Housing a prisoner in California costs more than a year at Harvard
latimes.com
latimes.com
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 for these prisoners as it would draw down the labor force and lead to depletion of the firefighter force.
Someone already mentioned the profit of commissaries. Some are actually run by private companies operating inside the prison
Legally speaking seems like in the US that prisoners are slaves.
SOURCE: https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/13thamendment.htm...
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/16102495/13th.2016.NF.WEBRi...
Much of this theory is based on The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander which first popularized the idea of how we utilized the prison system to intentionally discriminate and keep locked up (for free labor) the african-american populations.
There recently was a book discussing a different explanation. In this book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff, Pfaff argues it's the perverse incentives of prosecutors and judges that are pushing up the prison population.
I don't know enough to say which is true, just wanted to get awareness of the competing ideas on the topic.
But definitely there's some really perverse incentives to lock people up for free labor. And, as the documentary accurately points out, it's all built in to the Constitution.
Nor does the existence of perverse incentives mean that those presented with them are helpless to do otherwise than go along with them. That is an abdication of moral responsibility. If you are presented with a perverse incentive that you feel is incompatible with your personal moral calculus, then it is your duty to reject it. To go along with it and then say you had no other choice is no different from the behavior of the 'good Germans' described by Hannah Arendt in The Banality of Evil. It's literally the exercise of privilege.
Liberalism only works so long as people are invested in the integrity of the institutions which underpin it. When those institutions are corrupted, liberalism becomes complicit in oppression. This is how democracies devolve into autocracies.
Also, the word "except" is our key hint here.
I seriously doubt (and see no evidence for the idea) that the US is so lawless that we can have almost a quarter of all prisoners in the entire world while only having a fraction of its population.
This speaks strongly to the idea that huge amounts of wrongful imprisonment occurs and (as a logical consequence) these people are slaves against their will without their having done anything worthy of punishment.
The difference is solely the standing law. During the nazi regimen (godwin's law, but really) many of the appalling things they did were legal. It was legal to execute, and it was legal to do forced labor.
Slavery was always legal, that was the problem all along! A slave could not physically escape without the fear of unpunished retribution.
Redefining the word so that prison slavery doesn't qualify seems obtuse, counterproductive, and doesn't even have the defense of being historical.
If locking people up and forcing them to work is making people billions, it's slavery. Period.
That's why the Hollywood version sometimes has the judge say, "I sentence you to ten years hard labor at Camp Rockcrusher." If they just said "ten years confinement in Oubliette Prison," then the prisoner would not be compelled to do anything against their will.
Instead, we oversentence criminals, and use the low-wage prison jobs as a carrot to reduce their prison time. You can work for peanuts and get out early, or you can serve your entire sentence.
The net effect is the same. The rent-seeking profit motive makes the criminal justice system more cruel and exploitative.
If part of their punishment is meant to be financial restitution, then I believe that should be spelled out in the judgement, and they should be paid market wages for whatever work they do, and that should be garnished accordingly and kept out of the prison system entirely so there is no profit motive to keep people in, and so that the amounts are transparent.
On a more serious note: The Norwegian prisoners in question actually have to volunteer, and the department of justice have made a "marketing" video to entice prisoners, which led to complaints from prisoners when it turned out they'd exaggerated a bit (some stuff was not ready when the first prisoners arrived).
Overall the attitude is very different to the US one.
> We even used some jails as temporary refugee shelter (for those horrified: prisons in The Netherlands are a lot less stark than America).
Same in Norway. Low security Norwegian prisons have fences no more than normal garden fences for example - they're there to show the prisoners how far they are allowed to go, not to physically stop them, as the type of prisoners sent to those places are more concerned about getting it over and done with than escaping. I think that is an essential element: To give people a chance wherever possible to show they can take responsibility.
More serious prisoners too can demonstrate they can be trusted and are serious about rehabilitation and get moved to prisoners without barriers that will actually hold them.
After all, if we can't trust them the day before their release, there's no reason why we should suddenly trust them the day after... I'm happy we let these prisoners gradually prove that they are likely to have reformed.
And the rehabilitation rates thankfully reflect that people respond to being treated humanely.
Maybe one day America gets over its mentality of vengeance.
Zero. It's literally slavery. The thought of it is barbaric and horrible.
It is not. It may be allowed by the Constitution but it is a significant extra punishment levied on offenders that should be part of their actual punitive phase, if that is what society wants.
The 13th amendment specifically permits "slavery" as a punishment for those convicted of a crime.
"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."
Slavery was the capturing of innocent human beings and then forcing them and their progeny to do labor in perpetuity. It was utterly dehumanizing and undeserved treatment. We do a disservice to the meaning of slavery in the USA by calling everything slavery: taxation, prison work, marriage, etc.
I do agree about the overuse of the term in other situations however
That part, at least, is not technically correct.
Ah, justice, that famously objective thing we can measure scientifically and which is not subject to any sort of sociopolitical bias.
I'm arguing that here in the US, which is a very relevant context for a HN discussion on US/CA prisons, the term slavery has special meaning and we shouldn't water it down by using it to describe every perceived slight.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 13th amendment specifically calls it slavery and specifically allows that kind of slavery. The abolitionists who pushed through the 13th knew the meaning of slavery when it was more than a distant memory and still decided that it was the correct term.
Must they have to work on a cotton plantation for you to make it count?
Oh wait, we call these prison farms and there are dozens of them...
The point about the treatment being dehumanizing and undeserved is that this is a completely orthogonal issue. It mostly was, but then, most current prisoners aren't treated that well either.
Prison labor so sufficiently meets the definition of slavery that the authors of the 13th Amendment, ending chattel slavery, excluded prison labor as still allowed.
Why the word "innocent"? Its irrelevant if they committed a crime or not, or if they were convicted of a crime or not.
Enforced prison labor is slavery, no ifs ands or buts. It must be stopped. This is an Americanized version of Stalin's gulags.
If you're a member of a society and you break the law, then you aren't innocent. If the laws of the society are unjust then that's a different argument entirely. Africans who were not even members of the American colonies were kidnapped and forced into labor. They were completely innocent but regarded as sub-human and not deserving of rights. To equate their plight with the plight of those who knowingly break the law in the USA and are forced to do labor is to demean the situation of Africans who were enslaved. IMO, that's not the argument we want to make regarding US prison problems.
Enforced prison labor is slavery
Then I guess we can't fine people either. People perform labor to make money. Fining people forces them to provide labor.
Enforced prison labor is just a fine to be paid through labor. Like any penalty, it can be punitive or it can be recompensatory. It is not "slavery".
Ever had a traffic ticket? Stolen something when you were young? Yes? Technically, you are a criminal then. You just didn't get caught or were a minor criminal, according to law.
Besides. Anyone in prison/jail is still human and I truly believe this gives you some rights, including the right not to be used as slave labor. After all, we've already taken away their freedom.
> "Traffic infraction" means a violation of law punishable as provided in § 46.2-113, which is neither a felony nor a misdemeanor.
§ 46.2-113:
> [ ... ] Unless otherwise stated, these violations shall constitute traffic infractions punishable by a fine of not more than that provided for a Class 4 misdemeanor under § 18.2-11.
Ran a red light? Not a criminal. DUI? Criminal.
> unless otherwise declared in this chapter with respect to particular offenses, it is a misdemeanor for any person to do any act forbidden or fail to perform any act required in this chapter.
Upside, we're entitled to real jury trials.
I would suggest this line of reasoning - "they are all criminals" - is not productive. We all are criminals. Should we all be treated as such?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_by_Geo...
I personally don't mind inmates working while in prison. What I disagree with is the inmates not being allowed to be released early because the state wants them to keep working.
I don't think having to work while in prison is going to scare any would-be offender straight. And thinking about inmates not being released early is only going to piss off everyone.
However, if criminal punishment actually scared people away from committing crimes, why are our incarceration rates are so high?
