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Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

latimes.com

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Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#21

Post by ido »

stoolpigeon wrote: post #7
scandox wrote: post #2

Love when the problem as stated contains its own solution.

I think it helps show the cost of crime and look at different solutions but I don't see how it contains the solution. I had a car stolen by some guys once. They used my car to drive around breaking in to other cars and stealing things. The police caught them and took me to me car so that I could get it back. I also had to go through all the stuff in the back and tell the police what wasn't mine. It turns out they had…

Isn't an inordinately large percentage of US prison population due to fairly minor drug offences?

I would think the argument is that fewer people need to be imprisoned for crimes that don't really negatively affect society as much as sending them to prison does.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#22

Post by lb1lf »

cjCamel wrote: post #8

Bizarre comparison! Prisons need to safely and securely provide accommodation for "high-risk, high-need" human beings to survive and be rehabilitated. Universities have a wholly different set of requirements.

> (...) and be rehabilitated.

-Never having experienced the US penal system first hand, I cannot be too bombastic - but from the outside, it sure looks as if rehabilitation has taken a back seat to punishment.

If one were of a sufficiently cynical disposition, it would be tempting to assume that all involved parties (except the inmates) has more to gain from keeping people locked up than rehabilitating them.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#23

Post by splike »

andy_ppp wrote: post #17
flexie wrote: post #11

I get it - it's tempting to solve the Harvard Business School issue by sending the MBA students to prison before they wreck havoc on the economy. But I'm not sure their dads would pay the exceeding tuition. Also, there is the whole question of whether it would be fair to the other prisoners. Pretty soon the prison economy would be infested with cigarette derivatives and yard swaps.

I'd like to see what would happen in prison if these Harvard types destabilised the market...

MBAs destabilise the market? By taking a six sigma approach to introduce cryptocurrencies into the prison system, I don't see how it couldn't be a success.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#24

Post by danblick »

Strangely, I was just reading about the costs of prison in California because I read an article about "the grave injustice of mandatory sentencing" [1] and was curious about the associated costs to taxpayers.

I don't feel personally affected by this issue, but I get the sense we are sentencing too many people for too long for non-violent drug offenses.

Anyway, the cost of the prison system in California is about $7.9 billion according to:

https://www.vera.org/publications/the-price-of-prisons-what-...

or (given 39 million people in California) about $200 per taxpayer (no, that's not the best metric).

If the cost per prisoner is going up because we're releasing people from prisons this year, that's probably a good thing.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/mandatory-minimum-sen...

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#26

Post by Sacho »

stoolpigeon wrote: post #7
scandox wrote: post #2

Love when the problem as stated contains its own solution.

I think it helps show the cost of crime and look at different solutions but I don't see how it contains the solution. I had a car stolen by some guys once. They used my car to drive around breaking in to other cars and stealing things. The police caught them and took me to me car so that I could get it back. I also had to go through all the stuff in the back and tell the police what wasn't mine. It turns out they had…

> California sent them to Arizona so that they could go to a trade school. All their needs were covered, they just needed to complete the program. Instead the failed out and then went on a crime spree in their new home state. I'm sure it was a very cost effective solution for CA but I'm not sure about society as a whole.

The problem is identification; we can't identify which people will end up being "good guys" or "bad guys" after any form of prison or community work. There are some extreme cases where you can make the determination(although beware the slippery slope of discrimination that seeps in..), but for the rest, what do you do? This is a genuine question. Jailing people is both costly and doesn't seem to have a positive effect on their life prospects. Many people that go into jail for a minor offense end up incapable of finding a job(felon status) or a place in society(everyone left them and moved on) and they turn to crime and re-offend.

I agree that this doesn't contain "the" solution, but it's a good way to shine the light that our current solution isn't working either. Prison serves as a "out of sight, out of mind" choice and few people concern themselves with what happens to inmates once they try to reintegrate into society. If we're going to continue jailing people, then we should also look to mitigate the adverse effects - look for ways to integrate people after they serve their time, look into reducing the number of offenses you can be jailed for, etc.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#27

Post by erikb »

That sounds totally fine in my eyes. I live outside the US and a relatively cheap lifestyle, so a lot cheaper than the average US citizen. And I say if you add the security requirements of a prison on top of my life I could easily be at $70k-$80k.

What the article probably doesn't consider is the costs of daily life. I can't imagine Harvard+eating+sleeping+takingShowers+heating+clothing really just costs $75k/year, then everybody would go to Harvard, even those who already have a PHD.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#28

Post by jagermo »

Does the number include the housing and living costs for the students?

edit: sorry, that was not a polemic post. But if the number for the students excludes stuff like food, rent or other living costs (e.g. medical checkups) that are "included" with prisoners, the gap might be smaller.

I just checked the numbers for Germany, on the average, a prisoner costs 3281,40 Euro per month, so about 40k Euro or 45k USD per year. So, yeah, it seems like California is getting shafted, somehow.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#29

Post by mowenz »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #14

Think about that for a second...$75K/yr for abhorrent, yet improving conditions and you'll come to the correct conclusion that contractors are absolutely fleecing not only the p̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶s̶ tax payers, but the prisoners themselves. Half a lifetime ago, I had to spend a weekend in jail while visiting a friend in California (accused of theft by a drunk lady who couldn't find her credit cards and fingered me instead of…

Remember when a small team built a better healthcare.gov? Why not open up well-regulated competitive markets for these kinds of problems? Let some bright people solve them by going at them with their ingenuity. The fastest way towards progress is fair and honest competition.

Government can regulate the market by setting the goals: low violence inside, low costs, low re-offences of released, high security, high educational opportunities

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#30

Post by cm2187 »

lb1lf wrote: post #22
cjCamel wrote: post #8

Bizarre comparison! Prisons need to safely and securely provide accommodation for "high-risk, high-need" human beings to survive and be rehabilitated. Universities have a wholly different set of requirements.

> (...) and be rehabilitated. -Never having experienced the US penal system first hand, I cannot be too bombastic - but from the outside, it sure looks as if rehabilitation has taken a back seat to punishment. If one were of a sufficiently cynical disposition, it would be tempting to assume that all involved parties (except the inmates) has more to gain from keeping people locked up than rehabilitating them.

Rehabilitation must exist but it must also take the back seat to punishment. In Europe there is this strange concept that developed that crime is a sort of disease and that prisons are kind of hospital. So there is some expectation that a criminal will be "cured" when leaving jail. And many judges got to the thinking that crime is caused by poverty and since jail will not cure poverty we should not send criminals to prison. And you end up with guys with a 10 pages long criminal record and who haven't spent a night in jail.
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