The article says 1 in 4 complete the programme. Sounds like the majority of people eventually choose prison. After providing a few weeks or months of free labour for an organization apparently breaking far more laws than they ever did...
People are not "choosing" this sort of rehab -- judges are choosing for them. Even if given the choice at a sentencing hearing ("would you prefer prison, or a rehabilitation center?"), I suspect many of those convicted have no idea that these rehab centers are really corporate labor camps.
The article doesn't mention if they did any research in this case but it is also quite common for judges to receive kickbacks from for-profits to get them inmates.
A judge assigning a non-user to a rehab could be the result of that kind of conflict of interest.
Two american judges went to prison for sending hundreds of minors to private, for profit detention facilities and receiving kickbacks. They made over 100k doing it. Don't have a link at hand, but since i read this on HN, someone else might supply it. Sorry, too lazy to google it for you, on mobile and realizing i'm procrastinating on important stuff.
The article specifically mentions that he was threatened with prison if he didn't work fast enough. That implies he had the option to stop work and, instead, go to prison.
“Stop working and you’ll go to a hitherto unknown, potentially worse, prison” doesn’t sound like any kind of option that I’m familiar with. The article makes it sound like many of these men were on their first offence (if that’s even applicable here) and may not have realized that their current status as slave laborers was actually the worse one. They probably shouldn’t be faulted for that.
This is only me guessing, but I'd assume this kind of behaviour would be noted in his files as some kind of insubordination and used against him if he ever applied for parole or similar.
He had no choice in going to rehab initially, I'm not sure "summon the wrath of the rehab managers and then get sent to prison" is reasonably considered a fair choice. I also suspect that getting remanded to prison because of a poor work ethic would not help his case for parole.
