22 ms·

At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

401 points by wallace_f 8y ago

dotcoma 8y ago
Have they considered offering the option to those criminals who were implicated in 'smart' criminal activities?
zensavona 8y ago
As much as I disagree with mass incarceration, I don't like these "it costs $nK to house a prisoner", since usually it's not quite true - costs are amortised over many thousands of prisoners and the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner. That being said, I am sure they would regain enough money to seriously help that person, which is more likely what they need than to be locked in a cage to get some kind if societal retribution.
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago
  I'm not sure about how the contracts are but some contracts (I've heard of UK ones) it's a cost per prisoner. So if the prison holds 300 prisoners the company is owed money for 300 prisoners. I've heard of some that are run a prison for a certain amount of time for x amount of money. So depending on what the contract is for a private prison, it could actually be a case of it costs x for a prisoner.
- pyb 8y ago
  >> the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner. Neither would Harvard, so at least the comparison still stands.
- austincheney 8y ago
  > That being said, I am sure they would regain enough money to seriously help that person That depends on the person. How do you help a person who is primarily motivated due to narcissism?
- trhway 8y ago
  > I don't like these "it costs $nK to house a prisoner", since usually it's not quite true - costs are amortised over many thousands of prisoners and the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner. given the structure of the costs https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost there is not much amortization going on, at least not at the scale "over many thousands", more like "over tens and hundreds".
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  It's not cost but profit. The prison business is a huge business in the US and there are lots of people profiting from it. Some prison companies are on the New York stock exchange even. We are talking billion $ companies backed by institutional investors. It's a great business because your primary customers are clueless politicians trying to look tough on crime paying whatever they are being told to pay. Prisoners are also laborers, slave laborers that is because they don't actually earn a lot. Somebody profits from that as well. The reason so many people are in prisons in the US is that it is good business for a lot of people. So, to spell this out, US prisons are funneling tax money straight to institutional investors. Cost has nothing to do with it. Meanwhile they are cutting corners left right and center on cost and exploiting the prison population via lucrative corporate contracts.
jelliclesfarm 8y ago
Prop 47 reduced incarceration for small crimes. There are less prisoners than earlier. The cost comes from unfunded pension liabilities for prison guards. Most of whom retire by 50-55. And can draw their last salary as pension until they die. Because. Unions. This is for the state of CA. Don’t know about other states.
- maxehmookau 8y ago
  Retirement at 55 and drawing a full salary until death is more than fair for the level of stress being a prison guard involves. It's dangerous work. Thank goodness for unions!
  - mruts 8y ago
    More than fair? Fair is what the free market decides someone should be paid. And according to google, for private prisons “fair” is a median salary of $32,000/year.
    - maxehmookau 8y ago
      Strong unions are part of a sensible free market economy.
      - mruts 8y ago
        What about unions that force dues to be paid even without membership? Are those part of a sensible free market? The Supreme Court recently overturned this, but for a long time unions just extracted monopoly rents from all employees whether they liked it or not.
        unionpivo 8y ago
        Not the sensible part. But still part of the free market. Just like the corporations that abuse their monopoly powers.
    - 8y ago
nikhizzle 8y ago
To put this in perspective, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any country. I have trouble finding good numbers on recidivism, but anecdotally (based on sparse evidence) it seems like the US approach to incarceration is not working. Another fact supporting this is that the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds. One example of this is stop and frisk policies, which are applied unequally to people of different racial makeup, directly contributing to the racial disparity in the prison population assuming equal distribution of contraband.
- namdnay 8y ago
  I agree with most of your points, but I'm not sure about the validity of the following: > the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds This statistic could suggest lots of things, I'm not sure why being incarcerated for lesser cause would be the number one. Incarceration is strongly correlated with crime, which itself is strongly correlated with other factors that are also correlated with being African American, e.g. wealth, location
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - isolli 8y ago
    The charts in here [0] should alleviate any doubts you had: when it comes to marijuana possession, blacks are indeed arrested at massively higher rates. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
    - mruts 8y ago
      There are many possible reasons for that besides racism. Blacks are probably more likely to be smoking on the street, carrying weed with them, etc. Also black neighborhoods are policed more heavily due to crime rates so blacks are more likely to be stopped in the first place. In all likelihood, higher arrests for marijuana of blacks are more due to the above factors than racism, though I’m sure that’s a non-zero factor as well.
dabbledash 8y ago
Not commenting on the specific numbers, but maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a year of college costs less than food, housing, healthcare, security, and programs combined?
- YinLuck- 8y ago
