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California bans private prisons

theguardian.com

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Re: California bans private prisons

#271

Post by a1369209993 »

tyrust wrote: post #211
jvm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic to see the correct take get downvoted. If anyone's interested in actually learning about the causes of mass incarceration, I'd strongly recommend John Pfaff's _Locked In_: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L6SLKK8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... In short: a) It's not the war on drugs. b) It's not private prisons. c) It's not sentencing laws. You could get rid of all of those and America would still lead the "free" worl…

Then what is it?

Plea bargains.

Although the root fault is that a "guilty" plea costs the court less resources than a "not guilty" plea. If you wanted to solve this properly, you'd require that even if the defendant pleads guilty, there still has to be the full process of jury selection, presenting evidence and arguments (even if the defence's argument is "yeah, I did it") and deliberation (which, by design, gives twelve opportunities for someone to say "what the hell are we doing; this is clearly bunk" without that person being under threat of twenty-five-to-life for contempt of cop).

Edit: oh right, and you also need to make offering plea bargains (outside of state's-evidence cases) a twenty-five-to-life felony for the prosecutor.

Re: California bans private prisons

#272

Post by lacampbell »

etaty wrote: post #179

Just for fun, same sentence on health care. > I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and…

How expensive is health care in the US? IE, in my country dentistry is fully private, and it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning. How much is that in America?

Re: California bans private prisons

#273

Post by XorNot »

dlphn___xyz wrote: post #247
arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

why does the healthcare discussion always regress to capitalism vs socialism? everyone cites canada as the ideal model of social healthcare but forget to mention the long wait times and the fact that their population is only a fraction of the US. i think our system could use some tweaks but throwing it out altogether for a socialist program is not it.

Tell me what is the wait time when you can never get treatment?

Re: California bans private prisons

#274

Post by lacampbell »

magduf wrote: post #183
refurb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting Wikipedia page. Seems almost 20% of Australian prisoners are in private prisons! And 15-20% in the UK. Obviously this is not a uniquely US issue another countries are expanding their use.

The five-eyes countries are all going down the tubes, not just the US.

Yet they're all very popular destinations for migrants - they haven't got the memo?

Re: California bans private prisons

#275

Post by chroma »

jacobush wrote: post #250
chroma wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's private prisons, not private judges. The prisoner would be released when they'd served their sentence.

If someone was up for parole, you could very easily discover bad behaviour on their part, so they would have serve the full sentence. How's that? Waddayknow, they committed a new crime while in prison . Guess they have to stay a bit longer now. Sad.

Crimes committed while in prison count as recidivism.

Re: California bans private prisons

#276

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jorblumesea wrote: post #266
arcticbull wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm also in favor of socialized medicine for basically exactly these reasons. Shocker, I know. The system works! I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There's no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.

> Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money. Many Americans have not been outside of the states and have no concept of what life in other countries might be like. There's a good percentage of Americans that are completely ignorant of how the rest of the world does things, and also dism…

Your comment seems flatly accurate and yet you get downvoted. I still can’t understand this phenomenon.

Re: California bans private prisons

#277

Post by tomp »

arcticbull wrote: post #215
imsofuture wrote: post #187

[flagged]

Capitalism is great for some things, and awful for others. Capitalism works best when there's no power differential between customers and service providers because the goal is to maximize profit. If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system. If I get no choice in which prison I go to, well, I get bilked. Basically anywhere you have n…

> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die

In a socialized medicine system, someone else is making this choice for you. Medical costs (drugs, doctors' education and time, research costs, equipment) are unbounded, while resources are not (no matter what kind of insurance you have), so tradeoffs have to be made. ("What? My daughter is dying from an extremely rare disease and you're not having 1000 PhD researchers working on the cure?! You're spending the resources on curing breast cancer instead?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!") AFAIK (though I haven't deeply researched this topic) society-level recommendations aren't made on what is best, but on what is most cost effective (e.g. how often you should have mammography, when you should start having regular colon cancer scans) so it's perfectly reasonable, if you're rich(er), to supplement the public medical system with some extra resources of your own to improve the health outcomes of yourself and/or people close to you. In addition, that funds new research (e.g. the anti-aging craze currently happening in SV, funded mostly by rich billionaires that don't want to die... the medical system doesn't even recognize aging as a disease (so drugs can't be approved to be "anti-aging")!)

Re: California bans private prisons

#278

Post by abugheratwork »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #276
jorblumesea wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money. Many Americans have not been outside of the states and have no concept of what life in other countries might be like. There's a good percentage of Americans that are completely ignorant of how the rest of the world does things, and also dism…

Your comment seems flatly accurate and yet you get downvoted. I still can’t understand this phenomenon.

> They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money.

Mind reading a bit, here: This line might be taken as an ungenerous representation of a different point of view, and likely to generate more emotional argument than productive discussion.

Re: California bans private prisons

#279

Post by coldtea »

lacampbell wrote: post #272
etaty wrote: post #179

Just for fun, same sentence on health care. > I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and…

How expensive is health care in the US? IE, in my country dentistry is fully private, and it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning. How much is that in America?

Once in the US, I was quoted $200 for busting a cyst that had developed on my finger due to small cut/infection (this service in my European country is offered for nearly free in any pharmacy).

Instead I went to a Walgreens, bought a pin, a lighter, some ethanol, and a band-aid for like $5, and did it myself...

Re: California bans private prisons

#280

Post by zeptoon »

jorblumesea wrote: post #266
arcticbull wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm also in favor of socialized medicine for basically exactly these reasons. Shocker, I know. The system works! I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There's no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.

> Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money. Many Americans have not been outside of the states and have no concept of what life in other countries might be like. There's a good percentage of Americans that are completely ignorant of how the rest of the world does things, and also dism…

Damn straight
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