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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

We're paying ~$50K for every person that's incarcerated, BUT nobody takes into account the income we're losing from their taxes and spending if they were living a sane life in the free world.

It is exceptionally difficult to move people from a life of crime and addiction back into society, though. And I have insane respect for the people that do it full time. I've worked in that space and it's a world of absolute unending chaos.

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100%. Even beyond the direct incarceration costs and the opportunity cost of their lost contributions, there is also the cost of the whole apparatus for arresting and charging folks with crimes and trying them. The police department alone is more than 1/3 of our budget in Austin. Add courts and forensics and it’s 40%. And that’s still just the money part, to say nothing of the moral impact and humanity we throw away.

It’s exceptionally difficult because we largely do not try; recidivism rates in the US are multiples of other countries.

IIRC this is at least partly because we measure that differently (re-arrest in X years vs re-conviction in Y years I think it was?).

Maybe because the people getting arrested here really do commit more crime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLwKFGjE2zY

50k is a pittance compared to the amount of suffering the average criminal causes. I'd pay $1 million /year to incarcerate more people so long as we got the right people. I'd pay any amount. The cost of being a victim is monstrously high it doesn't matter

That depends on the crime, now doesn't it. When I got my car stolen the first time, the kid who stole it went on a joy ride, dumped the car, got caught. I got my car back, and the whole experience was largely an inconvenience. Most painful part was paying the impound lot. Dude ended up spending over a year behind bars.

Now, what did society gain from locking that kid up? Not $50,000 worth, that's for sure. Definitely not a million dollars' worth. No, it just fucked up some dude's life, and made some jackass at the tow yard $600 richer. If anybody had asked me, my idea of justice would be a few weekends community service, maybe a small fine, and a molotov through the tow-yard office's window.

Don't get me wrong, there are crimes worth the societal cost to punish. Violent crimes, crimes that cause serious emotional or financial damages. Abuses of power. But that isn't most criminals. In my book, if a victim wouldn't seriously consider killing the perpetrator, we probably shouldn't be in the business of incarcerating them.

Because incarceration basically carries the message of "We the people want to fuck your life up, but don't have the stomach to kill you".

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