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Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

latimes.com

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Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#331

Post by cubano »

throwaway040435 wrote: post #285
cubano wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court. You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something. >An ironic applicatio…

You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court. Do you think it's appropriate to call out someone for using "jail" instead of "prison", when the meaning is clear, and you made the same mistake just 5 minutes prior? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497654 and in your original post: https://news.ycombinator.…

No I most definitely did not make a mistake.

Yes CCDC aka Clark County Detention Center (aka Las Vegas County Jail) is a jail in downtown Las Vegas where I did my kitchen slave labor recently on a 90-day sentence for basically jaywalking.

If I were to be sentenced for more then a year, I would have been sent to a prison somewhere in the boonies of Nevada away from Vegas.

The OP discussed a "3-year jail sentence", and I simply explained that would not be possible as jail and prison are significantly different institutions with very different implications.

I don't think I am wrong to continually express the difference between the two.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#333

Post by cubano »

pixl97 wrote: post #314
cubano wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court. You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something. >An ironic applicatio…

>You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, You have no idea what "time served" means at sentencing. You can get released on the day you are sentenced if you have already served more time.

Right of course..."time served" is a very common sentence for misdemeanor offenses where you could not bond out, and I certainly have an good "idea" what it means.

Also, if you are willing to take a ungodly amount of probation, it is quite possible you will get time-served on your felony charges as well.

I am talking about serious felony offenses where people get sent for multi-year prison sentences, and in those cases, time sitting in jail waiting to get to prison is not eligible for prison gain time.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#334

Post by cubano »

77pt77 wrote: post #294
cubano wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? You don't get 3 years in jail, you get 3 years in prison. The only jail time you do waiting to be sentenced to prison is the time you wait to go to court. You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something. >An ironic applicatio…

> You get no gain time for time spent in jail for your prison sentence, so its often called dead time or day-for-day or something. Excuse me?! So if I wait for 1 year in jail waiting to go to court and later I'm sentenced to 1 year in prison, I get to serve another year?!

No...you get sent home.

Let me give a concrete example here, direct from experience.

Florida DOC mandates you must do 85% of your prison (not jail...all jails have different gain time schemes just to make it really confusing) sentence, so that is roughly 5 days a month.

Lets say you score out to 22 months like I was many years ago...thats a total of 110 potential gain-time days off my sentence...great I think almost 4 months!

BUT...let's say I did 13 months in jail waiting for sentencing so I only have to do 9 more in prison.

In most prison systems, I would NOT be able to recover all my potential gain-time because the 13 months county-time did not count for my prison gain time, and perhaps I would only get 9*5 or 45 days gain-time against my sentence.

Get it?

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#335

Post by robertlagrant »

marcosdumay wrote: post #171
robertlagrant wrote: post #44

Remember when "university" meant "for anyone"? Why should Harvard tuition fees cost anywhere near what it costs to incarcerate someone 24/7?

Didn't it mean "for all knowledge"? When universities appeared, they were clearly not for everyone.

As in they were universally accessible, not that everyone should go to one. I.e. not just education for the rich, education for the smart.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#336

Post by HillaryBriss »

ptaipale wrote: post #64
timwaagh wrote: post #25

just outsource this to a low cost area. i'm sure a poor state would love to make some money housing california prisoners.

But I guess California prison guards and their unions - probably not an insignificant contributor to election budgets of some politicians - would not like that? They would bring up issues like isolation of prisoners from their friends and families (further increasing their re-offending risk) and dumping of working conditions (immoral). And that if you do this, you won't be re-elected.

> probably not an insignificant contributor to election budgets of some politicians

most definitely not insignificant.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or-...

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#337

Post by anigbrowl »

cubano wrote: post #122
csmark wrote: post #60

The USA has ~5% of the world's population but 22% of the world's prisoners. Financial profiting from prisoners: Prison Labor - paid $0.93-0.16/hr California Prisons didn't want to release prisoners because they would loose cheap labor..Courts said they had to: https://thinkprogress.org/california-tells-court-it-cant-rel... 30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit f…

At the risk of being boorish about the subject... I was recently released from Las Vegas County Jail (CCDC) where all sentenced inmates, myself included, are forced , by state law, to "work" in some manner in the jail. In this case, work consisted of 11-hour shifts, 6 days a week, of ultra back-breaking kitchen work. We were not even allowed to have water cups anywhere outside the break room. They actually yelled fas…

Yes, it's slavery by another name. Assuming you committed a crime rather than being framed up, that was bad, but the you were treated was itself a crime and I am sorry that you were subjected to that. I've been advocating (not very effectively I'm afraid) for root and branch reform of our criminal justice system for years now, and I feel both angry and ashamed to be a participant in a society where incarceration is treated as an economic opportunity for exploitation rather than a tragic outcome to be remediated.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#338

Post by BearGoesChirp »

devmunchies wrote: post #199
ythn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thought of it is barbaric and horrible. Know what else is barbaric and horrible? The crimes some of the "slaves" commit

Any child abusers or rapists arguably deserve it, but not to the benefit of a private company. And they shouldn't be required to work imo.

Even those classes of people include people who don't deserve it, given the extent of crimes that fall under those labels. Consider a parent being charged with child abuse for letting their child play alone outside, much like parents of old. Or consider cases that fall right outside the limits of Romeo and Juliet clauses.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#339

Post by dragonwriter »

Headline is an outright clickbait lie contradicted by the lead sentence; it doesn't cost more than the all-in annual cost of Harvard, but more than tuition.

Not that the comparison is particularly meaningful in any case, since it's not like sending convicts to Harvard instead is an available alternative.

Re: Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard

#340

Post by BearGoesChirp »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #316
tombrossman wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For future reference, if you or others reading this catch a bullshit charge like you describe, it is very likely that you can have a lawyer handle everything for you and it may be cheaper than the extra travel costs and missed work days. Even if you are supposedly 'required' to appear. I'm not a lawyer so my specific advice is to call a few and explain the situation, then hire one to handle everything for you. Even i…

I learned this lesson the hard way. I have weird facial tics. People often remark that I must be a very happy go lucky guy because I often smile involuntarily (or maybe that's the default position of my lips). During a pleading where I was highly anxious, a judge thought I wasn't taking the matter at hand seriously because I was smiling and decided to throw the book at me for that. This phenomenon is also what caused…

>Justice may be blind

Which is why it has never found its way into the courts.

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