Might as well just give people the money as long as they don't re-offend?
I'd argue give every American $75k and watch America become great again for real
At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
131–140 of 457 posts
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that not just a "no true Scotsman" argument? "there is no free market but they are oligopols" There used to be 12 private prison companies in 2000 but it appears there are only 3 now. The start of the journey was privatization of prisons. This is where that path has currently led. It is what it is, ergo free market didn't work?
Even in free markets, Oligarchies and Monopolies are a thing. No system is perfect - potential lack of competition in niche areas is one of the weaknesses of a free market system.
Agreed.
But we choose a free market or whatever because we believe it will produce the best outcome. If it doesn't work as envisioned then we can either tweak it until it does work, or throw it out and start again, the worst option is to leave it alone, especially as we know it works elsewhere.
There seems to be a view that free market v socialism is a binary choice. Its a continuum, and both pure socialism and pure free market are equally bad. No country follows either path 100%.
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
it is not 100% state-controlled. A lot of the fees and cost are indeed state-controlled as in set by the state, but the actual insurance companies, clinics, etc are private.
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#134I 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-sufficien…
Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning, construction, ...)
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Maybe we already are?
(I'm sure there's a joke about Harvard educated bankers in there somewhere.)
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#136Earlier 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.
Maybe we already are? (I'm sure there's a joke about Harvard educated bankers in there somewhere.)
Not to mention our Stanford-educated biomedical entrepreneurs. Or our USC athletes.
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#137Might as well just give people the money as long as they don't re-offend?
I'd argue give every American $75k and watch America become great again for real
I feel like there's a drama novel just waiting to be written there. Even if you don't mean to give every American citizen $75k in a lump sum, that kind of cash infusion would make so many things go bonkers. I'd kind of like to read that novel now.
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Would you support some kind of quasi governmental organisation to administer prisons?
Independent but answerable to the government, (like the Fed).
That would seem to address small govt concerns whilst avoiding the problems of the free market.
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#139I 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-sufficien…
> I think it's debateable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
From comments read on the Internet it seems there are plenty of differences between American and European prisons, even more to the Northen European countries.
There they seem to be able to rehabilitate the people (most of the time), unlike other places.
I think it doesn't help the depiction of prisons in fiction as a place where the strong thrive, full of contained violence, bribes and all the debauchery humanity is capable of.
I don't think American prisons rehabilitate. Insisting that they do even less is like the extreme capitalistic measures of cutting public funding for a function, and then demand that that function should be privatized because it doesn't work.
Re: At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities have all of those things. 75k would easily cover tuition, meal plan, dorms/off campus living, university insurance policies, campus security, extracurricular programs, etc.
Universities also don't require the same level of 24 hour surveillance, and have a more cooperative crowd that can look after themselves. It seems reasonable to a first approximation that they would have similar costs.
Maybe similar costs. I don't think the major driver of Harvard pricing has anything to do with its costs though.