You'd think a country with mandatory minimum sentences and capital punishment to deter a lot of crime, but it appears it simply doesn't work. One theory I read (I can't find the source ATM) posited deterrence tends not work against people who tend to go to prison because people who go to prison statistically have a poorer sense of risk/reward.
So what do you do?
Personally, I think it depends on the type of crime. First, we need to recognize that some of our policies incentivize crime, especially the illicit drug market. People with a poor sense of risk/reward will naturally gravitate to this line of work because they probably respond a lot more to the reward than the risk.
There may be a population that is deterred by criminal punishments and one could argue it makes sense to keep criminal punishments to simply deter that population. I don't disagree with that, but I do think we really need to reassess whether criminal punishment is the universal deterrence some people make it out to be. Our best crime prevention policy may simply be removing or poisoning incentive.
The premise: "Harsh punishments are scaring criminals from commiting crime" must be questioned. I highly doubt it is a valid premise. Just look at crime rates in regions where you have harsh criminal laws up to capital punishment. There is not even a correlation much less a causal relation between "Harsh on Crime" vs. "Low crime rate".
Know what else is barbaric and horrible? The crimes some of the "slaves" commit
California is well-known for this, and Riverside County is one of the primary counties responsible. When you walk into the courtroom, there's a sign that says "Attention CUSTOMERS" instead of "Attention Citizens." Lets you know right off the bat that these people are after nothing but money and should be charged under RICO statutes.
If I ever go through that system there is no way in hell I am coming out of the prison "reformed". Today when I look at a young kid I feel compassion and I will help the kid in need. After coming out of an US Prison I am likely to see everyone else as "these people were responsible for putting me through hell". That lack of compassion is way more worse.
I am not surprised that so many people turn out to be repeat offenders.
But once the for profit element was added into the mix there is an actual disincentive to rehabilitate people as it would mean a direct reduction in profits. So before it was bad but this is like adding some gasoline into the fire.
There was for example, the case of a judge in PA who had a deal with the local prison/juvenile center of sorts where he was sending teenagers in for minor infractions and was getting kickbacks.
Prison industrial complex also lobbies the government to keep the War on Drugs going because a reform there also would directly cut profits for them.
There even a whole ecosystem of predators exploiting every single angle possible to milk the prisoners and their families' money and labor. Down to telecom companies with ridiculously expensive charges when prisoners talk to their loved ones, to companies selling food (the commissary) and so on.
It is exactly slavery, and it is the explicit exception to the US Constitutional abolition of slavery in the 13th Amendment.
It's also an explicit exception to the international prohibition on slavery in the ICCPR.
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 faster! faster! as we ran "the line"...I never could get over that one. All that was missing were the whips and the guards with shotguns spitting tobacco.
We processed approx. 10 thousand trays per day, and were constantly harassed and threatened big time by the corporate kitchen staff in charge. It wasn't enough that we were clocking 60-70 hours a week for the grand total of 1 extra tray per meal (not every meal grant you, just the ones we were working during), but you could actually get thrown in the box and lose gain time (more days in jail) for eating a cookie or some trivial such thing.
If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.
I did the math...2 shifts of 28 workers 365 days a year...with overtime and all that, approx $50k per week($2.6mil/year) of free basically coerced slave labor for the Aero-mark Corporation that ran the kitchen.
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Don't you need a judge to determine that?
Obviously some sentences are not eligible to earn gain time.
The sentence you receive from a judge is probably not anywhere close to what you will actually sit in jail for. Probation, parole, double time, triple time, good behavior, trustee status, all affect the outcome.
For example, you are sentenced to 3 years of jail for a non-violent drug offense. How long do you serve in jail? Very commonly 366 days, though it may be as much as a year and a half. That is if you don't get into any other trouble in jail. After that point you will be released on probation.
What the previous poster is likely stating is that if you willingly agree to be a slave for the state you get all the benefits of early release. The defectors that do not want to be slave labor are not given said benefits. An ironic application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
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 application of the prisoners delma. If none of the prisoners would be willing to be a slave, the state could not hold them all, or 'extend' their sentences because of overcrowding.
This is an interesting observation, but here is how thats dealt with; anyone whom discusses a general purpose strike against working is charged with a serious felony "inciting to riot" and is given an "outside charge" and is probably spending years more in prison.
That's how they do that.
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.com/item?id=14496609
For example in Texas, you've sat in jail for 6 month and receive a 1 year sentence, you will not be sent to prison, you will remain in the jail for the next 6 months. You can remain in 'jail' for years sometimes before being sent to a prison facility, even after sentencing.
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.
Can you elaborate?
Those who support the war on drugs should think about his point:
>...Was this the outcome society wants me to have? To wreck what small success I struggled to get over what amounted to an illegal search and seizure (that's my PD talking, not me)? Who was the victim of my "crime"? ...
The war on drugs is just a war on people.
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?!
I took that to mean that while you are in jail you burn down one to one days which is not as fast as the bonus or "gain time" you would get in actual prison.
He may or may not be correct and my guess is it depends on where you at since state and local laws will be applied but... As for knowing what he is talking about my guess is many prisoners are experts in the system of trying to reduce their stays in prison.
As the other poster actually has first-hand experience of being incarcerated, your dismissive tone in response to some loose phrasing comes off as both nasty and ridiculous.
Source, was a CO in Texas, also: http://law.justia.com/codes/texas/2005/gv/004.00.000498.00.h...
If you follow the link, you'll see that participating in work or educational programs can improve one's good time earning class, allowing an inmate to earn an earlier release date. In contrast to the other poster, Texas requires good time for time served in county jails. Also notable, educational opportunities have been severely curtailed in TDCJ over the last decade.
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?
I think 'score out to' was 'sentenced to'.
If I read it right they are saying (mostly) the time spent in jail does not accrue days off a sentence like the time spent in the prison would.
The scoring system is byzantine as all hell and I challenge anyone to figure it out.[1]
"Scoring out" is simply a term used by Florida convicts to explain how much time they got among themselves I guess. Maybe it was inappropriate to use it here.
Gain-time is a sentence reduction scheme where people get time off their total sentence for staying out of trouble.
[0] http://macklawpa.com/criminal-defense/felony-score-sheet/
[1] http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/sen_cpcm/cpc_manual.pdf
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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.
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.
Second, you do get credit for time served, whether you sat in a jail cell or a prison cell. If they don't credit you for time served, you can sue for illegal detention. It varies state-by-state as to whether you earn good-time (gain time) during your presentencing stay, but typically you get it if you didn't have any infractions.
Finally, prisons employ psychologists who actively gauge the population for "low morale" and suggest courses of action for the staff to take to keep the population under control with the least amount of effort/expense. Typically, they will improve the feed a little when the men become unruly. Also, the staff actively works with the gang structures to help keep the peace.
No matter which way you slice it, the sentence is still 10 years, and the state can decide how much of that is spent in prison, and how much outside as a less-than-entirely-free person.
If you can manage to serve your entire sentence in prison without actually committing additional crimes, you might be able to walk out the front gates and never have a single day of probation, but I put the likelihood of that ever happening at just above infinitesimal. People in prison would mostly rather be outside and on parole/probation.
You only need a judge's help to keep someone in prison past the actual length of their sentence.
IANAL and IHNBAP, so I may be up to 100% wrong about this.
The kitchen is also considered one of the better jobs, a bad job would be Hoe Squad, which means a chain gang led out into 35C heat to work the fields while guys on horseback yell at you to work faster.
The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
Is there any documented evidence of this happening?
EDIT:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...
http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2015/06/private-pri...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...
There is limited on-unit housing for officers, and inmates are responsible for maintenance of those.
It is not unheard of for inmate work-crew supervisors (officers) to buy their workers a hamburger or take-out meal; this is usually during or after a shift of unusual duration or a situation that deserves a little recognition.
There are special cases. My grandfather, a county sheriff, was granted custody of a TDCJ inmate by the director. The inmate worked as a porter in the county jail, and occasionally was my babysitter for short periods of time. This was in the '70's.
