There is a distinction that needs to be made. There were different types of indentured servitude. Some were voluntary, usually second sons of merchants, even minor nobility. Due to primogeniture laws, only the firstborn son inherited the estate, leaving the second born and so on largely to their own devices. Many elected to enter voluntarily into indentured servitude, known colloquially as “apprenticing out.” Usually they had some skill or were regarded as trainable, many had their way paid over to North America by plantation owners who basically recruited them. That’s how many a wealthy tobacco dynasty got started.
Some forms of involuntary indentured servitude were regarded as a kindness, as in the instance of orphans who were indentured to some prominent member of the community who would see to it that the orphan child was educated to the best of his ability and taught at least a trade in order to support themselves in adulthood.
Then, there was plain old involuntary indentured servitude of the kind everyone thinks about when the subject arises. Petty criminals, politically inconvenient people, etc. were sentenced to be “transported.” Many went to penal colonies, for instance early colonial Georgia was a penal colony. So was all of Australia.
Later on, by 1670 or so, there weren’t enough laborers being transported so they resorted to kidnapping. That was toward the end of the so-called “headrights system” in the North American colonies. These individuals were treated brutally, worked literally to death oftentimes, because as previously noted on this thread, they were worth more alive than dead due to their headrights, which were land grants upon completion of the term of indenture, which reverted to the plantation owner upon the death of an indentured servant.
... worth more dead than alive, I should have written.