  Have you been to an American college campus any time this century? Literally every item you mentioned is provided as part of the (on campus) tuition price. At many schools, you can't even opt out selectively even if you want to! They require you to buy the meal plan!
- chess93 8y ago
  Universities have all of those things. 75k would easily cover tuition, meal plan, dorms/off campus living, university insurance policies, campus security, extracurricular programs, etc.
  - mruts 8y ago
    I don’t think campus security is responsible for keeping students on campus and organizing manhunts if they escape. Comparing college with prison is patently ridiculeous. Why would someone expect that keeping someone incarcerated be cheap?
    - jMyles 8y ago
      > Comparing college with prison is patently ridiculeous. The point is that they are different possible futures for a given individual. The matter of which of these two possibilities comes to fruition depends on policy and on that individual's conduct. To the degree that it's determined by policy, it makes sense to restrict incarceration such that it is used at most in the limited situations in which there is societal benefit. Drug prohibition, for example, does not achieve this, but as a policy is responsible for a huge portion of the costs of incarceration.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Universities also don't require the same level of 24 hour surveillance, and have a more cooperative crowd that can look after themselves. It seems reasonable to a first approximation that they would have similar costs.
beobab 8y ago
Half-baked idea here: Should we force prisoners to get a degree while they are incarcerated?
- jacobush 8y ago
  Maybe not force, but incentives? Or both...
- minikites 8y ago
  I know a few people who work in prison education programs and the prisons themselves are the biggest barrier to education. There are so many restrictions on the activities and resources available to prisoners that it's difficult conduct any educational activity.
andy_ppp 8y ago
Might as well just give people the money as long as they don't re-offend?
- mruts 8y ago
  Most people can’t agree on the purpose of prison. Certainly taking bad people out of society is one view, but punishment and paying a debt is another. I don’t think many people would be happy about a murderer walking free and paying him even if it ensured he wouldn’t reoffend.
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    I'm not suggesting people always get the money, I'm suggesting that where the cause seems to be poverty and bad background it should be tried to see if it works out cheaper. Murder and rape should probably have a penalty based approach, yes.
    - tasuki 8y ago
      Can we skip the "crime" part here? Perhaps just give money to people in poverty? Wouldn't it be better to prevent them from committing a crime to begin with?
- AshishBora 8y ago
  Bad idea. This gives an incentive to start committing crimes to get free money for life.
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    What if the crime rate overall (and cost to the tax payer) ended up being substantially reduced with this system, would you still be against it?
    - tasuki 8y ago
      Why should the crime rate end up reduced when you pay people to commit crime? AshishBora's point was that crime rate overall would increase, as there's a clear financial incentive to start committing crime. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
zavi 8y ago
There's a lot of variability per-state. Also it's not as exuberant on a per capita basis compared to other wealthy countries that also choose not to treat prisoners like animals: https://steemit.com/prison/@gaby-de-wilde/what-prisons-costs-per-inmate-in-different-countries https://steemit.com/prison/@gaby-de-wilde/what-prisons-costs... The California problems really are: 1. Volume - too many people doing time for non-violent crimes 2. Healthcare costs for prisoners and employees (also seems like a root cause of every major problem in the US) 3. General inefficiency / Unions etc. Honestly I think the rational approach for the US would be to forget every single issue and focus entirely the healthcare costs. Nuke the problem with either complete government control of the prices in the system or liberalizing supply side thru abolishing of licensing requirements / AMA / FDA / CLIA / etc.
zavi 8y ago
It costs $1240 per year in Ukraine. Why not make a deal with Ukraine and house them there? (Assuming we at the same time stop jailing people for drug related crimes which should require medical rehab instead)
- draugadrotten 8y ago
  Or to the Netherlands, like Norway did. "Due to lack of space, more than 1,000 inmates in Norway are waiting to be placed in prisons, where they are often assigned to individual cells. To solve the problem, Norway has leased Norgerhaven prison from the Netherlands." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inmates-sent-to-dutch-prison-cells-too-full https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inma...
ferros 8y ago
Cost is not always the first/most important consideration for incarceration. Britain shipped convicts to the other side of the world (Australia) at one time.
- gruez 8y ago
  Are travel costs more expensive and/or imprisonment costs cheaper back then? I'd think that a one time boat ride was cheaper than holding someone for a decade or more.
Proven 8y ago
The State and parasitical machinery within (unions) and around (crony capitalists) it naturally aim to maximize their benefits from this asymmetric relationship (the State vs taxpayer).
narrator 8y ago
The 5 Highest-Paid California State Employees All Work in the Prison System, Make Over $500,000 Per Year https://www.laweekly.com/news/the-5-highest-paid-california-state-employees-all-work-in-the-prison-system-make-over-500-000-per-year-2385924 https://www.laweekly.com/news/the-5-highest-paid-california-...
- smileysteve 8y ago
  $500k seems like a low cutoff for a team managing 8,763 locations, 66k employees, 136,000 inmates. If we're comparing to the private sector. And if we keep the relation to Harvard, I'm quite sure there are more than 5 staff at harvard making over 500k/year.
minikites 8y ago
The United States didn't end slavery after the Civil War, we just started using the justice system to mask the original justifications for slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/20/prison-labor-protest-america-jailhouse-lawyers-speak https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/20/prison-labor... >More than 800,000 prisoners are daily put to work, in some states compulsorily, in roles such as cleaning, cooking and lawn mowing. >The remuneration can be as woeful in states such as Louisiana as 4 cents an hour. >The idea that such lowly-paid work in a $2bn industry is equivalent to slavery is leant weight by the 13th amendment of the US constitution. It banned slavery and involuntary servitude, with one vital exception: “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. >Prisoners, in other words, have no constitutional rights and can be blatantly exploited.
dusted 8y ago
One may interpret this as one nations view that punishing those who fail is more important than helping them not to fail, since as if they deserve to fail if they can't make it on their own. While this view may or may not be justified, I believe it is to the detriment of all.
dalbasal 8y ago
I think it's worth thinking about the history of incarceration, for context. Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment... Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn't have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to "hard labour" in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes. The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they'd rehabilitate (reform) people. I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well. We're stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence? Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts/lawyers), we can do something more useful. Prison startup?
- countryqt30 8y ago
  Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning, construction, ...)
  - zuminator 8y ago
    Seems a non starter. If your costs are $75K per inmate you'll never make that up in prisoner labor productivity. Even if your costs are half that. And if you do get profitable labor, regular citizens will rightly complain that good paying jobs are being taken by criminals.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    There will always be an activist group which will tell you that forcing people work is inhumane and violates their freedom of expression.
    - 8y ago
charliebrownau 8y ago
Come to Australia, then you will experience the HIGHEST cost of living in the west
b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
This state should have no funding whatsoever from the Federal Government. NONE. Let the citizens deal with that. It won't be long before they revolt and overthrow their masters that are slowly killing them all. A bunch of numbnuts. The entire lot of them.
bluedino 8y ago
I have a cousin 2 years younger than me who's getting out of prison today. He just finished a 2 year stint for violating probation. When you get caught drunk driving with a gun in the car, then tend to send you back behind bars. In reality, he had two other offenses in the time before that, which should have been enough. His first sentence was 7 years for theft. He was part of a group of ~ 20 year olds that were breaking into garages and stealing tools, etc to sell for money. He got in trouble as a teen and went to one of those youth harbor camps, that didnt' seem to help him. When he was released from prison the first time, he got a decent paying job at the local auto plant (we're a blue collar town) and he threw that all away. He would rather do whatever the heck he wants which usually means hanging out at the bars and drinking and selling a little bit of drugs and getting into fights. The system can't fix him until he wants to be fixed. If he's out here he's just breaking laws and fathering more children (that the state gets to support as well). I'm perfectly okay with him being locked up until he decides he's had enough and wants to straighten out. I just hope if he ever decides that, he's not doing 10-20 years at that time. Once you're in, you're in.
- digianarchist 8y ago
  7 years for something that would have probably gotten him 6-12 months in Europe/Canada. When are the Americans going to realise you can't punitively punish someone and not reap of profound negative consequences (re-offending, home-breaking etc.).
  - e40 8y ago
    As an American, I've been waiting for us to realize this for decades. I don't think we ever will.
  - muzani 8y ago
    It's not just punitive. Some (not all) people are broken, unfixable, and dangerous. The idea is to just isolate them from society.
    - mikejb 8y ago
gumby 8y ago
Admins, this should say (2017)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
diegoholiveira 8y ago
Prison is a protection to society from individuals that prove they can't live in society. This is the goal of prison: protect who is outside. Prison is not punishment. Prison is not rehabilitation (although this is desirable and we should definitely try it).
dajohnson89 8y ago
45% of US prisoners are drug offenders [0]. That's disgraceful. [0]https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
Miner49er 8y ago
Abolishing prisons used to be a fairly mainstream view in American politics. Maybe we should reconsider it.
door5 8y ago
Abolish prisons.
exabrial 8y ago
Here's an idea: Stop passing stupid laws and making criminals out of normal behavior.
DannyB2 8y ago
Reading the article, a takeaway message seems to be that overcrowing in prisons made the per inmate cost lower. Example: there were four prisoners to each guard. Now there are two. That just increased the per inmate cost. Harvard probably has fewer guards per inmate. Maybe more prison automation could help? But I wouldn't know.
brandonmenc 8y ago
To be fair, Harvard tuition as listed probably isn't actual "market rate" because it's subsidized by an absolutely titanic endowment. But I get what they're saying.
cobookman 8y ago
Why not house these criminals in a cheaper cost of living area? Lower cost, provide jobs & services to other states, win-win? I get the visiting hours being harder on families. But look at mississipi which costs 49.79/day or 18k/year [1]. With a 57k/year savings you could buy air travel for up to 50 visits per year. https://www.peer.ms.gov/Reports/reports/rpt608.pdf https://www.peer.ms.gov/Reports/reports/rpt608.pdf
benhebert 8y ago
But it's easier to get into Harvard than get locked up if you're rich amirite? /s
ausjke 8y ago
Why can't you just _force_ them to work and pay for their own meals in the prison? I'm not saying to make profit out of them, but at least they should work to survive, like the rest of us. They committed a crime, and then losing their freedom(got locked up), but that does not mean the rest law-abiding citizens shall provide all free lodging for them! This is ridiculous. So often the human rights group care more about criminals' rights while ignoring the ordinary Joe that is working hard to make ends meet by following all the rules.
hello_tyler 8y ago
You can thank prohibition and private prisons.
cameldrv 8y ago
Prison is a huge problem. I'm not a criminologist or a psychologist, but there is a lot of truth to the fact that most people think and behave like the people that surround them. Our solution to crime is to surround you with exclusively convicted criminals for a few years. Worse, going to prison or even jail just wrecks your life. You lose your job, most likely your house, your family suffers hugely, and you have a black mark if you do try to get any legitimate job in the future. It requires a lot of resilience and ability to delay gratification to bounce back from that. Of course the lack of those characteristics is probably a big part of what landed the person in prison in the first place. Prison seems pretty bad. On the other hand, there has to be some sort of deterrent to committing crime, and for the worst cases, the public simply needs to be protected from some people. You see the lack of this in SF now. The police don't act in cases of smaller misdemeanors like shoplifting or car breakins, and so they're rampant. For people that have poor future orientation, prison isn't that great of a deterrent. If you're going to use punishment as a deterrent, it works much better if it's consistent and quickly follows the behavior to be extinguished. Being arrested and sentenced only with some probability, and perhaps days or months later just doesn't work all that well. If we take, for example, shoplifting, if potential shoplifters knew that the second they walked out the door of the store, with 100% probability, that they were going to get punched in the face and the stuff taken away from them, no one would ever do it. I think we need to come up with punishments that are less severe, more immediate, and more certain.
- ericfrenkiel 8y ago
  Like what exactly? You accurately describe the cause-and-effect of not prosecuting petty crime whatsoever and that prison is not a sufficient deterrent, so what would be “less severe, more immediate, and more ‘certain’” that would impel a miscreant to not commit a crime? Please provide a specific example.
  - cameldrv 8y ago
    I don't know. That's why I say we need to come up with them. It's not easy to reconcile our values with the obvious ones. It's not easy to reconcile our values with the current criminal justice/prison system either though. My point is simply abolishing or greatly scaling back the current criminal justice/prison system without a replacement doesn't address the needs of society that the current system (poorly) serves. Without some mechanism to dissuade antisocial behavior, you get anarchy for a brief period, and then people start organizing vigilante groups, and then the vigilante group becomes the government.
jelliclesfarm 8y ago
Here is an article on why costs rise even when prisoner numbers have fallen in California : https://reason.com/archives/2017/06/09/prison-unions-punish-california-taxpayer https://reason.com/archives/2017/06/09/prison-unions-punish-... [..]The higher costs are driven by escalating pay and benefit packages negotiated by unions that represent prison guards and other staff. It's an example of how powerful public-sector unions keep the state from getting spending under control, even when the need for such spending plummets. That example comes from a new report by the Vera Institute for Justice. "Despite a decline in both its prison population and the number of prison staff, California's prison spending rose $560 million between 2010 and 2015, primarily because salary, pension and other employee and retiree benefits continued to increase, also a result of union-negotiated increases," explained the New York-based think tank that promotes criminal-justice reform.[..] [..]California is unusual from a national perspective, per the report. Thirteen states have reduced prison populations since 2010, but they've also cut their prison spending by $1.6 billion. Seven states have increased their populations, but have managed to decrease their prison spending, (by $254 million). Fifteen states have increased their prison populations and also increased their total prison spending by a half-billion dollars. California is in an ignominious group of 10 states that saw declines in the prison population since 2010, but which increased spending by $1.1 billion. Furthermore, California's spending increase accounts for more than half of that number. California has by far the costliest system of incarceration in the nation at more than $75,000 per inmate per year—more than triple the average cost of the 18 states with the least-costly rates.[..] [..]The study focuses on the 2010 to 2015 period, and some major prison-related laws—e.g., 2014's Proposition 47, which reduced many felonies to misdemeanors and resulted in further reductions of prison populations—got started toward the end of the study period. Yet, if anything, these disturbing spending trends only accelerated in the ensuing years. "Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates," wrote Don Thompson for The Associated Press. "Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13 percent." That's a whopping increase in a short period of time, and even more amazing given that state just raised gas taxes because it claims to be out of cash.[..]
Simulacra 8y ago
But in a weird sort of way, it's cheaper for the inmates who, upon possible release some day, will be at the very bottom of a very, very steep housing pyramid.

401 points by wallace_f 8y ago

Have they considered offering the option to those criminals who were implicated in 'smart' criminal activities?

As much as I disagree with mass incarceration, I don't like these "it costs $nK to house a prisoner", since usually it's not quite true - costs are amortised over many thousands of prisoners and the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner. That being said, I am sure they would regain enough money to seriously help that person, which is more likely what they need than to be locked in a cage to get some kind if societal retribution.

johnnyfaehell 8y ago
I'm not sure about how the contracts are but some contracts (I've heard of UK ones) it's a cost per prisoner. So if the prison holds 300 prisoners the company is owed money for 300 prisoners. I've heard of some that are run a prison for a certain amount of time for x amount of money. So depending on what the contract is for a private prison, it could actually be a case of it costs x for a prisoner.
pyb 8y ago
>> the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner. Neither would Harvard, so at least the comparison still stands.
austincheney 8y ago
> That being said, I am sure they would regain enough money to seriously help that person That depends on the person. How do you help a person who is primarily motivated due to narcissism?
trhway 8y ago
> I don't like these "it costs $nK to house a prisoner", since usually it's not quite true - costs are amortised over many thousands of prisoners and the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner. given the structure of the costs https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost there is not much amortization going on, at least not at the scale "over many thousands", more like "over tens and hundreds".
jillesvangurp 8y ago
It's not cost but profit. The prison business is a huge business in the US and there are lots of people profiting from it. Some prison companies are on the New York stock exchange even. We are talking billion $ companies backed by institutional investors. It's a great business because your primary customers are clueless politicians trying to look tough on crime paying whatever they are being told to pay. Prisoners are also laborers, slave laborers that is because they don't actually earn a lot. Somebody profits from that as well. The reason so many people are in prisons in the US is that it is good business for a lot of people. So, to spell this out, US prisons are funneling tax money straight to institutional investors. Cost has nothing to do with it. Meanwhile they are cutting corners left right and center on cost and exploiting the prison population via lucrative corporate contracts.

jelliclesfarm 8y ago

Prop 47 reduced incarceration for small crimes. There are less prisoners than earlier. The cost comes from unfunded pension liabilities for prison guards. Most of whom retire by 50-55. And can draw their last salary as pension until they die. Because. Unions. This is for the state of CA. Don’t know about other states.