Actually working for the jail only provides you the opportunity to LOSE gain time, not get more.
If you refuse to work, you get up to 15 days in solitary confinement (the box, or I simply call it "jail" because its actually jail inside of jail) and lose 5 days of gain time, thus adding 5 days to your sentence.
However, it does not end there...one of the CO's that worked security in the kitchen often threatened to contact your sentencing judge and ask for extra time for screwing up in the kitchen.
I wish I had some way to verify your story, as I as a reader can't know who sits behind the keyboard on the other side.
I could never in a 1000 years make up the narrative of my life. I often cannot believe I've lived it.
Every word I write here on HN is true, although you simply have no idea how I wish it wasn't so.
I'm also a LV resident. The city is generally hostile.
When did that become a thing? And who does it benefit?
>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.
Unless the work was part of the sentence (which I think is totally fair, as a term of restitution) I don't see how what they did was legal. You might want to talk to the ACLU.
> except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
SCOTUS has ruled that prison labor does not violate the 13th amendment.
Also, "The Thirteenth Amendment has also been interpreted to permit the government to require certain forms of public service, presumably extending to military service and jury duty." (https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/a-common-interpretation-...)
That’s a handy excuse to use to justify involuntary servitude. I guess they feel the part about "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,“ wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2013/09/private-pri...
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2015/06/private-pri...
California for instance (referenced multiple times here) has had many governors since the Reagan days and could have ended the practice on a state level, and at a federal level the pendulum has swung to both sides on multiple occasions. Any of these administrations could have made it a priority, but did not.
That statement is nonsensical. Who else is to blame for originating these policies?
otherwise.. why not blame the romans?
But maybe I'm wrong. Given his other comments it sounds like he's been in jail/prison more than once.
I wouldn't be glad someone had a bad time in their life.
Some people need to have a bad time in order to get them to behave. If you know without a doubt, that breaking the law will lead to having a very bad time, you are going to avoid breaking the law. If you see it as a viable career move, wouldn't you be more likely than ever to break the law?
> Some people need to have a bad time in order to get them to behave. If you know without a doubt, that breaking the law will lead to having a very bad time, you are going to avoid breaking the law. If you see it as a viable career move, wouldn't you be more likely than ever to break the law?
People probably need both, "proportionate" consequences to their action and mean and method to avoid the following the same path...
Certainly they could have whipped him daily and that too would have discouraged future lawbreaking but at some point we have to ask "is this justice or abusive?"
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...
You can almost always find someone doing something even more horrific. That's a pretty low bar, which is usually not seen as sufficient.
> 30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit for these prisoners as it would draw down the labor force and lead to depletion of the firefighter force.
I guess if some of them die fighting fire we as a society are told to think "good riddance".
Lack of compassion for those wronged by the state is a Achilles heel of US civilization. It is going to cause a damage down further as people's respect for law erodes over time.
Let's call it what it is - slave labor. Text of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
"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."
Also, there is the whole question of whether it would be fair to the other prisoners. Pretty soon the prison economy would be infested with cigarette derivatives and yard swaps.
> “Bernie really was a successful businessman with quite original insights into the market, and he’s continued applying his business instincts in prison,” Fishman said. “At one point, he cornered the hot chocolate market. He bought up every package of Swiss Miss from the commissary and sold it for a profit in the prison yard. He monopolized hot chocolate! He made it so that, if you wanted any, you had to go through Bernie.”
The search for "madoff swiss chocolate" will find many more articles based on the above quote.
"While Max and Franz earnestly supervise rehearsals, Leo continues their old scam - overselling shares of the play to their fellow prisoners, and even to the warden. The song "Prisoners of Love" plays while the credits roll."
Instead of wasting time and resources to select the "best" possible level of future criminal, we just throw the whole lot in jail.
Except taxpayers foot the bill. Theres an economic incentive to keeping crime low and right now were all being robbed blind, in this area as well (because yes there are too many to count)
The amount who are released within 5 years with little to no recovery or are going to end up in an even worse state, with even less of an ability to get a job, are more likely to continue to commit crime to make ends meet.
Before we talk about Harvard grads destroying the eocnomy, lets talk about making it less and less likely for 75% of the people imprisoned to ever be able to contribute to society once they are released.
We have a very protestant implementation of prison, they exist to punish people, not to reabilitate people or address the issues, and everyone ends up paying a higher cost with more damage in the end.
Yes people who are doing serious crimes should be put away, but we know that most of the time thats not the case, and furthemore, we know that alot of serious crimes including rape, have men released within 5 years, while a first time offender selling green could land 15 in prison.
Maybe.. http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/14/some-european-pri...
Why not both?
You also have to budget for extra security if your a contractor working in a prison you have to log all of your tools in and out to stop inmates nicking things that could be used as weapons or to aid an escape
There is a (relatively famous) prison in Norway where the rehabilitation is so effective that the prisoner's are given these jobs and are handed chainsaws, picks, the keys to the boat off the island. The prisoners are the ones ferrying people to and from the prison.
Sounds to me like (for the most part) we're doing prison wrong in the states.
How easy is it politically to build a min security facility in an area affluent enough to have day jobs for prisoners vs. building a max security prison in the middle of unemployed nowhere?
but this is all based on a deep rooted belief that most people are good, and crime is usually a result of low income/and growing up in places stuck in a cycle of socioeconomic hopelessness (atleast the kind of crime people are imprisoned for, weve already established wallstreet bankers commit crime and dont go to prison), taking people out of these toxic environments and equipping them with a job where they are exposed to society and have a chance to rebuild their lives is beneficial, for them, and society as a whole.
In U.S. politics we have 300million people binned into two extremist views and prison reform is'nt trending hot on twitter right now and if it was it would be used as a litmus test to pit half the country against the other and a debate about whether people deserve the life they have or can better themselves and deserve to be treated better and we all know how that has played out in politics recently. bigotry and stereotyping win.
Very little hope for the incarcerated in this country
In the vast majority of American prisons, the prisoners do the mopping. Security is still done by guards, but nearly every other job in the prison is done by the offenders. It's much cheaper this way - for state prisons average starting wage for non-industrial jobs is $0.25/hr. Industrial jobs don't start much higher, but they tend to have a higher cap around $2.50/hr instead of the standard cap of $1.00/hr. There are a few cases of offenders making minimum wage, but these are the exception rather than the norm.
Prisons are run by the offenders - it's cheaper this way.
For that price, we should have Harvard classes taught at prisons, and maybe these inmates could have a shot at using their disparate lifestyle extremes to have new ways to employ/create new businesses that can improve society in areas where they see/experience/witness need for improvement, and put our tax payers to good work.
If every prisoner is cooking mopping and doing whatever for free, where is the $75k/yr coming from?
As far as other costs go, I'm not sure where they're getting up to 75k/year/offender. My experience has been mostly in the federal and midwest, where average cost of housing an offender for a year in a low/medium security facility is around 20k-25k.
It would be interesting to look at their books!
This will explain a lot: http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=correcti...
Yesterday people expected cheap construction labor, today they complain there's not enough cheap home nurses around. I wonder if they'll aim for cheap software development labor tomorrow.
I wonder why I don't feel entitled to cheap caviar and cheap yachts?
Tell that to all of the companies that outsource manufacturing.
Offshore workers are often abused, but when they are not they might be paid a decent wage which is also peanuts when onsite wages are considered. You profit from arbitraging cost of living, not from exploitation.
Even if we enforce unions at oursource locations with wage control, outsource manufacturing won't disappear overnight.
Sure! but will you rent a place that is $500 expensive while bringing no additional benefit other than it employed someone at higher wages ?
Try to pay as much as feasible for the actual work, as few as possible for overhead.
You end up paying extra for 'cheap' labor anyway, in the form of higher taxes for those who have to pay them, that includes you. Less transparent economy leads to what is discussed in parent article. All what 'cheap' labor does is lining the pockets of middle men selling this snake oil. With your money.
