Do you enjoy paying for people in prison? I feel like we can take what we currently spend on prisons and more effectively apply it to both fronts which would hopefully help more people.
I'm no lawyer, but I doubt poverty has ever been an excuse for crime. Some wealthy people commit crimes, and crime exists in communist countries (where everyone gets "free housing and food").
You guys make it sound like criminals are victims, like we should feel sorry for them or something. Sometimes what I read on HN scares me and makes me sick.
I did not make myself clear. OP was saying we should give people free housing and food so that they don't commit crime. IMHO that's basically yielding to extortion. By the same logic we should not put criminals in jail, instead we should give them lots of money so that they don't commit crime anymore.
I read it as OP stating that money spent on prisons would have less of an impact on crime than money spent on housing.
That said, crime isn't a silver-bullet-solution kind of problem. It's a systemic problem with a lot of causes, so any sort of broad stroke claim about what will and will not reduce crime is unlikely to be accurate.
I don't think you understand what OP was saying. They aren't suggesting we try to bribe criminals to stop them from committing crimes. He is suggesting we stop people from getting into a situation where crime is seen as the only way out.
It's cheaper to pay for housing, food and medicine than housing, food, medicine and guards. And the former has the possibility of those people finding employment meaning we don't have to pay for them at all and actually benefit from their labor.
I completely agree that the idea that giving people housing and food would magically stop crime is utterly absurd. However, reducing the number of children growing up in highly stressful poverty situations may well lead to a reduction in crime over years and decades. It's absurd on the scale of bribing individual criminals, but it's not absurd on a societal scale to reduce the conditions where crime is likely to grow.
Also, obviously, not all crime is the same. Plenty of crime could never be prevented by any kind of policy. But there also is a lot of minor crime that probably could.
You know that there's tons of for-profit prisons right? I've always been a proponent of hard labor camps, short sentences, and judicial forgiveness. Put them in for a few months, work the living hell out of them, get 'em out and back in a regular job in a regular place as far away from criminal influences, and see if crime doesn't plummet.
Current prisons reinforce risk taking behaviors and can worsen behavioral disorders that can lead to crime in the outside, and violence in the inside.
It doesn't take a PhD in economics to realize that attaching a profit motive to incarceration just might increase "crime" since a for-profit prison naturally wants to increase profits.
But it takes a bit of common sense to realize prisons aren't lawless hellscapes and are very strictly regulated and closely monitored. Particularly private sector ones.
You also are shoehorning what I actually said into "hurr sure for-profit prisons are great" when I actually offered a critique and possible remedy to the problem at hand.
The prisons could easily be structured in such a way that penalties could be used when excons don't reintegrate well, and bonuses when they do. Bam, easy. Prisons aren't a business, even if money is involved. They are supposed to rehabilitate people, and I think there's plenty of work to be done in coming years to restructure how prisons operate, the rules that they need to play by, and strategies for correcting risk taking behavior in excons.
>We could try to break up a fight if we wanted, he says, but since we won't have pepper spray or a nightstick, he wouldn't recommend it. "We are not going to pay you that much," he says emphatically. "The next raise you get is not going to be much more than the one you got last time. The only thing that's important to us is that we go home at the end of the day. Period. So if them fools want to cut each other, well, happy cutting."
>I ask one of the regular white-shirted COs what an average day in seg looks like. "To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long," he tells me. They are supposed to walk up and down the eight tiers every 30 minutes to check on the inmates, but he says they never do that.
>Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, "[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine."
Both my parents are career wardens in a supermax. (two different ones) But I'm sure Google has taught you more about prison than what they've taught me.
I'll be sure to examine things with more detail, lmao
Well then, if two whole prisons aren't corrupt (by the standards of parents being wholly truthful with their children and not omitting any embarrassing details or exaggerating their achievements to look good) then I'm sure all prisons are just fine and any reports of corruption are just people with an agenda.
You mean by standards of myself having been there and seen them, but sure.
I think there's plenty of room for improvement for the prison system, and I've enjoyed discussing it with you. You have broadened my perspective on the issue
afaik, for profit prisons main source of income is money they receive from the state for each prisoner they house. So, its still coming from tax money.
Me? Compared to prisons I'd bet it would be a bargain.
The real issue isn't paying for it, it's administering it. We make it so difficult to to navigate the social safety net that it becomes a skill and the people who need help are frequently without that skill.
Americans manage crime by moving away from it into the next county. Don't worry, you'll get to pay anyhow through a longer commute and a HOA-mandated minimum enclosed floor space.
