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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

#161

Post by mcbits »

freyir wrote: post #128
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with

Nature or nurture? If nurture, then it's at least highly plausible that their prison systems have something to do with it. Recidivism is also much lower.

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

#162

Post by james1071 »

silvestrov wrote: post #70
throwaway13337 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. None of the things you listed are anywhere near a free market in the US. You've created a compelling argument against government intervention, actually. 2. I agree with the second point. The US government officially does, too. Prison should be about rehabilitation and not retribution. It's just that the government doesn't act like it agrees.

So why isn't it a free market in the USA when free markets is clearly seen as the way things should be? Why doesn't lack of free market trigger a demand for reform of the sectors but only hand-waving excuses/acceptance? When credit card companies in Europe started to price gouge with high fees the EU responded by putting a cap on fees. Why does the US government not respond by putting a cap on prices for hospital tre…

What Americans call 'the free market' is a system where there are few restrictions on what a person can buy or sell. It extends to their political system, where politicans sell policies in return for campaign contributions.

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

#163

Post by johnbatch »

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, ...)

This already exists for less then $1 an hour[0]. They’ll even do CAD design work[1].

[0]https://www.cio.com/article/2417888/prison-labor--outsourcin...

[1]https://www.unicor.gov/Category.aspx?idCategory=1691

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

#165

Post by b0bby_tabl3s »

This state should have no funding whatsoever from the Federal Government. NONE.

Let the citizens deal with that. It won't be long before they revolt and overthrow their masters that are slowly killing them all.

A bunch of numbnuts. The entire lot of them.

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

#166

Post by bluedino »

I have a cousin 2 years younger than me who's getting out of prison today.

He just finished a 2 year stint for violating probation. When you get caught drunk driving with a gun in the car, then tend to send you back behind bars. In reality, he had two other offenses in the time before that, which should have been enough.

His first sentence was 7 years for theft. He was part of a group of ~ 20 year olds that were breaking into garages and stealing tools, etc to sell for money.

He got in trouble as a teen and went to one of those youth harbor camps, that didnt' seem to help him. When he was released from prison the first time, he got a decent paying job at the local auto plant (we're a blue collar town) and he threw that all away. He would rather do whatever the heck he wants which usually means hanging out at the bars and drinking and selling a little bit of drugs and getting into fights.

The system can't fix him until he wants to be fixed. If he's out here he's just breaking laws and fathering more children (that the state gets to support as well). I'm perfectly okay with him being locked up until he decides he's had enough and wants to straighten out.

I just hope if he ever decides that, he's not doing 10-20 years at that time. Once you're in, you're in.

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

#167

Post by leetcrew »

minikites wrote: post #157
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

most people rightly oppose slavery. but confining people to cages for years at a time is pretty bad too. if it's possible to justify imprisonment in the first place, are all forms of forced labor significantly worse? what if the prisoners get training as webdevs and have to spend 6-8 hours on weekdays improving the UI of government websites. they get an aeron chair, free coffee, ping pong, etc., and when they get released they have some experience to list on their resume. kind of an absurd proposal, but hopefully it illustrates the point of my question: is it immoral to have them do literally anything to defray the cost of their imprisonment?

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

#168

Post by llamataboot »

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.

Ah yes, those pesky social justice warriors working to make slavery illegal. We should have a war or something.

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

#169

Post by chmod775 »

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…

> At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.

WHAT!

> Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?

WHAT! Mind sharing some sources?

IMHO you have it completely backwards.

I can point to plenty of European countries (Norway, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) that focus on rehabilitation, not punishment.

Their recidivism and overall crime-rates rates are significantly lower than in the US and their prisons don't look like 3rd world shitholes.

They blow the US out of the water on every metric. If anything has failed (and spectacularly so), it's the idea that focusing your prison system on punishment works.

I can't fathom what gave you a different idea.

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

#170

Post by prepend »

JaumeGreen wrote: post #139
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…

> 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…

I think this is more romantic “grass is greener” thinking. It’s pretty hard to compare effectiveness of prisons for rehabilitations across countries. There is some research [0], and there is a lot of limitations in data, but it seems like Europe isn’t doing so well on recidivism. Or at least France and Germany seem to also struggle with people leaving and then reentering prison.

If I had to guess, I would say that prisons, in general, don’t rehabilitate. They just isolate for society’s protection because no one has a good idea of how to fix people that has effectiveness efficacy.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/

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