Well no, because of lack of general availability. But I pay extra for many things to avoid certain corporate behaviour. In a free market, that's my right. We're trying to wean ourselves off of Amazon, in fact, but we're a one-car family, and Prime is an amazing service.
Isn't that what minimum wage is all about? And disability, social security, and public education? There are lots of benefits to these programs, but the benefits often go directly to someone else, and indirectly back to whoever paid for them.
Also, I think a lot of problems come from paying the cheapest possible price, rather that paying for value. An over-focus on short-term profits causes a lot of long-term issues.
both of which are available if you're interested.
Which, if there is a real labour shortage, is fine with me. I'll just forgo the project I wanted to build, build less. Whatever.
But there isn't a labour shortage. At least not when you look at particulars segments, locations, past-histories, ect.
I'm not trying to push any ideology here. I'm just saying that the economy, actually, sucks despite what point estimates that grossly overgeneralize are saying. It sucked under Bush. It sucked more under Obama. And it getting suckier under Trump.
Why? I don't know. In the meantime hire a local contractor and pay them double their rate (or give the employees a tip == to the cost of the service < this is what I do to my monthly cleaners)
Let's stick to discussing services.
In well-populated niches like construction, nursing, and software development, you can safely assume that competition will make the price of the service as low as it can reasonably go and still get acceptable quality.
If construction labor costs go up to whatever point you consider "fair", then the cost of the finished products will rise to compensate. If you extrapolate this out for the results of all super-low-priced labor, then lots of costs go up, and the middle class suddenly has less buying power than before. Why, they'd need a raise just to keep the same standard of living!
It's a web, you can't tug on one part without moving lots of others. The only "stretch" available in this web is people who are earning more than they are actually worth, like some CEOs or Waltons. Which, come to think of it, is not that dear to me. So okay, fine, let's start raising the minimum wage.
Besides, crime has become such an arbitrary thing. A corporation is allowed to quietly syphon away billions of dollars from society using clever government lobbying and tax avoidance schemes but if a member of society physically steals something from a corporation, they'll go to jail. Why don't corporations like JP Morgan and their executives get a permanent criminal record when they are found guilty of criminal activity?
Either it should be consistent for all or it should be abolished entirely.
There are a number of companies that exist with the intended purpose of providing jobs to ex convicts.
The risk that a regular company takes, however, is one of "this individual has done XYZ when times were hard in the past. How can we be sure they won't again?" This is combined with that for many good paying jobs there are more applications than positions allowing for the "filter by felon" to be a not unreasonable first level filter for HR to apply.
> A corporation is allowed to quietly syphon away billions of dollars from society using clever government lobbying and tax avoidance schemes
Was it society's to begin with?
And you can't completely pin the financial crisis on the likes of JP Morgan when the feds bailed them out with our tax dollars. That was the crime.
Now what would really help, especially with recidivism, is to use the profit motive of prisons in a different way. First-time offenders-- the prison gets paid full price. If an offender returns to prison, the prison should get paid less, or not at all. That would encourage the private prison system to rehabilitate, and provide post-release re-integration assistance.
Or to make tiers of service, where second-timers get a cheaper and more brutal experience which happens to be cheaper for the prison.
This would encourage prisons to also take an active role in finding ex-cons jobs afterwards, advocating for the highest possible pay (since they make more money), and also encourages them to train/teach the prisoner more to make them more likely to get a job as an ex-con. I think most victim advocates would be ok with this too as there would continue to be a penalty imposed for the crime.
Whats more, like stadiums and cities (the city paying the difference if there isn't enough attendance), there are private prisons that have a "lockup quota" ( https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-find... | http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-... ) where the state pays for the bed be it full or empty.
This is part of the contract, and officials making short sighted deals that have the appearance of reducing costs while actually raising them in the long term is a oft heard refrain.
I have difficulty believing that any private, for profit company would be working to negatively impact its bottom line. While it is possible that there are places where improvements in efficiency over government run facilities can be had, at the end of the day the duty of the company is to the shareholders ( CXW - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoreCivic , GEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEO_Group ) rather than to the taxpayers of a state.
https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/08/23/866325/0/e...
> Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) CCA’s facilities lacked adequate safety and security standards and were less efficient at offering correctional services than the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (“BOP”) facilities; (ii) CCA’s rehabilitative services for inmates were less effective than those provided by BOP; (iii) consequently, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) was unlikely to renew and/or extend its contracts with CCA; and (iv) as a result of the foregoing, CCA’s public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.
The profit motive for a private prison has shown in the past that in the interest in short term gains they will understaff and cut back on programs. Give them everyone who has been incarcerated before and they'll take the profits they've gotten and close that franchise. Furthermore, the lobbying efforts of private companies creates odd incentives in writing laws and negotiating contracts compared to facilities run and maintained by state or federal workers.
It's very little deterrence.(look up hyperbolic discounting) The average person is pretty bad at weighing consequences 10 years from now. And criminals I imagine are far worse than average.
Criminals definitely are worse at it, but I asked "how many more would commit crimes..." so that's not really relevant.
Sure it does, in the sense that wealth only exists as a construct of society. If Bill Gates is on a deserted island it doesn't matter if he has $1 or $60 billion, because without society his money has no value.
One could make an argument that if society has made you very wealthy you owe a lot to society. Personally I don't disagree.
Of course from there it gets messier because everyone has opinions about how wealth is earned, how beholden the earners are to everyone else, how much of personal success is solely based on an individual's merits as opposed to support from society and other external sources. People want to minimize or maximize the particular points best serve their beliefs in this case. Hard to say who is the rightiest.
And so do property rights and pretty much any other kind of right. To begin with, the construct was there, but the wealth wasn't, and definitely not Bill Gates' wealth, which did not exist prior to the creation of Microsoft and the aggregate consumer surplus and capital it created.
My point was about the total cost of the crime. e.g. if speeding tickets had no impact on insurance rates, don't you think fewer people would care about a $200 fine?
I actually know someone who didn't get a government job at an animal shelter because of his poor credit. He has an MBA too. I don't think that's fair but maybe financially irresponsible people aren't as good at their job. Same with criminals.
Jail time doesn't reverse your wrongdoing on society and the way it's currently setup - it's not really a redeeming process. Why should a business hire you over someone as qualified with no record?
We're basically talking about felonies anyway. Misdemeanors are generally irrelevant for most jobs and you can get those expunged from your record.
At the end of 2006, there were ~160,000 people in prison "institutions" in the state of California[1]. The design capacity of those institutions was ~79,000 people[1], so the occupation was ~204% of the design capacity.
At the end of 2016, there were ~114k people in prison institutions[2], which was ~134% of the design capacity.
Obviously, if prisons are vastly overcrowded, and over time the number of people in prison is reduced substantially, the per-prisoner cost will sharply increase. There are no financial savings on infrastructure because institutional capacity is still vastly exceeded, and the savings in other areas will not be proportional to the overall drop in prison population because the people released early tend to be less expensive to imprison, as they tend to be incarcerated for less serious crimes.
Whatever one's political allegiance, the fact that the prison system in the state of California has been running at a minimum over 130% of design capacity for the last decade is a tremendously serious issue, and it feels trivialising to make a nonsensical comparison to the cost of university tuition, and to present the fact that per-prisoner costs have risen while prisoner numbers have fallen as anything less than blindingly obvious.
A discussion of the prison crisis in California seems completely worthy of Hacker News, but it shouldn't be based on an article like this.
[1] http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/Monthly/TPOP1A/TPOP1Ad0612.pdf
[2] http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/Monthly/TPOP1A/TPOP1Ad1612.pdfPrisons should not be training grounds for future criminals, but they are today.
Also: prisons should be shuffled periodically, mixing up the population. That'll prevent the formation of criminal gangs inside. Outside, they'll be living in a diverse, mixed environment anyways; might as well get them started on that inside.
