One extreme is the death sentence, sure.
But on the other end it feels as if there are constant stories of career criminals who just do thing after thing after thing. It's not like someone just accidentally gets caught up in multiple assaults/robberies/break-ins etc. At some point you have to just think, okay, there's no rehabilitating this guy, how do we minimise the damage to society.
Locking 1,000 people up for a decade costs ~1 billion dollars. So even slightly more aggressive policies get expensive fast, and a surprising number of people “age out” of these kinds of crimes. It’s not clear if it’s hormones or what but you’ll see people with extensive rap sheets who end up as productive members of society in their 30’s or 40’s and beyond.
A person that goes about assaulting people is a significant drain on society. It's not even just monetary, it ruins trust, it ruins the relations between the people who aren't antisocial. It also has the moral hazard effect of increasing the number of others that see that this behaviour ultimately goes unpunished.
As far as I'm concerned, there are very few legitimate reasons to raise taxes, but police and prisons are one of them, they are not problems that individuals can solve in the private sector.
In a way it does, because it ruins trust as the participants treat your presence on the road like an inconvenience.
Aren’t we all a bit guilty of that? Maybe not all the time - when I see an ambulance whizz past or a fire truck, I’m appreciative of their efforts.
But everyone else? You’re just in the way ultimately. There isn’t much pleasure to be derived in waiting around for someone to have their fair turn at the intersection or whatever.
Obviously as a rational human I’m quite capable of suppressing such thoughts and generally abide by the traffic laws, but the point still stands.
This is a purely political decision, not an inherent cost of jailing.
Your number comes down to $100k per person per year. That’s just insane. Many families earn less than that (post-tax)!
And obviously jail is supposed to be cheaper than non-jail life in the first place, because you’re not paying for luxury, just food, (cheap) rent and security.
That's not nearly as bad as I was expecting considering that for every 1-2 prisoners there's a ~$100k employee.
Low key jobs program at the expense of taxpayers IMO.
Or consider institution GED classes. You might say, those can easily go on the chopping block to save some money. But then you end up with inmates who are released without a high school diploma and, lacking educational opportunities, are more likely to return to crime. Then they go back into the prison system where they use more state resources than if they had just been given education in the first place. It's easy to imagine scenarios in which programs like that are worthwhile in the long term purely for fiscal reasons even if you care 0% about the welfare of criminals themselves.
Add admin staff etc, and the numbers escalate quickly.