I was pointing out the paradox that even in the fantasy where there is no crime because everyone gets "free housing and food", there will always be people who refuse to pay for housing and feeding other people.
Reductive arguments rarely hold up in the real world. It is not true that if we had a great universal safety net there would be no crime. But it's also not true that advocating for a rebalance of the resources going into this space towards prevention and away from punishment is arguing for mass wealth theft.
Not to mention the gdp boost. If half those in prison instead end up with jobs, we have a more functional society. Even if they aren't paying taxes they are still helping the economy.
Well, if you're not willing to pay your current tax that already goes towards funding prisons, you'll eventually be sent there as well. It's not that ironic.
"We should give money to people so that nobody feels miserable enough to commit crime and we won't have to put them in prison." -> "But what about those who refuse to pay?" -> "We'll put them in prison".
"We should pay lots of money to keep people who have committed minor crimes locked up in prison for a long time just so we can pretend we're making the world safer." -> "But what about those who refuse to pay?" -> "We'll put them in prison".
That's the further irony.
You're already paying lots of money to keep too many people in prison. The poster back up the thread was simply suggesting a cheaper alternative that would save you money.
> The real issue isn't paying for it, it's administering it.
Just give it to everyone and increase taxes slightly (very slightly). We already have the whole "report income for taxes" part done, so just use that to increase taxes on those who would otherwise not be eligible, then give the benefit to everyone.
The net expense will be the same, except with much less administrative effort.
I'd bet it's relatively cheap, especially compared to the prison system.
While this is probably a false equivalency and anecdotal, I'd like to point out that there are 2.3 million people in prison and it costs the US about $80bn/year. We have roughly 46 million people on food stamps and it costs us roughly $80 billion a year.
With the money wasted on prisons, mostly going into the pockets of private industry, I'd wager a large bet there's likely the amount needed to feed, cloth, and house them all within our currently wasted expenditures.
So the answer should be: all of us; because, we'd VERY likely be saving money and have a more functional society.
Not to mention almost all that money would then be spent and taxed (and again and again up to 5 more times) as opposed to being disbursed to a for-profit concern that likely does it's best to avoid taxes.
Unemployment and welfare can actually return up to 1.7x the amount disbursed in tax revenues. Obviously this factor reduces as the amount disbursed goes up as a proportion of overall GDP, but pales in comparison to e.g. tax cuts for corporations/wealthy which net much closer to zero - corporations simply move that money overseas or tax shelter it using things like "double irish with a dutch sandwich" schemes.
I hate it when people make this "who feels like paying for it," bullshit. Your money isn't what you think it is. Our current monetary systems (from coinage to fiat) all depend on creating debt and guilt (same word in German and Old English)and impose a moral obligation that keeps us serving a ruling class.
You're already paying for that person to be in prison, for the CIA to distribute weapons to people to start wars and for a massive war industry that then fights those people we give weapons to. Don't pretend you can vote with your money or that you can vote with your votes. The world is much more complicated than that.
I should have specified: using technology like 3D printed housing and automated vertical farming in order to make it cost effective or negligible, or subsidized like roads.
It seems to me we have the tech to provide good solutions, it just needs to be applied.
Which is a problem. A punishing prison likely produces a hardened, system-hating criminal, not a person who'd rather want to integrate back into the non-criminal society.
Don't know why you're getting down voted. I like the idea of coops from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Where ever you work, you should gain shares of ownership based on the number of years you put in, and get dividends for as long as you own those shares.
The current system of work is pretty insane. It basically turns us into slaves that produce for peanuts what nets the people in charge a massive cut. They essentially get large payouts for being willing to take massive risks. Why is the FedEx guy who gambled the company to success considered an amazing story? That's as fucked up as Abraham being asked to murder Issac. He didn't give a damn about his employees. He was just willing to take insane risks to keep his shipping company going or let it all burn.
Yeah I don't understand the down-vote but people are afraid of the unknown, which is sad because there is a lot of good unknown out there.
The best formula I've figured out so far is actually something I'm bending my life toward(!) and that is creating alternative environments to prisons.
As someone wisely pointed out, the first question is "Are prisons for punishment, or for healing?" If they are for punishment, our society will suffer that price when people mingle minds with prisoners who are under punishment, and then try and re-integrate. This is why recidivism (rate of falling back into the prison machine) is really high in the US comparatively.