Half a lifetime ago, I had to spend a weekend in jail while visiting a friend in California (accused of theft by a drunk lady who couldn't find her credit cards and fingered me instead of realizing that she may have left it at the bar. The best part was when I had to fly back out for a court date, they told me they were dropping the charge for an obvious lack of evidence. This decision was made on the actual court date, so I got to waste even more money on airfare and travel ). I was surprised at the entrepreneurial zeal of those who have no issue profiting from misery and suffering. In the LA area at least, many former/older celebrities are investors or owners of prison supply companies. Most notable was Bob Barker's company which sold travel-sized generic toothpaste for $7. In this case, the price is wrong, Bob.
The fingerprinting machine was the size of a ultra-deluxe 70's Xerox machine, regularly needed service, and looked like it had a sticker price around 5 figures (a feature that is just an add-on to $500 phones.) I think that 10x-20x inflation is pretty consistent across the board in the American penal system. The collect calling system is also beyond ridiculous given the near zero cost of landline telecommunications and that most cell phones can't receive collect calls. The food you're eating is the absolute worst (in terms of taste of course) nutritionally. Nearly everything is processed and is done so in the cheapest way possible. When I say as cheap as possible, I mean that the $.49 Nissin Ramen is an actual delicacy (No exaggeration. Some of the inmates would pool their resources together and "cook" the ramen in a giant plastic bag with hot water that surely must be leeching pcb's and/or phthalates from the container.) After a few months of that diet, even the most physically fit people developed a weird type of gut and loss of musculature. I didn't eat anything while there, but I observed that the only nutritional guideline that could possibly be met that of 2K+ calories/day. I know it's not Club Med, but that type of diet is a blocker for any type of rehabilitation. It was depressing to look at and had the effect of making one more docile and depressed.
So while California may spend $75K per prisoner, the value they spend is probably closer to $7K. It's kind of brilliant in a sadistic way, as if the prisons, their programs, food, and environment were designed to maximize recidivism.
Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if some elements were designed in this way
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is very powerful in state and local elections and through association with other providers who are also union pretty much have the state on the ropes.
Contractors might be part of the problem but they only are as much as CCPOA allows for. As in, you play by their rules or you don't get to play.
Same reason we spend so much on education and don't see improvement. Nothing is about the prisoner or the student, it is all about political control
1994: With the help of CCPOA’s $101,000 support, Californians passed Proposition 184, the nation’s toughest three-strikes law mandating 25-years-to-life sentences for most felony offenders with two previous serious convictions.
2000: The CCPOA contributes at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders.
2004: The CCPOA spends over $1 million to defeat Prop 66, the initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law.
2005: The CCPOA defeats Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.”
2008: The CCPOA contributes $2 million to Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign. The CCPOA contributes $1 million against Prop 5, a measure to reduce prison overcrowding by providing treatment rather than prison sentences for nonviolent drug users.
Source: http://californiapolicycenter.org/the-role-of-the-prison-gua...
Ultimately, I think you've got it the other way around. Prisons don't build themselves, contracts are put out for their construction, their vastly overpriced buses, cells, etc.
For example, the absolutely disgusting and dehumanizing water fountain/toilet combo, ensuring that every sip you take you smell and taste feces, costs $2600 while a normal stainless steel toilet runs about $250. Also, private prisons gain the benefits of a conscripted labor force without having to worry about slavery laws.
Corps have co-opted the unions to vote in their interest. After all, they have the carrot of offering a nice, kushy corporate gig. That prison guard's pension isn't going too far. Follow the money
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-priso...
(dated 3/25/2015)
Government can regulate the market by setting the goals: low violence inside, low costs, low re-offences of released, high security, high educational opportunities
I'm sorry, but that is the worst answer. Perverse incentives and moral hazard problems not withstanding, incarceration as a market, profit from human misery and suffering is absolutely morally repugnant.
> Remember when a small team built a better healthcare.gov?
You're comparing apples to naked mole rats. Running a website (that does exactly what you tell it) is a wee bit different than caring for violent, mentally disabled, borderline personalities, sexually, mentally abusive and abused, etc. individuals. (I'm including a lot of the guards in this description too)
> Businesses that get high marks automatically get more prisoners, ones that get low marks get none.
> That's a lot worse than gov run facilities, but gov facilities are probably not as good as properly regulated market.
Incarceration, and security in general, is the very definition of a market failure and one of the few things that a government needs to provide in the most liberal, laissez-faire economy
Think about how this will play out in reality, considering that prison guard unions and companies wield a large amount of political capital and no one really cares about the welfare of prisoners, if they're being mistreated/abused, etc. Companies can cook their books and no one will care.
We also live in the era where speech=money. Prison corporations spend large amounts of money lobbying. And they lobby for the sickest things possible: increases in sentences, increases in mandatory minimums, fighting against medical marijuana legalization just so they can imprison and profit off of "scary, criminal mastermind potheads"
Our economics is so backwards that we include spending on prisons in our GDP. Growth in the prison sector should not be added as growth in the overall economy
The market solution will not magically erase the culture of the prison economy or change its major players
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/this-norwegian-prison...
Because the solution ("making prison a market") is what caused the problem in the first place.
And because some things, like treating people in prison humanely, you don't want to live to the lowest bidder (though even that would be an improvement over the worse than third world shithole that are us prisons).
I agree there is a lot of danger in profiting from incarceration. However, it would be good if someone figured out how to solve the problem and a profit motive is a reliable way to do it.
In other words, the profit motive would have to work towards eliminatin the problem--that's my point about a properly regulated market.
Maybe some other users here are right and I am naive in thinking people will create fair and just rules that others wont try to cheat.
Which means any "profit motive" can (and normally will) work against them (the prisoners). After all feeding them crap and stuffing them in tiny cells is cheaper than giving them quality prison time and rehabilitation opportunities...
There's just not a lot to gain and a lot that can go wrong. It's high risk, minimal rewards. Making prisons more rehabilitative isn't difficult or some unsolved problem.
People in this country just have an appetite for righteous vengeance and ensuring that criminals receive their due suffering.
https://www.gov.uk/going-to-court-victim-witness/expenses-fo...
Where I'm originally from(Poland) it was the same - I was summoned to court, after the trial I went to the clerk, said where I drove from and was paid cash for fuel. Had I taken the train it would have been refunded fully.
Over here (Finland), if you are witness, you are compensated (meagerly, not always reasonable).
If you are the accused, you pay for your own travel - so the professional criminal class just skips the trial, thereby causing lot of unnecessary hassle to witnesses and injured parties. Then a new trial date is set, and on the nth try the police might pick up the accused, and bring him or her to trial (at no cost), then to be released on a conditional discharge.
[0] http://e-prawnik.pl/artykuly/postepowanie-przed-sadem/zwrot-...
I'm sorry, I'm actually laughing out loud for that one. No, they do not refund any cost you incur for going to court.
Luckily, I wasn't accused of any drug crimes or they may have seized my car and kept it under then-existing asset forfeiture (legal theft) laws
IIRC, the judge's opinion was something like "Well, we followed all the procedures correctly, it doesn't matter if the wrong conclusion was reached"
Looks like there are some attempts to provide compensation, but they vary
https://www.innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convic...
Even the juror compensation is something ridiculous like $10/day. I don't think subpoenaed witnesses are compensated for anything.
Yes, it seems logical if jurors would be compensated at least as the minimal wage per hour. In small communities it could probably lead to something like 'professional juror' but I think it could be dealt with by monthly/yearly cap for compensation.
A median for the defense is about $1500, including all the cheap plea bargains that don't go to a time-consuming expensive trial. A starting price for a misdemeanor that goes to trial might be $2000-$3000. Felonies and long, complicated trials just go up from there.
You may be thinking of a civil defense, where you can work out to pay nothing if you lose, but they're going to take some of the pot if you win. Or of a public defender, who is nominally free, but most states charge a few hundred to a couple thousand in court fees anyway.
