In a very literal sense, most countries and especially the USA, do have that pool of labor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...

Prison labor != Political prisoner labor

To some extent, the war on drugs is a war on minorities is a political war on the left.

The down voting of the parent is wholly unjustified. This is a factual reality that has already taken place and continues on to this day.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In a very literal sense, this is an absolute false equivalency meant to obfuscate and excuse the truly horrific behavior of the Soviet state.

I see the tankies are out in force for May Day.

There is nothing about the use of prison labor that benefits a free market. The opposite is true. By controlling a source of labor that can operate at below market prices it's easy to destroy any competion and gain total control. That is the antithesis of free market economics.

If anyone is a 'tankie' it's people who support government-supplied cheap labor...

We do have that, it's called the global south under neocolonialism.