Their point is that they agree with you 100% on slavery, but this isn’t slavery.

Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

What happens if you refuse to work?

I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

…no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?

It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

Which is just a lot of caveats.

Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.

Direct Drive tech reduced the number of moving parts so low that it put Big Washer Repair out of business and they had to develop other ways to monetize your laundry.