Who told you they “owe a debt to society”? That is a made up phrase only occuring in America in the 20th century as a justification for slavery. No one in the history of prisons ever “owed a debt to society” where there debt was not monetary, as in the invention of debtors prison. That was to literally pay off a monetary debt. This spiritual debt you are reciting blindly comes from evangelical Christianity and reflects the idea of redemption. It’s a sales pitch to allow whites with a sense of Christianity to accept this new form of slavery, called literally “slavery or indentured servitude.” Was Frederick Douglass working as a prisoner when he was enslaved working off a “debt”? No. Were vagrancy laws meant to arrest Black Americans specifically after the Civil War in Southern States made to pay off a debt? Yes, but a literal debt. Their find became a debt and since they could pay it, a bail of around $1800 in today’s money for a just freed slave, they were auctioned off exclusively to white plantation owners who paid the debt off for them in return for one to two years work. This system inspired more and more arrests of blacks, so that by 1916 indebted blacks in literal convict leased slave laborers or those bound now into sharecropping debt contracts picked four times as much cotton by 1916 than black hands picked by 1860. All that cotton picked by black hands, quadrupling output with no machines invented until the 1950s when John Deere rolled out the SF22 Harvester, was done with white men on horseback carrying loaded shotguns and rifles watching over black hands picking cotton, man, woman and child. What debt did blacks owe, which were no increased to four times as much picking than by 1869?
That whole “debt to society” thing that whites blindly receive is garbage and nonsense, sorry but it is. It is a modern invention made to blot out the past. making black Convicts work, and it has been about 85 percent or more black male convicts in the last 158 years, is not some “debt to society” but plain old target white racist prejudice used to make money from enslaving blacks. Lots and lots of money. None of it is acceptable ever.