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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

I'll pay you $150k to watch over 10 children for 7 hours a day or one violent and mentally ill murderer 24/7. What do choose?

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So let me make sure we are clear on your position on this — you think 150k per prisoner sounds like a reasonable number? To me that number seems to be about a magnitude of order wrong. I bet you could do some back of the napkin math, multiply that number by 5, and it would still be way under that number.

To me, when I see 150k, I don’t see a cost — I see a facade.

Well yes, because it’s plainly incorrect eve California (which spends the most) ‘only’ spends around 100k per prisoner.

$150k is the average and relatively few people in prison are mentally ill murderers. So something doesn’t seem to add up.

So you choose one prisoner for 168 hours a week instead of 10 children for 35 hours?

Homicide is not insignificant for state prisons (around 15%). Violent crime is over 50%. And mental illness is a huge problem in prisons. Would you care to take the chance of who you get in this?

https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/56686e0e160000290094c0d...

Right, but that's not how that choice is framed in reality. The people watching prisoners in fact don't make anywhere near that much, because a lot more goes into the cost than wages of a single person watching a single prisoner 1 on 1. People still do the job. Teachers don't make $15,000/yr/student, either, for similar reasons. Your whole line of inquiry (I guess that's what it is?) doesn't make much sense to me.

[EDIT] and that's beside the fact that it's irrelevant if you're looking at "what could we have bought for this instead". No bearing whatsoever.

So, you're aware that when I as this question, all the costs associated with the job are in the number. You only take home what you get after costs. Facilities, staff, legal liability, etc. I'm not offering you a job, I'm offering you a contract to fulfill. You can do it at larger scale if you please (say 100 prisoners vs 1000 children for $15mm), go ahead. I guarantee that you could do neither profitably.

I continue to have no idea what the point of this entire line of inquiry is.

The original claim was that we spend far too much on prisoners, and the rationale is that it costs 10x more per prisoner than per student without any regard to the actual costs and complications of doing each job. The fact is that prisoners are fundamentally that much more expensive to manage. And if society requires some violent and antisocial subset of the population to be removed from the rest of society, then this 10x cost is justified as far as I can tell. I'm offering the geniuses of Hacker News an opportunity to show that they can do it for less, since they seem to know better on this topic.

The original post just highlighted the very high cost of imprisoning people relative to other things one might do with the same money. I see no suggestion in it that it ought to be cheaper, though there's perhaps an implicit suggestion that the US might want to reconsider having the highest per-capita prison population on the planet, since it's so expensive.

> I see no suggestion in it that it ought to be cheaper

So, it's both "so expensive" and there was "no suggestion that it ought to be cheaper?" Cool. So, what in his inkblot of a post did you read as the solution to keeping violent criminals from subjecting society to their violence?

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