At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard • Hacker News Board

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#121

Post by fxj » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:37 AM UTC

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #94

fxj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a compelling argument against gouvernment intervention, then why does it work so much better in europe where all three sectors are state-owned? The best example is switzerland, where the costs are a fraction of the costs in the U.S ( and which is not a "socialist" country at all).

Healthcare isn’t state owned, or even single payer in Switzerland. Everyone pays for their own insurance. The rate they pay is fixed by the state but all the assets — the insurance companies, the hospitals, the insurance policies — are in private hands. In Germany none of that stuff is state owned, either. This is one of the strangest things about the healthcare debate in the United States: we frequently contrast our…

It is called gesetzliche Krankenversicherung in Germany

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetzliche_Krankenversicherun...

and is 100% state-controlled.

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#122

Post by dusted » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:40 AM UTC

One may interpret this as one nations view that punishing those who fail is more important than helping them not to fail, since as if they deserve to fail if they can't make it on their own. While this view may or may not be justified, I believe it is to the detriment of all.

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#123

Post by Udik » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:43 AM UTC

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #37

dabbledash wrote: post #16

Not commenting on the specific numbers, but maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a year of college costs less than food, housing, healthcare, security, and programs combined?

As a non-American, what I find mostly surprising are these two things: 1) that a society that mostly believes that a system of private businesses competing in a free market is the be all and end all of optimal resource allocation end up having the most expensive health care, higher education and apparently, prison system in the world; that this fact does not trigger more thought and discussion; 2) that despite incarc…

> end up having the most expensive health care, higher education and apparently, prison system in the world; that this fact does not trigger more thought and discussion;

I'm thinking that a defining quality of Americans is their propension to spending. Saving money is just not something they seem to think about- it's not what you save that is important, but the total amount of money circulating in the economy. There are little incentives to make things less expensive, there are more incentives to consume as much as possible, both for privates and for businesses. It's wasteful, but contributes to make the economy stronger (even if the resulting society is more unequal and harder for those who earn less).

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#124

Post by golergka » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:44 AM UTC

jordanbeiber wrote: post #78

golergka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> optimal resource allocation This is a strange assumption. As a free market proponent and almost a libertarian, I don't base my argument on "optimal resource allocation", neither care that much for it; I assume that most economically right-wing people don't pursue this as a main goal either, and rather see it as a nice side effect.

Just a bit of defense to this assumtion: When it comes to privatizing stuff that really should be handled by a welfare state the “optimal resource allocation” argument comes up frequently though. And it completely misses the point of supporting a welfare state. It’s of course not about being optimal with resources, it’s about providing the best standard of life to as many individuals as possible. Do this and the numb…

> it’s about providing the best standard of life to as many individuals as possible

Which is also a nice thing to have but definitely not the main objective for people on "my" political side. Main argument for privatising stuff is not being optimal or not: it's the principle of making the government, which is the only entity with monopoly on violence, as weak and as small as possible.

Think about it as a microkernel (I must admit that I don't know enough about kernel development, so this analogy is very crude). Even if moving different services from the kernel to user-space would hurt perfomance, it's still a good security practice: this lost efficiency is worth, even if the advantages are "abstract" and not clear from the get-go.

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#125

Post by steveeq1 » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:44 AM UTC

nikhizzle wrote: post #8

To put this in perspective, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any country. I have trouble finding good numbers on recidivism, but anecdotally (based on sparse evidence) it seems like the US approach to incarceration is not working. Another fact supporting this is that the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American…

> Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds.

There are also more men than women in the prison system. Doesn't mean the system is being sexist.

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#126

Post by dalbasal » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

I think it's worth thinking about the history of incarceration, for context.

Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment...

Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn't have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to "hard labour" in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes.

The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they'd rehabilitate (reform) people.

I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.

We're stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?

Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts/lawyers), we can do something more useful.

Prison startup?

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#127

Post by bko » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

fxj wrote: post #113

bko wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1: In regards to health care, US public spending on health care is similar to that of other western countries, although it does spend more on private. Make of that what you will but saying that the US doesn't spend on public healthcare is just incorrect. > While the U.S. has similar public spending, its private sector spending is triple that of comparable countries [0] Same is true about public eduction > In 2014,…

Prison population rate (per 100,000 of national population) U.S. 655 Switzerland 81 Japan 41 http://www.prisonstudies.org/

Read my comment again. I didn't say anything about the overall prison population, just that private prisons have a very small share of overall US prisoners (especially in California, the state mentioned in the article). So I'm skeptical that privatization is somehow driving the prison policy.

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#128

Post by freyir » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #106

freyir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I see what you’re saying. We should send all criminals to Harvard. We’ll save money, and they’ll become productive members of society.

More civilized countries (e.g. nordic ones) do something similar to that. They don't send "criminals to Harvard", but they have prisons close (if not more) habitable as a Harvard dorm, very humane treatment of prisoners, extensive educational programs, and so on. And they have less costs, less crime, and a healthier society doing so. So snark from a country with the largest prison population (by percentage) in the wo…

Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with, which allow them to build relatively spacious prisons and allocate more treatment resources per prisoner.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem we’ve got. We could just not prosecute many non-violent crimes, like our District Attorney chose to do in San Francisco. But that didn’t pan out well and we now have the highest non-violent crime rate of any major US city.

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#129

Post by bko » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

icedchocolate wrote: post #111

bko wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1: In regards to health care, US public spending on health care is similar to that of other western countries, although it does spend more on private. Make of that what you will but saying that the US doesn't spend on public healthcare is just incorrect. > While the U.S. has similar public spending, its private sector spending is triple that of comparable countries [0] Same is true about public eduction > In 2014,…

Re: Healthcare, that’s not true. The US spends more on health care per capita than many systems with free healthcare (Australia, UK, Canada). You pay the most and receive the least. Like the previous commenter, I am increasingly surprised that this system is still supported, instead of one that costs less and provides more (e.g. the fact that states bargain with drug companies individually, rather than federally, mea…

> I am increasingly surprised that this system is still supported, instead of one that costs less and provides more

So you're for decreasing the amount of public spending on health care in the US?

Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

#130

Post by metafunctor » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

unionpivo wrote: post #57

mruts wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than fair? Fair is what the free market decides someone should be paid. And according to google, for private prisons “fair” is a median salary of $32,000/year.

Unions are part of free market. They optimize for benefits to their members, just as corporations optimize for benefits for their shareholders. And just as businesses who get to big can abuse their monopoly status, big unions can also have negative consequences. This is free market at work. Edit: Which is why free markets need sensible regulations, to keep abuses from happening

Unions have special protection under the law, which means they are more of a regulated market than a "free market". It's government (or corrupted politics, depending on your viewpoint) all the way down, man.