maxehmookau 8y ago
Retirement at 55 and drawing a full salary until death is more than fair for the level of stress being a prison guard involves. It's dangerous work. Thank goodness for unions!
- mruts 8y ago
  More than fair? Fair is what the free market decides someone should be paid. And according to google, for private prisons “fair” is a median salary of $32,000/year.
  - maxehmookau 8y ago
    Strong unions are part of a sensible free market economy.
    - mruts 8y ago
      What about unions that force dues to be paid even without membership? Are those part of a sensible free market? The Supreme Court recently overturned this, but for a long time unions just extracted monopoly rents from all employees whether they liked it or not.
      - unionpivo 8y ago
        Not the sensible part. But still part of the free market. Just like the corporations that abuse their monopoly powers.
  - 8y ago

nikhizzle 8y ago

To put this in perspective, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any country. I have trouble finding good numbers on recidivism, but anecdotally (based on sparse evidence) it seems like the US approach to incarceration is not working. Another fact supporting this is that the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds. One example of this is stop and frisk policies, which are applied unequally to people of different racial makeup, directly contributing to the racial disparity in the prison population assuming equal distribution of contraband.

namdnay 8y ago
I agree with most of your points, but I'm not sure about the validity of the following: > the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds This statistic could suggest lots of things, I'm not sure why being incarcerated for lesser cause would be the number one. Incarceration is strongly correlated with crime, which itself is strongly correlated with other factors that are also correlated with being African American, e.g. wealth, location
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- isolli 8y ago
  The charts in here [0] should alleviate any doubts you had: when it comes to marijuana possession, blacks are indeed arrested at massively higher rates. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
  - mruts 8y ago
    There are many possible reasons for that besides racism. Blacks are probably more likely to be smoking on the street, carrying weed with them, etc. Also black neighborhoods are policed more heavily due to crime rates so blacks are more likely to be stopped in the first place. In all likelihood, higher arrests for marijuana of blacks are more due to the above factors than racism, though I’m sure that’s a non-zero factor as well.

dabbledash 8y ago

Not commenting on the specific numbers, but maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a year of college costs less than food, housing, healthcare, security, and programs combined?

YinLuck- 8y ago
Have you been to an American college campus any time this century? Literally every item you mentioned is provided as part of the (on campus) tuition price. At many schools, you can't even opt out selectively even if you want to! They require you to buy the meal plan!
chess93 8y ago
Universities have all of those things. 75k would easily cover tuition, meal plan, dorms/off campus living, university insurance policies, campus security, extracurricular programs, etc.
- mruts 8y ago
  I don’t think campus security is responsible for keeping students on campus and organizing manhunts if they escape. Comparing college with prison is patently ridiculeous. Why would someone expect that keeping someone incarcerated be cheap?
  - jMyles 8y ago
    > Comparing college with prison is patently ridiculeous. The point is that they are different possible futures for a given individual. The matter of which of these two possibilities comes to fruition depends on policy and on that individual's conduct. To the degree that it's determined by policy, it makes sense to restrict incarceration such that it is used at most in the limited situations in which there is societal benefit. Drug prohibition, for example, does not achieve this, but as a policy is responsible for a huge portion of the costs of incarceration.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Universities also don't require the same level of 24 hour surveillance, and have a more cooperative crowd that can look after themselves. It seems reasonable to a first approximation that they would have similar costs.

beobab 8y ago

Half-baked idea here: Should we force prisoners to get a degree while they are incarcerated?

jacobush 8y ago
Maybe not force, but incentives? Or both...
minikites 8y ago
I know a few people who work in prison education programs and the prisons themselves are the biggest barrier to education. There are so many restrictions on the activities and resources available to prisoners that it's difficult conduct any educational activity.

andy_ppp 8y ago

Might as well just give people the money as long as they don't re-offend?

mruts 8y ago
Most people can’t agree on the purpose of prison. Certainly taking bad people out of society is one view, but punishment and paying a debt is another. I don’t think many people would be happy about a murderer walking free and paying him even if it ensured he wouldn’t reoffend.
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  I'm not suggesting people always get the money, I'm suggesting that where the cause seems to be poverty and bad background it should be tried to see if it works out cheaper. Murder and rape should probably have a penalty based approach, yes.
  - tasuki 8y ago
    Can we skip the "crime" part here? Perhaps just give money to people in poverty? Wouldn't it be better to prevent them from committing a crime to begin with?
AshishBora 8y ago
Bad idea. This gives an incentive to start committing crimes to get free money for life.
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  What if the crime rate overall (and cost to the tax payer) ended up being substantially reduced with this system, would you still be against it?
  - tasuki 8y ago
    Why should the crime rate end up reduced when you pay people to commit crime? AshishBora's point was that crime rate overall would increase, as there's a clear financial incentive to start committing crime. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

zavi 8y ago

There's a lot of variability per-state. Also it's not as exuberant on a per capita basis compared to other wealthy countries that also choose not to treat prisoners like animals: https://steemit.com/prison/@gaby-de-wilde/what-prisons-costs-per-inmate-in-different-countries https://steemit.com/prison/@gaby-de-wilde/what-prisons-costs... The California problems really are: 1. Volume - too many people doing time for non-violent crimes 2. Healthcare costs for prisoners and employees (also seems like a root cause of every major problem in the US) 3. General inefficiency / Unions etc. Honestly I think the rational approach for the US would be to forget every single issue and focus entirely the healthcare costs. Nuke the problem with either complete government control of the prices in the system or liberalizing supply side thru abolishing of licensing requirements / AMA / FDA / CLIA / etc.

zavi 8y ago

It costs $1240 per year in Ukraine. Why not make a deal with Ukraine and house them there? (Assuming we at the same time stop jailing people for drug related crimes which should require medical rehab instead)

draugadrotten 8y ago
Or to the Netherlands, like Norway did. "Due to lack of space, more than 1,000 inmates in Norway are waiting to be placed in prisons, where they are often assigned to individual cells. To solve the problem, Norway has leased Norgerhaven prison from the Netherlands." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inmates-sent-to-dutch-prison-cells-too-full https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inma...

ferros 8y ago

Cost is not always the first/most important consideration for incarceration. Britain shipped convicts to the other side of the world (Australia) at one time.

gruez 8y ago
Are travel costs more expensive and/or imprisonment costs cheaper back then? I'd think that a one time boat ride was cheaper than holding someone for a decade or more.

Proven 8y ago

The State and parasitical machinery within (unions) and around (crony capitalists) it naturally aim to maximize their benefits from this asymmetric relationship (the State vs taxpayer).

narrator 8y ago

The 5 Highest-Paid California State Employees All Work in the Prison System, Make Over $500,000 Per Year https://www.laweekly.com/news/the-5-highest-paid-california-state-employees-all-work-in-the-prison-system-make-over-500-000-per-year-2385924 https://www.laweekly.com/news/the-5-highest-paid-california-...

smileysteve 8y ago
$500k seems like a low cutoff for a team managing 8,763 locations, 66k employees, 136,000 inmates. If we're comparing to the private sector. And if we keep the relation to Harvard, I'm quite sure there are more than 5 staff at harvard making over 500k/year.

minikites 8y ago

The United States didn't end slavery after the Civil War, we just started using the justice system to mask the original justifications for slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/20/prison-labor-protest-america-jailhouse-lawyers-speak https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/20/prison-labor... >More than 800,000 prisoners are daily put to work, in some states compulsorily, in roles such as cleaning, cooking and lawn mowing. >The remuneration can be as woeful in states such as Louisiana as 4 cents an hour. >The idea that such lowly-paid work in a $2bn industry is equivalent to slavery is leant weight by the 13th amendment of the US constitution. It banned slavery and involuntary servitude, with one vital exception: “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. >Prisoners, in other words, have no constitutional rights and can be blatantly exploited.

dusted 8y ago

One may interpret this as one nations view that punishing those who fail is more important than helping them not to fail, since as if they deserve to fail if they can't make it on their own. While this view may or may not be justified, I believe it is to the detriment of all.

dalbasal 8y ago

I think it's worth thinking about the history of incarceration, for context. Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment... Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn't have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to "hard labour" in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes. The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they'd rehabilitate (reform) people. I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well. We're stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence? Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts/lawyers), we can do something more useful. Prison startup?

