Vessels of Opportunity

As in, each prisoner is a vessel of opportunity for BP to control its costs and liabilities.

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

Edit: Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name traces the rise of the system of prison labor which built much of the industrial South after the Civil War. It's difficult to read stories like the one above and not see parallels.