Consider if the prison system were meant to heal and help people re-integrate! You know, I was reading about French philosophy and very early on, like in the 1600s the French realized that if you have a death penalty, the incentive for an inmate to reform is gone. Meaning: death penalty equates to "do not change because there is no point" but a prison sentence that is not terminal / whole-life actually does give incentive to reform.
Yes, the economic system is unjust, but even worse we have people who are starving and dying in the cold because they have no money, and if they have no money we assume that they are not worth-y in the US. Very tragic.
Anyway, I don't want to harp on too much about things I would change, I am actively in the process of creating a foundation for such things, and I'd rather do than say, and be than dream.
I like your idea about getting shares -- it would be great if that is how we operated. Then you'd actually experience some of the wealth of the company over time. You help build this grape vine? Here, have some grapes in 6 months when it starts fruiting. Sure, more people join and maybe you only get 10 grapes next year since you left, or just one grape ten seasons from now, but it all adds up.
Money is good for many things, but the fact that it is a requirement to have basic survival taken care of is just deplorable.
"Who will pay for basic survival then?"
Well, nobody! This place is so abundant with resource, we throw away enough food to feed the homeless. We already have empty houses where people could live, it's just our human concepts and discriminations that block us on the daily.
If people did not have to fight for basic survival, could you imagine the number of Tupacs coming out of the ghetto? Could you imagine the number of Neil deGrasse Tysons coming to fruition? Most of the amazing minds we have are squandered to total frivolity, but will we ever show that on television? Will we ever have our propaganda machine look at its own shortcomings so we can make the nation we know possible?
Apparently, if you compare apples to apples, in 1953 the USSR period had more like 7.4 million "adults on probation, in jail or prison, and on parole". 2.61% of total population vs 0.76% in present US.
Where are you getting the 0.76% figure? The article mentions 6.7 million, which is about 2% of the US population. Still perhaps a lower percentage than during the height of the gulag days, but not that much lower.
0.76% is about the number that's currently incarcerated, with the rest on parole. It works out to be about 1 in 100 adults in the US that are currently incarcerated (even the US balks at the idea of locking up children)
The survival rate in US prisons is higher though. You expect to come out alive from them.
If you count the people that died in gulags... it is lot worse there.
Of course - "US - we are not yet as bad as North Korea, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany" is hardly a great optimistic slogan. The US prison system needs reform ASAP.
"6.7 million people under correctional supervision in 2015...more than were enslaved in antebellum America and more than resided in the Gulag Archipelago at the height of Stalin’s misrule"
Woah. How many thanks to the for-profit prison industry?
California has an Elderly Parole Program for prisoners 60 years or older and have served 25 years or more. Only 5.3% of California state prisoners are over 60.
People jailed for life have usually done some pretty nasty stuff.
Getting old is a prospect a lot of their victims were spared if that's the right word. And life becoming more miserable as we age is an experience not confined to prisoners.
To my mind an old folks home can be an experience that must be not too dissimilar to prison. We like to have a benign view of old people but horrible young people don't become nice old people. I don't like the thought of inflicting yet further misery on old people by having these people joining them.
There should be old folks prisons for old prisoners.
In much or Europe, murder carries 15 to life vs the US where it's 25 to life.
I do realize it is a serious crime; the most serious crime when you deprive another human being of the ability to live. There is no way to ever pay that debt, but at the same time, 25 years is a very long time. 15 years is your birth to a drivers permit. It's enough time to go from a high school diploma to a PhD. It is a significant portion of one's life.
> People jailed for life have usually done some pretty nasty stuff.
In America there are many people serving insanely long terms for even lesser crimes. In places with three strikes laws or point systems, people can be serving over 20 years for low volume drug distribution.
Incarceration does not make a better or safer society. It just creates a new slave class. America has the highest percentage of prisoners of any other country on the planet. It's also the only high-income/western country with the death penalty. It indicates something is terrible wrong with our justice system.
Unless they're child molesters, many of the elderly in prison are in a condition where it is almost impossible for them to physically harm anyone again. What does society gain by not letting them spend the last few years of their lives dying humanely?
If people are in prison who should not be in prison, that's a different thing.
You mentioned murder. Personally I don't believe that murderers should ever be released. The fact that we do so sends a signal that murder is bad, y'know, and we give a life sentence and all, but we don't really mean it, particularly if it wasn't a 'bad' murder.
Hypothetically, I would not be happy if my elderly father was in an old folks home and in the next room was a convicted murderer.
