costs quite a bit of money to take care of prisoners, so why not make them earn it? The civil liberties advocates seem not to like the idea, but they broke the law, and you will be punished, and chain gangs are a good way to do it.

You do have a point--but somehow scraping dead animals etc. off the side of the road couldn't possibly change a person for the better...it makes me think of a Hannibal Lector:

"I ate his liver with some farva beans..."

....i know, spammage, but that's what i think of....

It sounds fair enough to me. It's no worse than the normal conditions inside a prison, and it means that instead of languishing they're out getting some exercise and contributing a little to society.

I live near a minimum security prison, so I see prison work crews all the time around here.

Here, they aren't chained up. There are several guards standing nearby, with guns, and the workers wear bright orange jumpsuits. As far as I know, there has only ever been one escape in the years since they've been doing this.

The program here is voluntary -- it's part of a program that provides job training to inmates to help them find work when their sentence is up. Our library was remodeled around the time I was a senior in high school, and prison labor was responsible for the vast majority of the work done (which was really quite extensive -- it's quite a bit larger now).

I don't have any problem with the way it is practiced here. I lived across the street from a prison work site once, so I saw firsthand that they were not treated like slave labor. They took plenty of breaks, and it was not at all like what I've seen in movies (such as Cool Hand Luke).

I don't know if the voluntary thing is true for all areas, however. A few prisoners came to talk to my Sociology class in high school, and they said that there's actually a waiting list to get onto the work crew. You have to have good behavior to get onto it (obviously, since for this one they aren't chained up). They said that basically it's just nice to get to see things outside of prison walls for a change, even if they are working. But again, that's just here. It is just a minimum security prison...and I would think that the voluntary basis of prison work programs isn't true everywhere...particularly with ones where they have to be chained up.

We might as well have inmates do something productive. They do the community service/manual labor stuff outdoors as well as some factory type duties based at the prison usually. Granted, these aren't really the jobs people are all that eager to take on, but I suppose it's better than losing one's mind to boredom or messing about and getting into further trouble. I don't know how much it contributes to a person's theoretical rehabilitation, but I don't suppose it could really hurt.

Wherever candice is near, they seem to do it right...maybe barb-wire the fences instead of chaining people together?

Well, since they're often out on roads and in regular public areas moving around, setting up and taking down and moving barbed wire fences probably wouldn't be practical. And I don't think they're always chained together. Often it's like what Candice described. "Chain Gang" is a name that stuck and generally means groups of inmates out in society doing work, regardless of whether they're literally chained or not.