Even if a charge sticks, they will be better then you at pleading it down and/or negotiating reduced fines when possible.
Again, it's likely going to be cheaper then travel costs and you should have a lawyer anyway, right from the very start. It sucks to be unfairly targeted but there is an easy way out. I hire a lawyer for even the most minor traffic violations and they really can save you money once you factor all costs (insurance rates, etc...).
Protip: If you have to appear in front of a judge, try your best to be the first party the judge sees in the morning or right after lunch. Your chances of a favorable judgment lessen as time wears on and judge's get cranky. I use this same philosophy for job interviews: try to appear before the interviewer at the least stressful time, and they are more likely to view you favorably.
ALWAYS lawyer up with the best you can afford. Justice may be blind, but the more money you have and, accordingly, the higher a quality of lawyer you can afford, the more "justice" you will receive.
That's why it's so difficult for rich/powerful people to ever land inside a jail cell.
Which is why it has never found its way into the courts.
Although it's a little dense, a really good book on American legal culture is Adversarial Legalism by robert Kagan. Culturally the US is absolutely obsessed with property rights and the exhaustive accounting for them has provided fertile soil for a whole forest of complex litigation practices.
Many people would rather spent $10,000 on fighting a court case than pay $500 that they felt was unjustly billed to them. I once worked for a guy who got in a dispute with someone he had hired over ownership of the work product - he had not paid the bill for the photography and so the photographer was sitting on the footage. He took the photographer to small claims court; the court basically said 'meh, pay him what you owe and you, photographer, hand over the footage when he does.' We went outside and my erstwhile boss said 'well I showed him! that's the last time someone sues ME!' I literally walked away on the spot and never returned any of his calls even though he owed me some money; for my own sanity and safety I can not be around someone with that level of cognitive dissonance. I liked the guy, a lot, but he was literally editing reality in his head to fit his feelings from moment to moment. That sort of person is dangerous.
For instance, what are the consequences for the mid level government bureaucrat who accepted the 7$ a tube toothpaste contract? It is obviously a flagrant violation with a paper trail. Even if it is revealed he gets a fully paid vacation every year from the bidding company, how do people even hold him accountable?
The government is involved in so many projects and employs so many people, that your one vote every few years means next to nothing.
Democracy was meant as a safeguard against tyranny. It cannot hold individual people in a vast system accountable very well.
You either split up each department in separate elections or reduce the scope and size of the government such that essential services like law and order get maximum visibility and priority.
Find me a system that isnt flawed...
Yes, and? Are unethical people somehow immune from blame for their decision to act unethically? Just because you see an opportunity for profit does not mean you are compelled to take it. That is, after all, the whole basis for incarceration in the first place, otherwise bank robbers would go free on the basis that once they realized how easy it was to rob a bank, they were unable to stop themselves.
They are. In this Jon Oliver bit they cite a Powerpoint sales pitch from a prison corporation which notes that high recidivism rates are one of many reasons why you should invest.
People who do this and try to rationalize their behavior with some flimsy excuse about putting food on the table or keeping America safe are, I'll say it, deplorables.
It's a socially acceptable form of mental torture whose aim is to break you down, not build you back up. In particular, the dehumanization you face from the guards makes one more anti-social.
Oddly, this company which has been in existence for 20+ years fleecing correctional facilities still doesn't have a wikipedia page, and little is known about them. Would somebody please fix this?
This is a company that basically makes products of the lowest quality for the cheapest amount possible. An $800 3D printer I've used created higher quality items.
If you want a real laugh, check out the "Mission and values" section of their website. SPOILER: it has by far the least amount of content
I know it's just a smidge harder and takes a little more effort, but it is beyond crazy that we institutionally indoctrinate inmates into a race-based ideology. This engenders further wedges and future conflicts when inmates are released and trained to view other people with suspicion and mistrust....
Unless that's the point, serving as a useful distraction while the prestige is being performed
NY has recently taken a significant step forward in ensuring adequate access to higher education through the legislature's and Cuomo's initiative to bring tuition free higher education to all NYS residents.
I've become part of several minority communities and met many people with circumstances not so fortunate as mine. It is unbelievable to hear how such a large percentage of these young men have spent time in prison. During highschool I found it odd that in a school with a greater than 60% African American community the AP and IBO classes I was enrolled in were consistently 90% white. I skipped a lot of class back then and was always amazed by the peers who, despite by all standards being considered "the bad kids", could tear a car apart and build it all back together again.
In the projects in Brownsville I learned that my girlfriends mother had secured some sort of video shooting arrangement, she said the entire neighborhood would turn out in their Sunday's finest when the cameras were around. Everyone wanted to see what was going on.
In the projects in Brownsville I noticed an abject lack of activity spaces and an abject lack of green. Brownsville is one of the poorest communities in NYC and it consists primarily of a large number of bleak housing project buildings arrayed across several blocks. I have never heard so many sirens as I did in Brownsville. In the short month I was there my girlfriends mother literally walked into a shoot out to calm some of the younger community members down.
I've always thought to myself that I could do anything anyone else could do (well not always, took a lot of introspection in highschool). I mean, look at the person doing it. They have two arms, I have two arms. They have two legs, I have two legs. They've got a head and brain and I have exactly the same.
It would clearly be obnoxious not to believe in any other person the same way. I believe we're very fortunate to ride the subways in NYC because when you see a child hankering for a balloon you realize that child is just like any other.
I applaud this effort. I've met so many people who are smart as whips and deserve the access to the opportunities and future I had and have.
And that's why I believe the solution starts from the ground up.
I don't feel personally affected by this issue, but I get the sense we are sentencing too many people for too long for non-violent drug offenses.
Anyway, the cost of the prison system in California is about $7.9 billion according to:
https://www.vera.org/publications/the-price-of-prisons-what-...
or (given 39 million people in California) about $200 per taxpayer (no, that's not the best metric).
If the cost per prisoner is going up because we're releasing people from prisons this year, that's probably a good thing.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/mandatory-minimum-sen...
Also, the problem is too long sentences for pretty much all crimes.. Americans aren't very forgiving.
Source?
From what I remember, 4% is for death row, which has a much higher standard of guilt. Most people who are sentenced for a crime plea guilty to avoid worse charges, which is a situation where a rational innocent individual would plea, meaning that far far more are likely innocent.
edit: sorry, that was not a polemic post. But if the number for the students excludes stuff like food, rent or other living costs (e.g. medical checkups) that are "included" with prisoners, the gap might be smaller.
I just checked the numbers for Germany, on the average, a prisoner costs 3281,40 Euro per month, so about 40k Euro or 45k USD per year. So, yeah, it seems like California is getting shafted, somehow.
According to "Table 1.1. Estimated number of felony convictions in state courts, 2006" [0] it seems that only 18% of convictions are because of violent crimes, leading to 82% being non-violent, that doesn't feel like "a small fraction" to me. It's not the latest number, but feels you're trying to give a different view than reality.
- [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Felony_S...
https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Pub...
There's a sort of pedantic distinction between "prison" and "jail" that can make these stats confusing, and occasionally deliberately misleading. If you're in "prison", then by definition you've been convicted. The percentage of nonviolent inmates is very high in both "jail" and "prison", though; the statement "non-violent offenders are a small fraction of those incarcerated" is simply incorrect.
It might feel differently if you were looking at incarceration statistics.
I think just as much attention needs to be paid to younger first or second offenders who haven't been swallowed up by criminality or prisons, including more wiping of their records as an incentive for good behavior.
If you're labeled a felon, there isn't much incentive to play it straight since the only jobs you can get pay very little. It just makes crime that much more profitable and attractive
Or take the other case, I am high on drugs and crash a car with several of my kids in it. At the same time I clearly didn't mean to harm them - you wouldn't have problem with me having the kids if I wasn't on drugs. Assume further (because this is often the case) that I skip out of rehab. What would you do with me?
Everything has to be done in the children's best interest. In this situation hypothetical_tomjen3 has put their children in danger.
