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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

#331

Post by fwip »

leetcrew wrote: post #279
mrsuprawsm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the UK whilst there is free healthcare etc and its a country of 66m, the healthcare has been getting worse and worse. This is largely a consequence of chronic underfunding, a deliberate political choice by the Conservative party.

is it possible to define "underfunded" in an objective way? people inevitably die, and an individual's life can usually be extended at least a little by a marginal increase in spending. what would it take for you to not consider the system "underfunded"?

Sure, pick a mean time to appointment, and fund until you reach it. :)

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

#332

Post by gnode »

lb1lf wrote: post #310
everdev wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recidivism is very low. Anders Breivik got 21 years for killing 77 people. Are you worried about when he gets out in 2033?

He won't. Norwegian law opens for in essence indefinite terms for inmates deemed a lasting danger to society. ABB was sentenced under this statute and may well be locked up for the rest of his days; he may, however, at regular intervals apply to a board for release. He must then convince this board that he is no longer a threat to society and good luck with that.

I remember there being some amount of objection to his freedom to communicate while in prison (sending letters espousing his ideology, and such). Although this evidence of his continued ideology will probably help ensure he isn't released.

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

#333

Post by ewzimm »

eropple wrote: post #292
ewzimm wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases, the idea of rehabilitating people either before or after prison is nearly impossible. There are almost half a million people in the American prison system for drug offenses. If someone is released from prison for cannabis possession, they can likely drive a few hours to a place where it's perfectly legal (at the state level), and even encouraged by the culture. How could you possibly rehabilitate someo…

This is a strange reply. What makes you think that that is what the poster to whom you reply is concerned about? People don't commit violent crimes for weed . The crime is having weed . And things that are not weed are not being legalized state-by-state.

The subject is analyzing prison's role in rehabilitation. If we consider prison a failure as a rehabilitation device, then maybe we should focus on rehabilitation before prison. This is a reasonable suggestion. However, if the reason they're in prison is for drug possession, which makes up a huge portion of the prison population, I'm suggesting that any kind of rehabilitation is nearly impossible. With cannabis legalization finished, many states actually are looking to legalize other substances, and even if they don't, there's strong social pressure in American culture to try other illegal substances, leading to a huge prison population.

So I'm saying that it in many cases, the problem isn't so much that prison is a failure as a rehabilitation center and we should focus on rehabilitation elsewhere, it's that people are in prison for things they simply don't want to be rehabilitated for and have strong influences to continue doing. The culture is inherently resistant to being rehabilitated from things that it doesn't consider harmful.

To use an example that might be more neutral, what if copyright enforcement was more severe and we had half a million people in prison for watching unlicensed YouTube videos? We might analyze the failure of the prison system in rehabilitating people from watching the wrong streams and focus more on education so that people could identify properly licened content before they watched it. But unless the people actually considered this behavior harmful, it would be an impossible task, and we would see ever increasing numbers of people in prison for watching the wrong videos.

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

#334

Post by CaptainZapp »

europsucks wrote: post #280
CaptainZapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are there private prison companies to begin with? There are, in my opinion, certain aspects of government, which never should be outsourced for private gain. A prison company being one of the most extreme examples.

Why exactly, though? If other companies can satisfy the needs of the state, why not prisons? You wouldn't mandate that governments should build their own cars, for example?

Monopoly on violence [1] is held by the state as it should be, otherwise we have vigilante justice and I think we can all agree that's bad.

In my opinion (and we can certainly debate this point) this should never be outsourced to third party entities. A rent-a-cop in a mall should not have the power to arrest customers (or even search their belongings) without calling the cops.

Outsourcing such functions have the inherent risk that the privat company cuts costs and corners and moreover hires unqualified and cheap staff, which makes a bad situation even worse.

Incarceration of a human being should never, ever be a license to aply additional torture in any way, shape or form. Private law enforcment with minimal oversight is a direct route to such excesses, which should not be tolerated by a civilized society.

You wouldn't mandate that governments should build their own cars, for example?

That's a rather silly analogy, don't you think? Consumer products usually don't violently intrude into the freedom and bodily integrity of other people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

edit : added link

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

#335

Post by monocasa »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #178
minikites wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By "an activist group" I mean people who confuse work with slavery. People in prison eat what they're given, sleep when they're told, have (almost) no personal property and are at mercy of the administration on many other issues. Work is one of the greatest things a human being can do. Working doesn't make an otherwise free person a slave.

The legality of forced work of prisoners is due to an exemption in the 13th amendment.

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Prison labor is literally slavery.

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

#336

Post by zanny »

ashelmire wrote: post #115
jMyles wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if I agree that a public sector union has zero obligation to the public good - and I don't - I still don't think you can "thank goodness" for an organization that advocates for its financial interest of its members if that interest is bad for everyone else.

So you think Californians at large get to dictate terms to security guards? They shouldn’t get to negotiate their own terms? They get paid shit even with the union.

If you work 30 years in the industry and live for another 30 after that you are basically getting paid double per year worked without interest.

Getting the money upfront and investing it could be substantial, but thats still a much better negotiation than most Americans get for their jobs which are usually at most 40k without full pensions or almost any other benefit.

My grandmother is 86 and is infinitely grateful for her 25 years worked at a public university as a secretary. Those kinds of "obligations" are not large up front numbers but some people like the guaranteed security, at least up until austerity starts taking away the pay they were promised half a century ago.

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

#337

Post by cobookman »

Why not house these criminals in a cheaper cost of living area? Lower cost, provide jobs & services to other states, win-win?

I get the visiting hours being harder on families. But look at mississipi which costs 49.79/day or 18k/year [1]. With a 57k/year savings you could buy air travel for up to 50 visits per year.

https://www.peer.ms.gov/Reports/reports/rpt608.pdf

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

#338

Post by simonh »

insertcredit wrote: post #302
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could not possibly have any proof to back up this racist statement.

The black-white IQ gap in the US is not scientifically disputed. [1] US prisons are ~38% black. [2] Norwegian prisons aren't. Not to mention that in general, and without taking into account race, you don't expect the brightest to be in there. Ergo average IQ in US prisons being much lower than in Norwegian prisons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_S... [2] https://www.bop.gov/about/stati…

It's disputed that it's due to race, there's a good argument that it's due to culture and culture can change.

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

#339

Post by chmod775 »

gridlockd wrote: post #243
chmod775 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Their recidivism and overall crime-rates rates are significantly lower than in the US... Not really true: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/ Totally comparable to the US, Norway being an exception (as usual). > They blow the US out of the water on every metric. The US is a very large and diverse country and it's not structurally comparable to Germany, Netherlands and much less Norway (with 22% of…

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/

Let's fact-check some of their numbers.

Spoiler Alert: Their cited sources have completely different numbers.

EDIT: I removed some examples that are probably correct according to their definition of recidivism (they only looked at prisoners -> offenders).

Table 2.

Germany 35% (them) vs 23% (source)

They may have linked the wrong source here, since the source they provided is specific to people with psychotic disorders.

So let's assume this is their source (the one they linked for Germany in Table 1): https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Publikationen/DE/Legalbewaehr...

According to them the re-imprisonment rate is 35%, though the source says it's 23% (page 9, first paragraph).

The re-imprisonment rate for juvenile offenders is 35% though and mentioned in the same paragraph. It's likely they just confused that.

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

#340

Post by chmod775 »

prepend wrote: post #170
JaumeGreen wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

I did some fact checking on the article you linked and it turns out it's garbage. Their own sources disagree with them.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19463425

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