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Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

It seems like giving criminals a free college education is the very definition of a perverse incentive.

You might be surprised to learn this, but incarceration isn't just about punishment. The idea is to rehabilitate inmates so that when they get out of prison they have skills they can employ onto something productive thus avoiding recidivism.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/08/us/prison-reform-north-dakota...

You might be surprised to learn this, but incarceration isn't just about punishment.

For some people it is. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "lock him up and throw away the key." For some people, all they care about is that society provides a mechanism to obviate their need to seek retribution personally.

This is why a basic level of education that you can use to make a living should be free. It used to be. You used to be able to take shop in high school.

A better way of putting it should be that prisons should educate people to the level of high school or county college, something that should have been available to them but wasn't because of whatever factors. This way they get no handout not available to others and at the same time get a second chance at a life away from crime.

> You used to be able to take shop in high school.

I don't think these sorts of jobs exist any more, or at least not in the quantity that they used to. I do think that job training (tangible, current skills) would be an appropriate replacement.

My funny thought in writing this was that the only way it would happen is if we made Mike Rowe secretary of education.

So then maybe give everyone and inmates free college education.

What if, hear me out, we make basic education free for everyone, including those in prison?

Its interesting to see this argument come up on HN. How would we control the costs? If tax paid education cannot keep up with the cost of schools should we put a ceiling on professor wages? I believe that would be a horrible idea since the best talent would begin seeking greener pastures. On the other hand, should we just keep increasing taxes instead? The evil of that is a It decreases in competition for universities to be efficient. The market answers both of these issues, whereas free education does not.

Are professor wages really a substantial factor in increasing university costs? I don't know too much about the subject but I've always attributed it to (1.) the wide availability of student loans making it easy for college tuition to rise faster than is affordable and (2.) the crazy amount of expansion/construction/etc. that universities seem to be doing constantly.

And (3.) total college administration wages increasing.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4738584

article makes 0 mention of this (not even one sentence); the only 'proposed delta' is prison education.. critique is fair in this context imho...

which doesn't mean lowering the overall barrier to education is not a good idea and probably would reduce incarceration in the first place...

Agree. How much more taxes do YOU pony up? Let’s say, $10k a year. Yes?

$10k/year? Probably not.

A slightly more amount of taxes than I currently pay? Sure; if it's for the betterment and reformation of the worse-off in our society, I'd gladly pay a bit more money.

How much?

We already have plenty of perverse incentives with prison, but on the supply side.

Are you seriously suggesting that people would commit crimes to "get a free education"?

There are multiple cases where people commit crimes so they can get free prison medical care, so yes the incentives are out of wack.

The solution to this is to provide free health care outside of prison too. If someone needs something so desperately they're willing to give up their freedom to get it, the richest nation in history ought to be able to provide it for them.

you can find edge cases for nearly anything. Is there any evidence more than a handful of people do this?

In some cases, people do commit crimes to get free room and board, so it's not as far-fetched as you might think.

People that do that have essentially be rejected from society already -- very often largely due to lack of education and opportunity.

Some people will. Some people will do any damn thing. The real question is how many and will it be a significant enough portion to matter. My guess is no.

Are you suggesting that some people won’t?

If someone wants to do one of those victim-less crimes to goto college then why not? A person rationally looking at incentives wouldn't go out of their way to aggravate their stay at prison college.

"middlebrow dismissal" : https://www.google.com/search?q="middlebrow+dismissal"

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