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Comment by 7sigma | Hacker News Reader

I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI

I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.

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Yeah its the same with prisoners. Obviously with the right targeted support they do very well at rehabilitation. Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost, and the cost of individual targeted support is only increasing. I'm sure with infinite money we could educate everybody to an amazing standard, and reform every prisoner. It is a shame that our wellbeing as a society has become an act of taxation budgeting.

How often, though, are these not really "cost saving" measures so much as "nobody gets a free ride" measures?

Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.

We don't need indefinite money, we just need to realize that spending more on care has better outcomes than doing what's immediately cheaper. A rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to re-enter the system, but we don't measure that cost.

This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.

What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.

Yes, the "fiscal conservatives" show their hands over and over again when they simply choose policies that cost us more money, punish more people, lead to worse health outcomes, lead to worse societal outcomes, and just fail to produce the world we want to live in.

Well if you look at how much prisons cost per day (median of 167$ / day in the US), it's quite obvious that therapy combined with confinement at home would be magnitudes cheaper... My personal guess: it's got to do with the fixation on reward / punishment that's so present in our societies.

> Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost

A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.

Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.

We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.

Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.

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