Pro
#1
Here, I will defend Meow-gulags, not regular Soviet Stalin USSR gulags, but improved Meow versions of them.
Let's first take into consideration costs of US prison system:
Costs are over 100 billion dollars, going up to over 400 billion dollars when taking into account all the expenses.
Incarcerated workers in the US produce only around $11bn in goods and services, but keep in mind that 80% of that is just jobs like cleaning the prison or making food for prisoners, most of it isn't any goods or service to people outside.
Benefits for people outside are merely 2 to 3 billions.
This means you actually have over 100 to 400 billion dollars of expense, and only 2 to 11 billion dollars of income.
The net negative is over 90%, expenses over 10 times bigger than revenue!
Now let's look at Stalin's gulags.
Some grand projects as White Sea canal were hugely profitable on expenditures-final result scale.
1940 for all gulags in total in USSR:
Revenue: 7,375.72 million rubles
Expenses: 7,864.01 million rub
This basically means gulags covered around 90% of their expenses by merely slave work. Compared to that, US prisons cover less than 10% of their expenses.
There are some sources even saying gulags achieved a net profit during WW2 and few years before.
However, this is not the system I am defending. I am defending Meow-gulags.
Meow-gulags is basically re-introducing slavery as a system, but only for prisoners.
This doesn't mean all criminals will go to gulags. No, someone who steals an apple won't go to gulag.
However, someone who did murder, rape, selling heroin... These people need to go to gulag.
Property and money of these people is to be taken away. Assuming that average prisoner has even 50000$ worth of property, this already on its own covers about an entire year of his staying in prison.
However, there are also rich criminals like Epstein who have billions, so these guys would cover 100000 years in gulag costs, each of them. So if even just one billionaire gets sent to gulag for some terrible crime he committed, his money and property would pay for 10000 other prisoners's expenses for at least a decade, or 100000 other prisoner's expenses for whole year. Epstein's property and money alone would cover 10% of US prison expenses for whole year. And that's just one guy. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who need to go to gulag. If their property before gulag is on average merely 50000$, that already pays for whole year of gulag for everyone. When a billionaire goes to prison, his money covers 10% of all yearly expenses for whole gulag. Millionaire covers 1%. Someone who has 100,000 covers 0.1%. so realistically only 10000 people out of hundreds of thousands need to have above 100,000$ of property to on their own cover expenses of whole gulag for decades!
And then let's not forget many millionaires, or those who are just much richer than average citizen. These guys have huge amounts of money and property. So when they commit a crime, they cover a lot more than their own prison expenses.
Property and money taking alone covers more cost of gulag than entire current US system manages to produce.
However, Meow doesn't stop there.
Property and money taking is just one step. State needs to profit more.
Unlike Stalin gulags, Meow-gulags would focus on optimizing profits. This means giving prisoners work which they can't possibly screw up, maybe even easy work so they arent dying on mass scale, maybe some most basic animal farming so prison becomes more sustainable regarding food and also exports food, maybe even forcing prisoners to farm their own food or else they don't get a meal. That way, all the lazy will starve. But it has to be some work which is profitable for the state. As mentioned before, Stalin's gulags had areas where they were profitable and areas where they weren't. The smart thing to do is to abolish work in non-profitable areas.
AI can be used to design the profitable Meow-gulag. Stalin didn't have AI, so he was at a disadvantage.
Stalin's gulags were so effective that at some point, it was claimed 2 days of work of gulags covered an entire day of Red Army's expenses, you can read about that in link I provided regarding gulags. Same is not even near true for US prisons.
Keep in mind that gulag doesn't need to be profitable to be better than standard prisons. Standard prisons have over 90% net negative, costs over 10 times larger than revenues. Gulags merely need to beat that, and under Stalin, they did.
Standard prisons are by description of debate prisons where majority of prisoners don't work.
Stalin gulags had everyone working and producing at around 50% of usual workforce which is free.
Meow-gulags can improve that with AI optimizations for gulags.
But Meow-gulags have further even more potential, because merely taking all money and property of a criminal is a significant deterrent to crime, so crime would actually reduce, and this also benefits economy. Not to mention the fact that taking away money and property already pays for a significant amount of prison expenses.
This isn't to say property of criminal will be taken away if it's shared property or owned by multiple people. Obviously, if someone who didn't commit a crime owns property, his property won't be taken away just because part of it is owned by criminal. Only the criminal's part of property gets taken so the state profits.
I won't use entire character space.
Meow thanks you for this debate, and looks forward to US governments introducing Meow-gulags.