Good grief!! For Pete's sake!!
Is saving on maintenance considered a profit?
$9 billion plus $2 billion = $11 billion.
- Incarcerated workers produce at least $2 billion in goods and $9 billion worth of prison maintenance services annually, but this number is not closely tracked and is likely much higher.
Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic, ACLU examine coercion, exploitation in prison labor
news.uchicago.edu
No, savings on maintenance is not a profit. It may limit costs.
Gross profit, and that is not the profit that a business ever sees, is the amount of money left over after you subtract all costs from income. Income is not profit either. That is the most frequent error. Say you have a private prison and you charge the government $10 million a year to run that prison and house the convicts. You do not have $10 million in profit. That is income . But it costs you $12 million a year to house them. How much profit do you have? None. Instead you have a loss. Let's say that you do get the prisoners to work for you and they save you
Is that $1 million profit? No, you are still losing one million dollars.
Now if you could get the prisoners to save you $2.5 million dollars then you will have a gross profit of half a million bucks at the end of that year.
Profit and income are not the same. Nor is savings on costs from the prisoners. If you can get enough saving s you can get some profit.
