41–50 of 374 posts
>All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars What? Had no idea about this whatsoever and I consider myself a well-read person. Damn.
Nothing weird going on here... It's the free market doing it's thing. Apparently staying in prison is in high demand, driving up prices. /s
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.
Outsourcing prisons to cheaper authoritarian countries sounds like a bad idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, fines are governed by the 8th amendment which requires they not be excessive.
Which of course they always are, sometimes.
Heh.
For real though, fines that aren't adjusted to the offenders wealth seem to give legal impunity to the wealthy. But performing that adjustment without a floor essentially gives legal impunity to people at rock bottom. The trick is finding some middle ground where all criminals, poor and rich, can be effectively punished to deter crimes of opportunity.
Every day I find new reason to believe the American penal system unconscionable. Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United Nations over it (the ILO, specifically). For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. Charging prisoners for their time there. And one of the highest incarceration levels and worst recidivism rates in the world. What exactly is the point of any of t…
>What exactly is the point of any of this?
At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. However, since the private entity needs to invest upfront cash to build the facility, they want some sort of assurance that the demand will materialize and they won't be left with a facility that's only 50% used, hence the minimum occupancy clause.
I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations.
I agree this causes skewed incentives (ie. the marginal cost of imprisoning someone can potentially be zero), but if you're deciding to lock someone up or not hinges on whether it costs $30k or $0, you probably have other issues. If a convict is dangerous then he should be locked up, if he's not he shouldn't be. Money shouldn't play a factor in this.
What drives me absolutely insane about stories like this is that so many of the people suffering under these policies are guilty of little more than market participation. The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't. They simply can't. Countless laws, countless billions of dollars and countless ruined lives later, drugs are no less p…
Government[s]- plural, and international (though some are more progressive than others).
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.
Every day I find new reason to believe the American penal system unconscionable. Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United Nations over it (the ILO, specifically). For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. Charging prisoners for their time there. And one of the highest incarceration levels and worst recidivism rates in the world. What exactly is the point of any of t…
>[...] For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. [...] >What exactly is the point of any of this? At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. However, since the private entity needs to invest upfront cash to build the facility, they want some sort o…
That sounds pretty nefarious to me because the state has a duty of care for its citizens - of which this is a clear and flagrant abdication.
> I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations.
Probably worth not speculating. [1] At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place.
It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality. The state should feel the burden of higher criminality and reap the reward of lowering it.
[1] http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-...
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.
This is the sort of thinking that had the UK export criminals to Australia, no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
I believe it’s reasonable to assume that far more than 5% of people behind bars are actually innocent. I was raised by two career long LEOs and if even a small fraction of other LEOs were as bad as my folks, it would be safe to assume that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars.