alt Hacker NewsSame reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc.
Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it.
I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus.
Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.