By all means though, let's have prisons that are essentially old folks homes with secure fences around the grounds and treat the inmates as decently as possible.
60 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 84.5 ms ] threadYou guys make it sound like criminals are victims, like we should feel sorry for them or something. Sometimes what I read on HN scares me and makes me sick.
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/09/08/man-allegedly-ro...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/28/man-commits-crime-t...
http://www.wsfa.com/story/17695143/2012/04/24/homeless-man-i...
That said, crime isn't a silver-bullet-solution kind of problem. It's a systemic problem with a lot of causes, so any sort of broad stroke claim about what will and will not reduce crime is unlikely to be accurate.
It's cheaper to pay for housing, food and medicine than housing, food, medicine and guards. And the former has the possibility of those people finding employment meaning we don't have to pay for them at all and actually benefit from their labor.
Also, obviously, not all crime is the same. Plenty of crime could never be prevented by any kind of policy. But there also is a lot of minor crime that probably could.
Current prisons reinforce risk taking behaviors and can worsen behavioral disorders that can lead to crime in the outside, and violence in the inside.
>see if crime doesn't plummet
It doesn't take a PhD in economics to realize that attaching a profit motive to incarceration just might increase "crime" since a for-profit prison naturally wants to increase profits.
You also are shoehorning what I actually said into "hurr sure for-profit prisons are great" when I actually offered a critique and possible remedy to the problem at hand.
The prisons could easily be structured in such a way that penalties could be used when excons don't reintegrate well, and bonuses when they do. Bam, easy. Prisons aren't a business, even if money is involved. They are supposed to rehabilitate people, and I think there's plenty of work to be done in coming years to restructure how prisons operate, the rules that they need to play by, and strategies for correcting risk taking behavior in excons.
Yikes. You should really examine this topic in more detail:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...
>We could try to break up a fight if we wanted, he says, but since we won't have pepper spray or a nightstick, he wouldn't recommend it. "We are not going to pay you that much," he says emphatically. "The next raise you get is not going to be much more than the one you got last time. The only thing that's important to us is that we go home at the end of the day. Period. So if them fools want to cut each other, well, happy cutting."
>I ask one of the regular white-shirted COs what an average day in seg looks like. "To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long," he tells me. They are supposed to walk up and down the eight tiers every 30 minutes to check on the inmates, but he says they never do that.
https://www.aclu.org/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mas...
>Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, "[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine."
I'll be sure to examine things with more detail, lmao
I think there's plenty of room for improvement for the prison system, and I've enjoyed discussing it with you. You have broadened my perspective on the issue
The real issue isn't paying for it, it's administering it. We make it so difficult to to navigate the social safety net that it becomes a skill and the people who need help are frequently without that skill.
Thanks for your sacrifice. What if I am not willing to pay? Will I be sent in prison? That'd be pretty ironic.
There is no paradox in that.
If it were less, would you pay? Or is more of principal thing?
That's the irony.
That's the further irony.
You're already paying lots of money to keep too many people in prison. The poster back up the thread was simply suggesting a cheaper alternative that would save you money.
Just give it to everyone and increase taxes slightly (very slightly). We already have the whole "report income for taxes" part done, so just use that to increase taxes on those who would otherwise not be eligible, then give the benefit to everyone.
The net expense will be the same, except with much less administrative effort.
While this is probably a false equivalency and anecdotal, I'd like to point out that there are 2.3 million people in prison and it costs the US about $80bn/year. We have roughly 46 million people on food stamps and it costs us roughly $80 billion a year.
With the money wasted on prisons, mostly going into the pockets of private industry, I'd wager a large bet there's likely the amount needed to feed, cloth, and house them all within our currently wasted expenditures.
So the answer should be: all of us; because, we'd VERY likely be saving money and have a more functional society.
Unemployment and welfare can actually return up to 1.7x the amount disbursed in tax revenues. Obviously this factor reduces as the amount disbursed goes up as a proportion of overall GDP, but pales in comparison to e.g. tax cuts for corporations/wealthy which net much closer to zero - corporations simply move that money overseas or tax shelter it using things like "double irish with a dutch sandwich" schemes.
I hate it when people make this "who feels like paying for it," bullshit. Your money isn't what you think it is. Our current monetary systems (from coinage to fiat) all depend on creating debt and guilt (same word in German and Old English)and impose a moral obligation that keeps us serving a ruling class.
