CA's AGO Argues against Court-Ordered Prisoner Release in order to Keep "Important Labor Pool"

I've heard California Attorney General Kamala Harris's name floated on many occasions for either Senate (when Boxer or Feinstein eventually retires) or Governor (when Jerry Brown retires). She is widely praised as a liberal rising star.

Or maybe not-so-liberal.....

Federal judges on Friday ordered California to launch a new parole program that could free more prisoners early, ruling the state had failed to fully implement an order last February intended to reduce unconstitutional crowding.

The judges, for a second time, ordered that all nonviolent second-strike offenders be eligible for parole after serving half their sentence. They told corrections officials to submit new plans for that parole process by Dec. 1, and to implement them beginning January.
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Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.

That's right: the California Attorney General's Office argued that it couldn't release non-violent offenders because they are too valuable a source of cheap labor. $0.08-$0.37 per hour cheap. 

Rather than release non-violent offenders per the court order, Governor Jerry Brown has taken to privatizing prisons instead.

Lot of money to be made in the prison industry, isn't there?