Recently, however, the United States Congress and the National Institute of Justice have begun to support and encourage forms of jail industry as a means of reducing inmate idleness. While most of the nation's 3500 jails require sentenced inmates to work, under the United States Constitution, pretrial detainees cannot be compelled to work. Thus, it is unusual for pretrial detainees, who outnumber sentenced inmates in most jail settings , to be linked to vocationally constructive activities. St. Benedict does indeed make some comments about work in his Chapter 48. No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.
Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. Capitalist industrialization may have freed us from having to be peasants and factory workers, for which I am grateful. But we continue to work the majority of our waking hours when we really don't need to. In the coming century, as money is revealed to be merely a figment of the collective imagination stored in tiny silicon chips in a network of cash machines, and as every task from sex to brain surgery becomes automated, we won't need to work as much.