You're already paying for that person to be in prison, for the CIA to distribute weapons to people to start wars and for a massive war industry that then fights those people we give weapons to. Don't pretend you can vote with your money or that you can vote with your votes. The world is much more complicated than that.
It seems to me we have the tech to provide good solutions, it just needs to be applied.
Death penalty people are probably going to supermaxes which are not cheap.
People tend to get the more expensive death penalty cases and compare then to cheaper prisons.
The current system of work is pretty insane. It basically turns us into slaves that produce for peanuts what nets the people in charge a massive cut. They essentially get large payouts for being willing to take massive risks. Why is the FedEx guy who gambled the company to success considered an amazing story? That's as fucked up as Abraham being asked to murder Issac. He didn't give a damn about his employees. He was just willing to take insane risks to keep his shipping company going or let it all burn.
The best formula I've figured out so far is actually something I'm bending my life toward(!) and that is creating alternative environments to prisons.
As someone wisely pointed out, the first question is "Are prisons for punishment, or for healing?" If they are for punishment, our society will suffer that price when people mingle minds with prisoners who are under punishment, and then try and re-integrate. This is why recidivism (rate of falling back into the prison machine) is really high in the US comparatively.
Consider if the prison system were meant to heal and help people re-integrate! You know, I was reading about French philosophy and very early on, like in the 1600s the French realized that if you have a death penalty, the incentive for an inmate to reform is gone. Meaning: death penalty equates to "do not change because there is no point" but a prison sentence that is not terminal / whole-life actually does give incentive to reform.
Yes, the economic system is unjust, but even worse we have people who are starving and dying in the cold because they have no money, and if they have no money we assume that they are not worth-y in the US. Very tragic.
Anyway, I don't want to harp on too much about things I would change, I am actively in the process of creating a foundation for such things, and I'd rather do than say, and be than dream.
I like your idea about getting shares -- it would be great if that is how we operated. Then you'd actually experience some of the wealth of the company over time. You help build this grape vine? Here, have some grapes in 6 months when it starts fruiting. Sure, more people join and maybe you only get 10 grapes next year since you left, or just one grape ten seasons from now, but it all adds up.
Money is good for many things, but the fact that it is a requirement to have basic survival taken care of is just deplorable.
"Who will pay for basic survival then?"
Well, nobody! This place is so abundant with resource, we throw away enough food to feed the homeless. We already have empty houses where people could live, it's just our human concepts and discriminations that block us on the daily.
If people did not have to fight for basic survival, could you imagine the number of Tupacs coming out of the ghetto? Could you imagine the number of Neil deGrasse Tysons coming to fruition? Most of the amazing minds we have are squandered to total frivolity, but will we ever show that on television? Will we ever have our propaganda machine look at its own shortcomings so we can make the nation we know possible?
Apparently, if you compare apples to apples, in 1953 the USSR period had more like 7.4 million "adults on probation, in jail or prison, and on parole". 2.61% of total population vs 0.76% in present US.
If you count the people that died in gulags... it is lot worse there.
Of course - "US - we are not yet as bad as North Korea, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany" is hardly a great optimistic slogan. The US prison system needs reform ASAP.
Woah. How many thanks to the for-profit prison industry?
Getting old is a prospect a lot of their victims were spared if that's the right word. And life becoming more miserable as we age is an experience not confined to prisoners.
To my mind an old folks home can be an experience that must be not too dissimilar to prison. We like to have a benign view of old people but horrible young people don't become nice old people. I don't like the thought of inflicting yet further misery on old people by having these people joining them.
There should be old folks prisons for old prisoners.
I do realize it is a serious crime; the most serious crime when you deprive another human being of the ability to live. There is no way to ever pay that debt, but at the same time, 25 years is a very long time. 15 years is your birth to a drivers permit. It's enough time to go from a high school diploma to a PhD. It is a significant portion of one's life.
> People jailed for life have usually done some pretty nasty stuff.
In America there are many people serving insanely long terms for even lesser crimes. In places with three strikes laws or point systems, people can be serving over 20 years for low volume drug distribution.
Incarceration does not make a better or safer society. It just creates a new slave class. America has the highest percentage of prisoners of any other country on the planet. It's also the only high-income/western country with the death penalty. It indicates something is terrible wrong with our justice system.
Unless they're child molesters, many of the elderly in prison are in a condition where it is almost impossible for them to physically harm anyone again. What does society gain by not letting them spend the last few years of their lives dying humanely?
By all means though, let's have prisons that are essentially old folks homes with secure fences around the grounds and treat the inmates as decently as possible.