Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary.

Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.

> 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.

That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.

Prisoners in most states are literally underfed, and then "allowed" to buy more food, like a single packet of ramen for a whole dollar.

This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.

When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"

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The reality is in a lot of prison situations the people are bored and the money is going to non-essentials from a commissary.

It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.