Human rights and the ethics of compulsory prison labour

International human rights treaties ban forced labour – yet except "hard labour in pursuance of a sentence to such punishment by a competent court" (ICCPR art. 8.3b). Many developed countries, including the US, England, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland (Prison-Insider 2021), legally require prisoners to work for a pittance, in apparent contravention of several labour human rights (Gilabert 2019: 229-260). Compulsory prison labour schemes deny detainees the right to control their labour. They cannot freely determine when to work nor negotiate employment terms, conditions, and benefits (Lippke 1998, 2007: 150-175). Their human rights to unionize and to strike are legally suspended. We need not conclude, dramatically, that unwillingly toiling convicts are "slaves of the state" (Van Zyl Smit 2018). Yet compulsory convict labour does raise profound conceptual, moral, and theoretical questions. This paper argues that how we theorize permissible restrictions of basic labour rights of the justly condemned delimits for which purposes legal work requirements can permissibly be imposed. My analysis is a preparatory one: mapping the conceptual landscape in order to identify unique normative implications which three general theories of rights-curtailments have for compulsory prison labour (Lippke 2001; Boonin 2008: 103-119; Husak 2008: 92-99; Wellman 2017). Consider: even pointlessly imposed work requirements cannot violate forfeited labour rights. Labour rights are justifiably overridden only if imposing work requirements realizes a moral good outweighing the evil of rights-infringements. Lastly, limitations on some basic labour rights (‘as applying only to non-detainees’) require justification by some general moral principle (e.g., reciprocity, fair play).