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The cost of prison v the pecuniary benefits from hard labor is probably a net negative. Maybe though if prisoners had to do really truly hard labor (at pains of extreme punishment) prisons would be easier to manage (since no one would have the energy) AND there would be a larger disincentive to commit crime.
This is why for lower level crimes I support public flogging. I think you get probably more disincentive without the deleterious impact of jail.
Weirdly enough, I agree with you about the public flogging. It's also the reason I think arguments in favor of the death penalty fall apart on practical grounds. Carceral systems that include flogging as an alternative or supplement to fines and lengthy prison sentences demonstrate that it's possible to make fundamentally different tradeoffs about how we administer justice.
If you assume we're keeping everything the same about the current system, then the death penalty is verifiably a net economic negative. There's little evidence it is, in its current form, much of a deterrent, and it costs a lot of money to establish someone's guilt to the required standard. If you assume we're going to change the system somehow, to require a higher threshold of surety for guilt but also a lower threshold of double-checking to reduce costs... then why not assume we can change the system in other ways? I refuse to believe we can't engineer a way to make an entire adult human productive enough to be worth maintaining.
The death penalty isn't about material economy. It's about political economy. The people are naturally bloodthirsty. They used to walk long distances to see hangings and breakings on the wheel. They feel a visceral satisfaction in the pain of wrongdoers. It's primal.
Now, we are rational creatures. We can override our base impulses or have them overridden for us for our own good. We don't have to indulge our bloodlust. But denying it carries a cost. Sparing the worst of the worst from the ultimate reprisal has a big psychic cost, since it's a powerful emotion you're overriding.
A state can only spend so much entry in a continuous fight against human nature. Why should we spend our resources on kindness on jurisprudence instead of in inducing some other non-default beneficial behavior?
If we're talking about political economy, The People also hate hate hate to hear about innocent (or at least, insufficiently proven-to-be guilty) people being executed. They're also mad about people being falsely imprisoned, but to a far lesser degree.) There's no objective reason we should be spending our resources to satisfy the vengeance-lovers over the mercy-lovers, and plenty of practical reasons why we wouldn't want to encourage "vengeance" as a core value of our society.
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We as society will eventually admit that Heinlein was right for everything in Starship troopers. Unfortunately misunderstanding the book and decrying it as fascism is prerequisite of one's ascension to the IYI class.
I don't think Heinlein believed that the Terran Federation was right about everything, or even most things. His actual politics were a lot more libertarian than the politics expressed in Starship Troopers. The book doesn't even answer (and the fandom is deeply divided on) the fundamental question about how the Federation actually works because we only see it during an existential war - is the normal form of Federal Service participation in a large peacetime standing army, or is it more like the WPA but with military discipline?
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