Whether you consider yourself an environmentalist or not, it has probably troubled you at one time or another to consider the vast amount of junk and garbage generated in our society and the great waste of resources and land associated with it. As waste of any kind is virtually always bad, sense-making measures to reduce waste can only help us all. Now recycling society's trash and garbage is wonderful in concept, but only rarely is it ever a truly economically-viable proposition because the sorting and processes involved are generally dirty and very labor-intensive and so are, appropriately, usually very expensive. In essence, no one wants to do these jobs at the low wages which would be necessary for such a system to work. Some form of subsidy is required. Accordingly, there exists a source of inexpensive labor in our country that might be well-suited for this work: Prisoners. The nation's prisons could be transformed into large, modern recycling centers, processing junk and garbage efficiently at vast economies of scale back into useful reclaimed items and valuable raw materials. Prisons would become more self-financing. Prisoners would truly be paying their debt to society while learning skills in a modern industrial process. All manner of useful things and resources which would otherwise uselessly go into landfills for want of viable recycling systems could be returned to communities that need them. Such a system properly conceived and run would be a very fitting win-win-win for us all...
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Why use prisoners when you can just use slaves. ?? In germany, it is a public responsibility to sort your own garbage at the curb, and you pay fines for not doing this. Prisoners are not slaves, and there is no payback value to society to making them slaves... it certainly does not rehabilitate them to reenter society.
The citizens of athens used to talk like you do, except prisoners and slaves were the same thing... and by the time they got around to sorting their garbage, the not-very-democracy of a majority of voteless slaves collapsed from too much war spending. Since prisoners have lost their right to vote, they are sort of slaves in a way... and your idea just takes that to its full circle. Perhaps whips, manacles and better prison gear is in order... then since most prisoners are overwhelmingly black and of non-white races, we can forget the abolition of slavery as a glitch in an otherwise racist nation...and with the new bush racists at the helm, we can resurrect the south and give all the white folk prison plantations to sort their garbage... ;-)
It is a good idea to have prisoners work part time only. It would give them a chance to earn wages. But it is important for them to get training in other fields of interest, if need to have them pay with earned wages. They could use the saved income for staring a new life. This system would useful in other tasks that has a labor shortage.
I feel it would be simpler to implement very high fines for not sorting recycling products and have citizens use clear garbage bags. So the trash collector can issue tickets for violations by quick inspection.
Or just do what they do in Denmark: charge people for garbage by the bag, rather than making everyone pay regardless of use. That way, people who recycle or use less garbage would pay less, and people would throw out less to save money. Of course, then people might take their garbage elsewhere, but I imagine most wouldn't want to schlep stinking garbage just to save a little money.
I like sath45's idea... "They could use the saved income for staring a new life"
You could make the work optional. I'm sure if I was in prison, I'd rather sort garbage than stare at the wall.
of course, recycling would give the prisoners acces to all sorts of dangerous stuff. Some of these guys might use it, or sell it to other prisoners.
The problem with fining people who do not recycle (for a recycling company) is that they will bear a grudge upon the legislators and may secretly mix in genuine trash with the recycled products. You even find this problem with the existence of OPTIONAL recycling bins where people put in real garbage in.