Incarceration, or indeed, any form of "criminal correction" must always be at the expense of the State. It can never be allowed to be profitable!
The alternative is to see what we're seeing here; that every crime can be forgiven by paying money to the State, and more and more things become crimes, and people become permanent slaves to the State.
The State will continue to convince itself that squeezing convicts for money is just what they need to make better citizens out of them.
And a vocal mass of the population will sneer at the convicts because they have no pity and believe that certainly, leopards will NEVER eat their face.
let's just follow the money, shall we? This all exists because someone is profiting from it. And lawmakers and other politicians are getting payouts somehow.
If it became expensive for the State to lock people up in cages and hobble them in ways that they can never recover, then the governmenbt just may, after thousands of years, look into addressing the real cause of crime and responding by doing something that actually helps. Instead of being psychopathic parasites about it.
I explained my position. If the government insists on continuing to make things worse, then it ought to be expensive and not profitable. And yes, it is cruel though it is sadly less unusual lately.