This means any approach covers several points:
1) Firm reminder that continued use of drugs while you're supposed to be in control of the children means the state is left with little option but to remove the children from you
2) Removal of the children can be avoided if you comply with rehab
3) Provide good quality, evidence based rehab
4) Provide access to the children (with supervision if needed)
5) Remove driving licence for a year as a punishment. The driving licence can only be regained after successfully completing rehab with clean tests for some time.
This particular example you've given is a public health problem, not a criminal justice problem.
Prisons need to safely and securely provide accommodation for "high-risk, high-need" human beings to survive and be rehabilitated.
Universities have a wholly different set of requirements.
Maybe if society actually prepared its people for...itself (society) we'd have fewer problems?
I'm willing to bet $1 of room, board, and education alleviate $100 (or more) of incarceration.
Current US budget for prisons: 74 billion Current US budget for education: 68 billion
-Never having experienced the US penal system first hand, I cannot be too bombastic - but from the outside, it sure looks as if rehabilitation has taken a back seat to punishment.
If one were of a sufficiently cynical disposition, it would be tempting to assume that all involved parties (except the inmates) has more to gain from keeping people locked up than rehabilitating them.
I punishment has priority society can pay for a lifetime of either repeated incarceration or continued or even increased violence after release, with no education and psychological evaluation of the prisoners.
Yes, it has been voiced by some scholars, but is not, to the best of my knowledge, a widely held belief - more of an exotic outlier used by parts of the hip left.
By the way, our recidivism rate happens to be among the lowest in the world. (Granted, we have a huge advantage that abject poverty is very rare in the first place.)
Another way to get rid of "unwelcome individuals" is to provide rehabilitation, more opportunities, etc. This is better in the long term.
Source: I'm European.
1. Reciprocity. The modern justice system is a social contract where the victim accepts not to seek revenge himself, which would give the powerful a complete impunity over the weaker. Instead the punishment will be applied by a greater force, historically the King or the local lord, now the justice system. If you tell a victim that we don't intend to punish the person who hurt him/her for the greater good of society, the victim will have a legitimate sentiment of injustice and may seek to take revenge directly (think of some Saudi prince committing rape in europe, it may be in the interest of the country to let him go, the economic impact of upsetting the Saudi may be much more than the grief of a victim). I think negating this aspect is extremely dangerous for a society (and I see this aspect completely negated in some European countries). But it is by no mean the only purpose (many crimes have no individual victim, like not paying your taxes).
2. Deterrence. Ideally you want criminals not to commit crimes in the first place because of the fear of consequences. If nothing happens you create impunity and you ultimately fuel more crime. Now prison is not a miracle deterrent. Some criminals are too dumb to consider the consequences when committing a crime, or are unafraid of some jail time. Also deterrence will have no impact of terrorists on a suicide mission. But it is an important role nevertheless.
3. Protecting society. Some criminals are deemed to do it again. In some instance the cost to society is low (consuming drug again) or high (rape or murder). In some cases the cost is too high for society to take a chance and the sentence is also a way to "take out" a criminal element and protect society. But this should be in fairly limited extreme cases. But you do not send Madoff to jail just to ensure he doesn't start a new Ponzi scheme. This is a secondary purpose of prison.
And of course rehabilitation should also happen during the execution of the sentence. We would only make the matter worse by not using the jail time to help criminals find a better way. But I do not believe this is either the primary purpose of a sentencing (hence it should take a back seat).
Also, your complete dismissal of mental health as a component of crime is suspect and your post is filled with familiar rhetoric. Do you also believe that spanking or otherwise physically abusing a child is preferred for discipline as opposed to other methods? We live in the 21st century and we should take advantage the knowledge accrued, especially from the psycho/neurological fields. Here are some facts to rebut your argument:
Mentally ill people are disproportionately victimized by violent crime. The largest crime-reducing benefit of helping persons with mental illness would be in reducing crimes against the mentally ill.
Some types of severe mental illness increase the risk that a person will perpetrate a violent crime. Risk varies based on many other factors, such as substance abuse, or unemployment. Many of the risks are from secondary effects of the mental illness; for example, cognitive difficulties make employment difficult or impossible.
Many mental illnesses have a genetic component, although the genetic effects are far from fully understood. Untreated severe mental illness is particularly significant in homicide—the extreme end of the criminal spectrum. Such illness is even more significant for mass murders of strangers.
Treatment of severe mental illness—best accomplished by a combination of therapy and drugs—can greatly reduce violence by and against the mentally ill.
Many mental ill persons who seek treatment do not receive it. Mental hospital beds per capita in the U.S. are lower than they have been since 1850.
Over the last half-century, mental hospital capacity has dwindled, while prison and jail capacity has vastly expanded. Mentally ill prisoners comprise a large fraction of the jail and prison population.
Compared to imprisonment, treating a mentally ill person in a mental hospital is at least two times as expensive, on month-by-month basis. Nevertheless, expanded availability of treatment in mental hospitals could be cost-effective in the long run. Ninety days in a mental hospital might avoid the need for 10 years in prison. Also, we are not including the costs suffered by victims of crime in this calculation.
Greater availability of mental health treatment would provide major savings to society and to crime victims. Besides that, mentally ill persons who receive appropriate aid can be more constructively productive, and helpful to others.
Because many untreated mental illnesses (such as schizophrenia) are degenerative, early treatment is especially helpful. Preventing a first episode of psychosis (loss of contact with reality) can have major lifetime benefits.
In situations where a severely mentally ill person presents a grave danger to other persons, involuntary commitment may be necessary. Due process should be scrupulously protected—such as the right to neutral decision-maker. Involuntary commitment should not require that the danger to others be “imminent.” Instead of commitment to a mental hospital, “involuntary outpatient commitment” is a less-restrictive alternative for many persons. After hearing the evidence, a judge may order a person to attend therapy and/or to take medication, as a condition of not being committed to a hospital. Such programs have been successful, and should be expanded.
Mental illnesses are commonly considered "degenerative" because the professionals don't address the various causes. My observation is that the mental health industry favors palliative treatments instead of curative therapies. They do this because they think the causes are unknown, and that palliative drugs are the best they can do.
> Preventing a first episode of psychosis (loss of contact with reality) can have major lifetime benefits.
Sure, but avoiding treatment with "anti-psychotics" (tranquilizers) is a good strategy for all psychotic patients. If you put them in a safe environment, they usually come out of their psychotic state without medical assistance [1].
[1] The Case Against Antipsychotics - https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-...
What you call "strange" is backed by psychology, psychiatry, neurology together with a lot of evidence.
lmao
I had a car stolen by some guys once. They used my car to drive around breaking in to other cars and stealing things. The police caught them and took me to me car so that I could get it back. I also had to go through all the stuff in the back and tell the police what wasn't mine. It turns out they had been arrested in California.
California sent them to Arizona so that they could go to a trade school. All their needs were covered, they just needed to complete the program. Instead the failed out and then went on a crime spree in their new home state. I'm sure it was a very cost effective solution for CA but I'm not sure about society as a whole.
And, if, for $75,000 per person per annum we can't work towards better outcomes, then I think we can agree something is very wrong with the current approach.
If you want to fix what is wrong you start by not labeling people "felons" for life--change every law so that when someone gets out they get their full rights restored--voting, right to bear arms, all of it. And do away with sex offender registries and all of it. If they re-offend, put them away for good.
I would think the argument is that fewer people need to be imprisoned for crimes that don't really negatively affect society as much as sending them to prison does.
The problem is identification; we can't identify which people will end up being "good guys" or "bad guys" after any form of prison or community work. There are some extreme cases where you can make the determination(although beware the slippery slope of discrimination that seeps in..), but for the rest, what do you do? This is a genuine question. Jailing people is both costly and doesn't seem to have a positive effect on their life prospects. Many people that go into jail for a minor offense end up incapable of finding a job(felon status) or a place in society(everyone left them and moved on) and they turn to crime and re-offend.
