Note that sometimes society doesn't let them contribute in ways you're probably thinking of.
I have a friend who recently got a job at a company that works to deport immigrants who have committed some sort of crime. On the face of things they try to give them hope, but they mostly give false hope, don't provide the information they need, and make holding a job impossible.
Once a month they will visit home "sometime next week" - and the person must be at home, which means an indeterminate amount of time off - maybe a week, maybe two. They ask them to come into their offices at 9am and don't see them until 6pm, if at all - maybe they ask them to come back tomorrow.
He's in the process of finding a new job, as the job is misadvertised as helping immigrants. Especially as an immigrant himself, he hates working there.
No doubt, too, this is far from the only such travesty. For those responsible, I prescribe public flogging -- lest this statement be mistaken for some sort of metaphor, as is regrettably common in these parts, let me say that by "public flogging" I mean that they be taken in tumbrils to the handiest public square, there to be tied to a post and administered ten lashes apiece at the least; for repeat offenders, the gallows should serve.
Barbaric, you say? Do you then contend that the actions, which render such punishment meet, are any less barbaric? Which is worse, then? -- to lay open a man's back in answer to his crimes, and stretch his neck should he prove obdurate? Or to leave him grind his fellow men into the dust by trickery and deceit, and grow fat on the proceeds of their suffering? Or shall we handle him with kid gloves? -- as others here have rightly noted, a rich man rarely fears prison, and imprisonment itself carries great cost -- but let him once see his fellow criminal hauled down from the post with his back in bloody tatters, and you give him mightily to consider how best to save himself from a similar fate!
I have a friend who recently got a job at a company that works to deport immigrants who have committed some sort of crime. On the face of things they try to give them hope, but they mostly give false hope, don't provide the information they need, and make holding a job impossible.
Once a month they will visit home "sometime next week" - and the person must be at home, which means an indeterminate amount of time off - maybe a week, maybe two. They ask them to come into their offices at 9am and don't see them until 6pm, if at all - maybe they ask them to come back tomorrow.
He's in the process of finding a new job, as the job is misadvertised as helping immigrants. Especially as an immigrant himself, he hates working there.