>>>>How to reduce father-absence? Maybe "wave a magic wand" to bring back blue collar jobs even if only for one more generation before robots, so young men regain a sense of pride and participation in social compact. "Teach them to fish" and then help them lift promising kids out of the poverty trap. There's precedent: in living memory Northern Ireland was a hot-bed of terrorism and sectarian violence that was overturned in less than a generation by jobs and prosperity for whoever wanted to work.
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>>>Are you proposing to dismantle the whole industry based on inmate labor? We should have some compassion towards those who make living out of that.
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>>There should be no such thing as 'inmate labor' -- aka -- 'slave labor'. For those of us with compassion we don't believe slave labor is a good thing. Geeeze man.
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>Of course it's bad but... in a similar case in some other thread, I was warned that removing some other thing may leave thousands jobless because they were making a living on that whose removal was proposed. So some caution was called for. Well, we don't know how many people make money on inmate labor, and how many would be jobless if it were to vanish. So let it be on record that I warned about the possibility.

That doesn't add up to me. People will LOOSE their jobs if they're not getting free slave labor? How about all those jobs that are lost to wage earners because the jobs were taken by slave labor who work for 15 cents a day? The only ones making any money off this are those exploiting the inmates. It's disturbing and should be outlawed, just as for-profit prisons should be. ...which is something Obama had made headway on,...but of course since Obama did it Trump has decided to undo it. The whole thing is sickening.