the thing about labor camps is particularly strange, the idea that it's somehow intrinsically cruel to require convicts to work off their debt to society, or that doing so implies they'll be abused (even tho, as mentioned, we literally do exactly this and few people appear to have a problem with it!). this mostly seems to be a western hangup; china and russia both use labor camps/"penal colonies" (there was an amusing kerfuffle in russia recently where a dipshit Communist Party MP (MD? idk what they're called actually) was like "we must bring the gulags back it's unacceptable that these degenerates are living large off taxpayer largesse" and the responses were split betwee "bruh we literally did already where have you been" and incoherent screeching about solzhenitsyn).

it's perfectly reasonable that people who have offended against the nation should be both punished and compelled to materially compensate the nation. the idea that their suffering on its own is sufficient redress is bizarre and ghoulish. it's hard for me to think of a coherent argument against convict labor that isn't obscene bleeding-heart pro-criminal piffle. but also, there's elements of both rehabilitation and even compassion involved. would you rather be tyrone's prison bitch in a fetid cell where all you have to look forward to each day is getting your vril harvested by widget manufacturers, or would you rather be doing manual labor in the fresh air outdoors? and if that labor is something lifelong criminals can learn useful skills from, when they're released it'll give them additional options besides "go back to dealing meth to make a living." (many will not actually go straight given the opportunity of course, some people are just born rotten and there's no getting around it despite what libtards want to believe, but all the same many people can be successfully rehabilitated.) this was in fact the model that the soviet gulag system was built on (prisoners were iirc even paid the going rate for their labor, which imo is a step too far but w/e), and from what i've heard from russians i know it was reasonably effective reducing recidivism (tho it's important to understand that most crime in tsarist russia was aiui a way for people who had no other skills to survive, it wasn't like the US where there's a permanent low-IQ underclass with violent compulsions and severe self-control issues -- re-education through labor would be much less effective with people who are neurologically impaired relative to the eurasian baseline.)

so the allergy to the idea of "labor camps" is overall just bizarre, probably an artifact of anti-USSR and anti-Nazi propaganda