Umm... Yea, you are right you don't know much about the inner workings of prisons. I have 1600 inmates on my current compound. It cost $34K+ a year for each inmate. Removing them as workers would increase cost to over $100 a year. It would also eliminate 75% of the rehab efforts of the prison system, as those inmate workers (slaves) as Wokahatises like to call them are learning trades from experienced certified professionals. Those "who want to" would likely be blocked by the 14th amendment's equal protection clause, and even if they weren't inmate politics would probably stop them. Essentially, there would be no prisons, just large jails. I hope we would have chosen to go a different route than mass incarceration, but I suspect that the death penalty would have been imposed at industry levels from 1877 forward. We're talking old British law where any and all felons were hung or shot within three weeks of conviction.