Neutral characters can become survivors/refugees on your ships after the conversation. When encountering a ship of the respective faction, you can return them and get a reward. Foreign ships also have a crew limit, so all survivors/refugees may not be taken over from you. You can also try calling the alien ship and forcing the free-riders from their faction on them. Sometimes it works...

But think twice about rescuing entire crews of other factions' ships - they eat and breathe for three...

There should be a way to recruit a survivor/refugee to your crew via conversation... I haven't managed to do that yet...

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

I'll quickly recap how to get a crew:
All obtainable characters are random and you can't see their stats before you get them.
- Buy at the civilian station - a piece for 5000 money
- to get out of the hybernation chamber
You can also liberate characters captured by aliens and stuck to the walls of dead ships (also from the crews of ships in the sector that tried to capture the dead ship before you).
They are basically of two types - assignable to your crew (they get a purple exclamation mark when you zoom out of the sector view) and survivors/refugees (they get an orange or red dot mark when you zoom out of the sector view - like normal neutral or enemy characters).

yes, you can. for 5000 credists per person - and it is similar "cat in bag" as all others

I have heard you can sometimes recruit someone on leisure stations

Time to update the review...you can rescue people from aliens.

last run I saved a few refugees from a civilian ship (4 of them) - they were pretty useless - you could assign them to specific jobs for specific machines but since those jobs are 1 time (finish this specific task) it became extremely manually cumbersome to actually apply them.

the refugees had their own skills, but they didn't show up in the normal crew list with priorities etc - they just sat around and complained.

The strange thing is that I ran into another civilian ship who asked about a distress call, basically looking for the refugees - I said I had them, they gave me a nice big reward but strangely enough only 3 of the refugees left with them, so I had this last dude that just stuck around basically forever.

I was kind of expecting the 'recruit' option like you showed for the prisoners, but I didn't see that for the refugees at all...

I got the game yesterday and I just got attacked by a pirate ship. I banzi charged them and managed to take over their ship and take them all prisoner! Good to know I can recruit them. Sadly tho they blew up my ship.

Got one out of a pod yesterday. Thought that was pretty cool!