"California spends about $50,000 a year per inmate" On the surface, that number looks somewhat insane.
For food, clothing, shelter, medical care and 24 hour-a-day supervision by union employees?
Prisons or Colleges?
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so minor point: the California Three Strikes law requires the first two felonies to be "violent" or "serious". From the reference I just checked, the only non-violent serious crimes are "lewd or lascivious act on a child under the age of 14 years" and providing hard drugs to minors ("heroin, cocaine, phencyclidine(PCP), or any methamphetamine-related drug" or a precursor of the latter). I find it impossible to wo…
No one is arguing that it is bad public policy. I myself am only arguing that it is prudent to reconcile public policy solutions to the public's bank account prior to implementing them. I live in Houston, yes I'm a Texan. No one is tougher on crime than Texas. In some cases, yes, Texas is too tough. One of the major reasons Texas did not follow along on the whole Three Strikes bandwagon was because the political lead…
"[...] the Three Strikes ballot initiative ... obliges [the Governor] to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely."
"No one is arguing that it is bad public policy."
I don't see how the above two statements can be reconciled.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#13I applaud the Governor's intentions, it is far more sensible to allocate resources to higher education than to prisons. Having mentioned that, I think it should be stated that he is solving the wrong problem here. The reason tuition is increasing so rapidly in California is because the State no longer has the wherewithal to properly fund its educational institutions. This is a direct consequence of the fact that Cali…
Sounds like what we really need to do is outsource the prisons. To, say, Mexico, or China. I'll bet the Chinese don't pay $50,000 per prisoner per year to keep their prisoners locked up -- heck, they probably harness their labour to turn a profit.
I have wondered for years why it costs money to have inmates. Slaves in the old south would cost about as much as a good new car (40k according to free the slaves) so you would think there would be some value in inmates.
I compare them to slaves because they have about the same motivation for doing work.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#14Emotionally this sounds appealing. But it seems to me that htis is just another example of the kind of government that brought California to bankruptcy. Governing by emotional appeals to the way our values tell us the world should behave is not a recipe for success in a world that behaves as the chips fall. More to the point, read Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit for a discussion of the hubris of believing that we…
Exactly. Why should the government be spending more on the school system than on prisons? There isn't even a real argument, it's just being taken as a given. If anything improving the prison system should be given higher priority than fixing the college system, because prisoners have to be there. They don't have a choice. Whereas students can just opt out of college, or else go to a private college.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is arguing that it is bad public policy. I myself am only arguing that it is prudent to reconcile public policy solutions to the public's bank account prior to implementing them. I live in Houston, yes I'm a Texan. No one is tougher on crime than Texas. In some cases, yes, Texas is too tough. One of the major reasons Texas did not follow along on the whole Three Strikes bandwagon was because the political lead…
" [...] the Three Strikes ballot initiative ... obliges [the Governor] to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely. " " No one is arguing that it is bad public policy. " I don't see how the above two statements can be reconciled.
"[...] the Three Strikes ballot initiative ... obliges [the Governor] to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely."
This is a statement of fact, with no assertion made as to 'goodness' or 'badness' of that fact. Indeed I would argue that there is no uncontestable 'objective' basis on which to base such a appraisal. Given the facts present in the article.
What I have been saying is that there is an uncontestable 'objective' basis for judging the fiscal consequences of these policies. Further, that I am unsure as to whether or not precluding your leaders from considering those fiscal consequences is bad policy. I am thinking that it is bad policy. Please note that this is not about Three Strikes, it is about the wisdom of not letting your leaders judge the merits of Three Strikes before it is implemented. And, more generally, not letting your leaders judge the merits of ballot initiatives before they are implemented.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#16Allow the CCPOA to unionize TAs. Problem solved!
Ironically, that would work quite well. So would $10,000 scholarships funded with a $10,000 lump sum tax on UC and UC State students
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#17Emotionally this sounds appealing. But it seems to me that htis is just another example of the kind of government that brought California to bankruptcy. Governing by emotional appeals to the way our values tell us the world should behave is not a recipe for success in a world that behaves as the chips fall. More to the point, read Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit for a discussion of the hubris of believing that we…
Exactly. Why should the government be spending more on the school system than on prisons? There isn't even a real argument, it's just being taken as a given. If anything improving the prison system should be given higher priority than fixing the college system, because prisoners have to be there. They don't have a choice. Whereas students can just opt out of college, or else go to a private college.
Very good point.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#18Emotionally this sounds appealing. But it seems to me that htis is just another example of the kind of government that brought California to bankruptcy. Governing by emotional appeals to the way our values tell us the world should behave is not a recipe for success in a world that behaves as the chips fall. More to the point, read Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit for a discussion of the hubris of believing that we…
Exactly. Why should the government be spending more on the school system than on prisons? There isn't even a real argument, it's just being taken as a given. If anything improving the prison system should be given higher priority than fixing the college system, because prisoners have to be there. They don't have a choice. Whereas students can just opt out of college, or else go to a private college.
I think this idea is premised on the notion that there may be an inverse relationship between education and crime.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#19One of my favourite theories on prison reform: a huge problem with prisons is the formation of gangs and other social structures within the prison walls; not only do these promote the emergence of a criminal culture within the prison, they also make the prisoners harder to guard.
This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.
Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
Re: Prisons or Colleges?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Why should the government be spending more on the school system than on prisons? There isn't even a real argument, it's just being taken as a given. If anything improving the prison system should be given higher priority than fixing the college system, because prisoners have to be there. They don't have a choice. Whereas students can just opt out of college, or else go to a private college.
I think this idea is premised on the notion that there may be an inverse relationship between education and crime. http://www.jstor.org/pss/27529879
Are the folks in prison really the same folks who would otherwise be attending the University of California? I think they're generally pretty different demographics.
Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.