Workaround for Hibernate lazy initialisation not working

Question

So I'm making a deep copy of an object using method here (serialise and deserialise).

Before doing the clone, I'll need to initialise a List in the object so that the copy can have it. This is what I did:

Product prod = getProdFromDB();
//initialise someList
prod.getSomeList();

Product copiedProd = clone(prod);
// errors out because it's not copied
copiedProd.getSomeList()

Although I've added prod.getSomeList() before clone, it doesn't do the job for me.
Interesting thing is, if I run prod.getSomeList() manually in debugging mode, then copiedProd will have someList in it.
As a stopgap, instead of simply do prod.getSomeList(), I need to assign it to a variable and use the variable before clone:

List someList = prod.getSomeList();
System.out.println(someList);

I have 2 questions:

1. Why is this? My guess is that Java sees that getSomeList isn't doing anything so has it removed from compiled code (something done by JIT?)
2. Apparently System.out.println(someList) isn't an elegant way, is there some other ways I can use? (I don't have Hibernate lib in this project so Hibernate::initialise is not an option)

Thanks in advance!

---

FYI this is the clone method:

    private static <T extends Serializable> T clone(T obj) {
        ByteArrayOutputStream bout = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ObjectOutputStream oos;
        try {
            oos = new ObjectOutputStream(bout);
            oos.writeObject(obj);
            ByteArrayInputStream bin = new ByteArrayInputStream(bout.toByteArray());
            ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(bin);
            return (T) ois.readObject();
        } catch (IOException | ClassNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        return null;
    }