At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt • Hacker News Board

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#91

Post by nickdothutton » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

wizofaus wrote: post #79

nickdothutton wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, Australia wasnt an independent country at the time. It only gained independence in 1901. The last prisoner was shipped to the penal colony around 1870. So there was no Australian state to sign any agreement with. UK was until very recently in the EU with Greece. Might even get the prisoners superior conditions, some of UKs jails are Victorian in construction and very overcrowded.

> Australia wasnt an independent country at the time It had been occupied for 65000 years by people that might have argued otherwise though!

Unfortunately for those people, they hadn’t formed a state or anything approaching one, and were still busy fighting each other along tribal lines. I suppose the colonists could have tried a deal with the largest tribe at the time, who could have then imposed their agreement on the other tribes by force.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#92

Post by shakezula » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

Years ago, I got a speeding ticket. I worked nights at the time, and the office to make the payment at had very strange hours because it was from a tiny town. My schedule made it difficult to make it over to the office during open hours, and one of the times I tried it was closed randomly over lunch because again, small town. (I learned later there was only one person who ran the whole office.)

A day after my speeding ticket payment was due, I was pulled over, arrested for driving on a suspended license (quite roughly, I might add), and hauled to jail, where they booked me, processed me, and charged me thousands upon thousands of dollars for the privilege of being arrested. The whole process was structured around profit.

It absolutely demolished my meager savings account at the time, and damn near kept me from being able to attend the code bootcamp I was enrolled in. It taught me a serious lesson about the law: They exist only for power and profit. The entire experience cost me over $3000 for a speeding ticket of 5 mph over the stated limit. I've got a nice little arrest mention on my criminal record now, though, so that's nice.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#93

Post by kfksbxbksl » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #60

standardUser wrote: post #13

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…

Swap “drugs” for “guns” and you’d have the majority of HN flip out. The Government isn’t a magical entity of absolute perfection. Large classes of banned substances are indeed banned for good reason. Their effects on individual/societal well being documented quite heavily. Two things can be true at the same time: 1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled. 2. The US government and i…

To your point 1. no one is disputing that they need to be controlled. Alcohol is controlled, tobacco is controlled. The point is that making the illegal is an extreme way of controlling them (that doesn’t work).

Guns also need to be controlled (in my opinion way more that they currently are) but that doesn’t mean that I am advocating for them to be illegal.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#94

Post by etaioinshrdlu » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #13

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…

Plenty of countries, especially in Asia, but also the UAE and possibly others, have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies.

You may not like what it took to get done, but it did work. I'm not advocating for the heavy-handed approach, but it's intellectually dishonest to say that it can't work.

Also, the other countries have done it with a much smaller imprisonment per capita.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#95

Post by erdos4d » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #13

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…

Look at how many people will lose their jobs if this shuts down. The people who support this are often just happy to see minorities and poor people get fucked if it means their stupid brother in law stays on at the local prison. They view these people as human waste, so they don't care how much they get hurt, as long as their people are getting something out of it. Trying to stop this means figuring out how to unfuck these people's mentality. That is even harder than stopping drugs.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#96

Post by tpmx » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

nickdothutton wrote: post #21

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.

In Sweden the officially reported number is about $110k/year/prisoner or about $300/day/prisoner. Your comment makes me think I should try to sanity-check that number.

(And no, we don't charge them the cost afterwards.)

I absolutely think we should buy these services from other EU countries where costs are lower. I don't get why the EU single market legislation shouldn't apply to this.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#97

Post by hcnews » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #60

standardUser wrote: post #13

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…

Swap “drugs” for “guns” and you’d have the majority of HN flip out. The Government isn’t a magical entity of absolute perfection. Large classes of banned substances are indeed banned for good reason. Their effects on individual/societal well being documented quite heavily. Two things can be true at the same time: 1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled. 2. The US government and i…

Its very simple calculation really. Just look at the rest of the world if you're blinded by existing US system. 10s of countries have solved both of these problems in strikingly similar ways (similar as in similar for each problem not across the problems). So, why is US different? Answer: It's not. Majority of US folks need to just grow up to the fact that US humans aren't different than ROW humans and accept what data has been saying to them for generations. No point in being an outlier and trying to defend it tooth and nail.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#98

Post by standardUser » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

ryan93 wrote: post #80

standardUser wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, conceding that 5% of people in jail could be wrongfully imprisoned should be MORE than enough reason to want to tear the entire system down. Second, many of these "crimes" had no victim, so maybe it's not the people living their lives who are at fault, but rather an overzealous government who imprisons otherwise free people for doing no harm other than some abstract "moral" rule-breaking.

Thats one of the worst things about these criminals. If there were dramatically fewer crimes it'd be easier to find out who is innocent. Or devote more resources to it.

Imagine if we decriminalized every "crime" that didn't have a victim. We might actually be able to prevent more real crime, like violent crime and sexual assault and large-scale theft and fraud!

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#99

Post by wizofaus » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

metadat wrote: post #68

wizofaus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not clear how that's relevant to the comment you were replying to, unless you're suggesting that being jailed for minor controlled substance offenses is far more common in the US than the many other developed countries with similar laws?

Correct. It's a statistic many people are not aware of. Additionally, if you look at the racial breakdown of who's incarcerated in the USA, it's disproportionately black relative to number of blacks per capita residing in the country. Blacks are incarcerated at 5x the rate of whites, and make up 40% of all incarcerated individuals. This is insane.

Sadly it's even worse in Australia, where it's closer to 10x the rate for indigenous vs non-indigenous. I'd be horrified to find out they were expected to pay for their time behind bars though.

Re: At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt

#100

Post by shakezula » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

yeeyeeyee wrote: post #51

shakezula wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.

>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails. Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??

This is a problem of Stated preference vs. Revealed preference. You ask them what they think and they'd tell you "that's awful, I can't believe that, that's so unfair" but you put them up on the ballot at the midterms and get them to repeal it and all of a sudden it's about being "tough on crime" and "keeping our streets clean".