I agree that this doesn't contain "the" solution, but it's a good way to shine the light that our current solution isn't working either. Prison serves as a "out of sight, out of mind" choice and few people concern themselves with what happens to inmates once they try to reintegrate into society. If we're going to continue jailing people, then we should also look to mitigate the adverse effects - look for ways to integrate people after they serve their time, look into reducing the number of offenses you can be jailed for, etc.
- Smaller but individual cells. (have to think about how to keep them very clean)
- No outside yard for crowd.
- No plural bathroom.
Everything you do is for the benefit of society 90% and the rest for you.
- Clean something outside, plant trees I don't know, so you get walk, sun and forest time.
- You can read books, or some journals.
- You can talk to old wise persons.
- You don't have TV, video games.
- You can work (producing parts, fixing things) again for the benefit of society.
- You can do exercice: biking, rowing. Qi gong or Yoga too. (bonus, plug bikes to generate electricity)
- You get simple healthy food: raw veggies, some meat, some fruits. No sauce, no dessert.
Basically a cheap mindful retreat with optional work. Lowering costs as much as possible and prisonner suffering at the same time. You can improve your mind and your body while paying your mistake by being cut from the group. Nothing more.
My idea is that people with nothing to do, and no absurd violent crowds will start to soften and try stuff out of boredom or old desires (say before they turned into the "dark side").
You either stay silently in your cell or you do something that won't cost society and will give them something back, and you will also get something on the way (new knowledge, less boredom, health, etc).
Someone certainly stands to gain from it and it certainly isn't society at large, as you can easily grasp from the results on the "war on drugs"... [3]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incar...
Nordic countries have a reverse philosophy. Prison is a step to be helped into being better, it's comfortable, apparently very effective, but it's a bit unfair for peaceful homeless and victims that have lower quality of life. Hence my "frugal but human" proposal.
Not that the comparison is particularly meaningful in any case, since it's not like sending convicts to Harvard instead is an available alternative.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/02/162149431/million-dollar-block...
Also:
The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as
court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the
population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for
prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase.
1. Comparison of Harvard tuition to prisoner's costs is meaningless as done in the article
2. The article itself mentions costs raise mainly because of labor costs
3. The article itself mentions that drop in the inmates number did not reduce labor costs
4. The article does not mention any of the factors influencing labor costs.
Which evidence you think I am missing?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704132204576285...
Maybe every non-violent criminal should be put on house arrest with an ankle bracelet instead? Then they can work off a fine, do community service, etc?
Other states are cheaper. If you really wanted to be cheap, you could outsource to a foreign country. You could fly people to the other side of the world and still save money.
That usually works out well, right?
Seriously has there ever been a situation where privatizing an industry led to actually reduced costs, and didn't lead to reduced quality of output? Even if you accept the (IMHO dubious) premise that private industry is necessarily going to be more efficient than government-run industry, the efficiency gain has to be greater than the profit-taking for it to be a worthwhile tradeoff for the taxpayer.
Private organizations do some things much better than public, and vice versa. More often than not it depends on the question you're asking... And there's a lot of contextualization needed in the answer.
How's your electrical infrastructure, or your water infrastructure doing? They're supplied by private industry. How's your religious institution, your school bus, your local day care? What about public-private partnerships, like public transit? Personally, I will take the mixed market universal health care systems of France and Germany, over the 100% public Canadian waiting list system... but that depends on your criteria for success.
Volumes are written about each one of these cases, how to evaluate "success", what combinations of structures work well in what social contexts, etc. Other countries have private companies involved in prisons, and get great results... But their markets are different, their contract terms are different, the avenues of influence for legislation are different, their bidding processes are different, and their cultures are different. To reduce it to "privatization always raises costs and reduces quality of output" is ridiculous.
That is certainly a true statement, and I'm of course by no means suggesting that privately-supplied functions such as "day care" or "religious institutions" should be government-run.
I'm reacting primarily to the current American administration's de facto stance of "small government good, big government bad," which I feel is just as simplistic as the straw-man version of my question you constructed. Privatization efforts have been proposed (or have long since been carried out -- this tendency long predates Trump) for the prison system, the education system, air traffic control, even the military itself through use of mercenary companies like whatever Blackwater's name is now. (There's certainly room for reasoned disagreement about which functions a government ought to serve compared to private industry, but surely "military and jails" belong under the government umbrella?)
In every case I'm aware of, the justification has been that it will reduce costs due to increased efficiency, yet the end results have been increased costs and reduced quality of service. Maybe Americans are just bad at privatization, but that was a genuine question: has there been a case where privatizing a function traditionally served by the government has improved it? The case under discussion here, the american prison system, certainly hasn't.
My main point was this:
> Even if you accept the premise that private industry is necessarily going to be more efficient than government-run industry, the efficiency gain has to be greater than the profit-taking for it to be a worthwhile tradeoff for the taxpayer.
...which seems inarguable, yet is rarely if ever addressed by proponents of privatization.
(For what it's worth, and in case it helps clarify my stance here, my opinion on this is that if it's a necessarily monopolistic or universally-mandated function, it should be part of the government; if it's a function where meaningful competition is possible, let capitalism do its thing.
The goal being to provide some recourse when things go wrong: If my private daycare sucks I can just go to a different one, no problem. If my government prison system sucks I can at least theoretically vote the people responsible out of office. But when there's no opportunity for meaningful choice or competition, there's no benefit to privatization, it's just inserting a middleman who can skim some profit off the top.
This still leaves a lot of important gray area -- education and health care remain thorny issues for example -- but I hope I've demonstrated that I don't hold the simplistic "everything should be government!" stance you appear to have ascribed to me.)
This is prison industrial complex at play fueled by insecurities of average American.
most definitely not insignificant.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or-...
And don't lecture me about all the "non-violent" drug offenders--I don't think any of them really exist. They're all shitbags who got jammed up for whatever charges the cops could get them on. For every bleeding heart story, I'll show you 10 that justly deserve to be behind bars.
they can have pizza delivered and call hookers lol
Its not an ideal system, but there's a certain sensibility to it that stabilizes society. If people saw those that go to jail, come out better persons. They might get the idea that the criminal is a leadership figure, or that they too might become better persons after experimenting with crime.
I'm a strong believer in prison reform, and treating criminals as victims of the difficult choices life offers you. It shouldn't be the accepted standard to put them in a cage and forget they exist, we need to show them the flaws of their moral system: we need to preach to them until they concede the errors of their ways and show meekness.
Edit, just to add some history: justice system was very entangled with religion since forever. Romans were the ones that greatly developed the technical aspects. There was the directum --the righteous thing-- aspect vs the ius, the technical one, the contracts, the seek of solutions and social peace.
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt...
And besides that, there is a history of the opposite impulse in American politics also coming from religion -- look at Catholic opposition to the death penalty or the Quakers' efforts at reform.
And besides that, I think you grossly underestimate the stubbornness of many who go to jail in the first place. Getting a human to be humble is one of the toughest things you can do, and that difficulty is often an inverse of intelligence in my experience (are there studies on this? And I'm not talking about the ultra rich or ultra famous people.)
There are 2 camps: Ones that think of jail as a "correctional facility" (a place to fix broken people), and ones that think of it as punishment, justice for a crime.
No need to bring religion into everything. Punishment for "crimes" existed before christianity, friend.
Jesus: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."
Peter: "Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing."
Paul: "Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."
I know a bunch of Christians - mostly Protestant (Evangelical), a few Catholics. I never heard of Dominionism as anything but a warped fringe view.
Yeah, I know it exists. Yeah, I know you can quote people who claim it's an influential strain of political thought. I sure don't see it, though.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14496283 and marked it off-topic.
What the article probably doesn't consider is the costs of daily life. I can't imagine Harvard+eating+sleeping+takingShowers+heating+clothing really just costs $75k/year, then everybody would go to Harvard, even those who already have a PHD.