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

latimes.com

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

#151

Post by zuminator »

countryqt30 wrote: post #134
dalbasal wrote: post #126

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-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, ...)

Seems a non starter. If your costs are $75K per inmate you'll never make that up in prisoner labor productivity. Even if your costs are half that. And if you do get profitable labor, regular citizens will rightly complain that good paying jobs are being taken by criminals.

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

#152

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

countryqt30 wrote: post #134
dalbasal wrote: post #126

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-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, ...)

There will always be an activist group which will tell you that forcing people work is inhumane and violates their freedom of expression.

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

#153

Post by avenius »

dalbasal wrote: post #126

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-sufficien…

IIRC incarceration was a method started by christian monks, and the intention was that the incarcerated would use the time to reflect and contemplate his crimes - a form of rehabilitation. As you say, that certainly isn't what's happening today. Instead it gives criminals a broader network, and my impression is that it works sort of like a "crime school". But the US method of privatizing and profiteering off of imprisonment surely must skew the incentives as well.

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

#154

Post by ujhmi6 »

izietto wrote: post #92
draugadrotten wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and because of those population changes, the old ways of short incarceration and rehabilitation have stopped working... 2014, NOTE - Before the Great Migration "With prisoner numbers falling and jails closing, Swedish criminal justice works, says director-general Nils Öberg" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/26/prison-swede... 2018, A few years AFTER the Great Migration "Sweden's rapidly filling prisons –…

To me it doesn't demonstrate that incarceration and rehabilitation don't work, it just shows that crime is correlated to misery and ignorance

To me it demonstrates that the trick to have a crime-free society is social and racial homogeneity. Which the US doesn't have.

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

#155

Post by dagw »

coldtea wrote: post #93
fxj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top pharmaceutical companies with revenue greater than $10 billion Rank Company 2016 USD billions 1 Johnson & Johnson NYSE: JNJ 71.89 2 Roche SIX: ROG 50.11 3 Pfizer NYSE: PFE 52.82 4 Novartis NYSE: NVS 48.52 Number 2 and Number 4 are swiss companies.

How is this relevant? 2 and 4 can still have most of their revenues from where 1 and 3 have them (e.g. not by blood-sucking the Swiss society).

The US accounts for roughly 50% of Roche pharmaceutical revenue, so pretty much.

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

#156

Post by oarsinsync »

muse900 wrote: post #141
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

Good point. You have to think the scale though. US is not the same as e.g Sweden and can't be the same. The amount of benefits you get in Scandi countries or Europe in general against the US are massive. At the same time you have to think that the US is a country of 330m people compared to an average EU country of 10-20m people. In the UK whilst there is free healthcare etc and its a country of 66m, the healthcare ha…

> In the UK whilst there is free healthcare etc and its a country of 66m, the healthcare has been getting worse and worse. The appointment queues go up to years for a simple thing in London.

Agreed. In addition to that, private health insurance is extremely cheap in London compared to the USA, and you can see a GP or specialist the same day if you have this.

That doesn't mean it's not extremely unfair to those that can't afford private health insurance, as treatment should be needs based, not finance based, but it's also difficult to campaign against when you're a beneficiary of a broken system.

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

#157

Post by minikites »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #152
countryqt30 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ...)

There will always be an activist group which will tell you that forcing people work is inhumane and violates their freedom of expression.

By "an activist group" do you mean "people against actual slavery"?

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

#158

Post by oarsinsync »

coldtea wrote: post #101
vkhorikov wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that you can point to cases where free market does work.

So, just like you could point to cases where socialism did work? (E.g. changing the equality laws for men and women, rapidly industrializing an agrarian Russia, leading China to top global economy from a century plus slump, letting Cuba have a top notch and cost effective hospital system, and so on)

As a sibling comment has pointed out, infrastructure is a good example. UK train networks are a superb example of something that did work great until privatised.

The NHS is a good example too, but it requires one to look under the hood and see how many functions have been outsourced to private companies over the last ~20 years.

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

#159

Post by minikites »

beobab wrote: post #20

Half-baked idea here: Should we force prisoners to get a degree while they are incarcerated?

I know a few people who work in prison education programs and the prisons themselves are the biggest barrier to education. There are so many restrictions on the activities and resources available to prisoners that it's difficult conduct any educational activity.

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

#160

Post by izietto »

ujhmi6 wrote: post #154
izietto wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it doesn't demonstrate that incarceration and rehabilitation don't work, it just shows that crime is correlated to misery and ignorance

To me it demonstrates that the trick to have a crime-free society is social and racial homogeneity. Which the US doesn't have.

Do you really think that a crime-free society is possible? And that it's achievable with social and racial homogeneity? That's pretty nazi to me
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