countryqt30 8y ago
Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning, construction, ...)
- zuminator 8y ago
  Seems a non starter. If your costs are $75K per inmate you'll never make that up in prisoner labor productivity. Even if your costs are half that. And if you do get profitable labor, regular citizens will rightly complain that good paying jobs are being taken by criminals.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  There will always be an activist group which will tell you that forcing people work is inhumane and violates their freedom of expression.
  - 8y ago

charliebrownau 8y ago

Come to Australia, then you will experience the HIGHEST cost of living in the west

b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago

This state should have no funding whatsoever from the Federal Government. NONE. Let the citizens deal with that. It won't be long before they revolt and overthrow their masters that are slowly killing them all. A bunch of numbnuts. The entire lot of them.

bluedino 8y ago

I have a cousin 2 years younger than me who's getting out of prison today. He just finished a 2 year stint for violating probation. When you get caught drunk driving with a gun in the car, then tend to send you back behind bars. In reality, he had two other offenses in the time before that, which should have been enough. His first sentence was 7 years for theft. He was part of a group of ~ 20 year olds that were breaking into garages and stealing tools, etc to sell for money. He got in trouble as a teen and went to one of those youth harbor camps, that didnt' seem to help him. When he was released from prison the first time, he got a decent paying job at the local auto plant (we're a blue collar town) and he threw that all away. He would rather do whatever the heck he wants which usually means hanging out at the bars and drinking and selling a little bit of drugs and getting into fights. The system can't fix him until he wants to be fixed. If he's out here he's just breaking laws and fathering more children (that the state gets to support as well). I'm perfectly okay with him being locked up until he decides he's had enough and wants to straighten out. I just hope if he ever decides that, he's not doing 10-20 years at that time. Once you're in, you're in.

digianarchist 8y ago
7 years for something that would have probably gotten him 6-12 months in Europe/Canada. When are the Americans going to realise you can't punitively punish someone and not reap of profound negative consequences (re-offending, home-breaking etc.).
- e40 8y ago
  As an American, I've been waiting for us to realize this for decades. I don't think we ever will.
- muzani 8y ago
  It's not just punitive. Some (not all) people are broken, unfixable, and dangerous. The idea is to just isolate them from society.
  - mikejb 8y ago

gumby 8y ago

Admins, this should say (2017)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

diegoholiveira 8y ago

Prison is a protection to society from individuals that prove they can't live in society. This is the goal of prison: protect who is outside. Prison is not punishment. Prison is not rehabilitation (although this is desirable and we should definitely try it).

dajohnson89 8y ago

45% of US prisoners are drug offenders [0]. That's disgraceful. [0]https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

Miner49er 8y ago

Abolishing prisons used to be a fairly mainstream view in American politics. Maybe we should reconsider it.

door5 8y ago

Abolish prisons.

exabrial 8y ago

Here's an idea: Stop passing stupid laws and making criminals out of normal behavior.

DannyB2 8y ago

Reading the article, a takeaway message seems to be that overcrowing in prisons made the per inmate cost lower. Example: there were four prisoners to each guard. Now there are two. That just increased the per inmate cost. Harvard probably has fewer guards per inmate. Maybe more prison automation could help? But I wouldn't know.

brandonmenc 8y ago

To be fair, Harvard tuition as listed probably isn't actual "market rate" because it's subsidized by an absolutely titanic endowment. But I get what they're saying.

cobookman 8y ago

Why not house these criminals in a cheaper cost of living area? Lower cost, provide jobs & services to other states, win-win? I get the visiting hours being harder on families. But look at mississipi which costs 49.79/day or 18k/year [1]. With a 57k/year savings you could buy air travel for up to 50 visits per year. https://www.peer.ms.gov/Reports/reports/rpt608.pdf https://www.peer.ms.gov/Reports/reports/rpt608.pdf

benhebert 8y ago

But it's easier to get into Harvard than get locked up if you're rich amirite? /s

ausjke 8y ago

Why can't you just _force_ them to work and pay for their own meals in the prison? I'm not saying to make profit out of them, but at least they should work to survive, like the rest of us. They committed a crime, and then losing their freedom(got locked up), but that does not mean the rest law-abiding citizens shall provide all free lodging for them! This is ridiculous. So often the human rights group care more about criminals' rights while ignoring the ordinary Joe that is working hard to make ends meet by following all the rules.

hello_tyler 8y ago

You can thank prohibition and private prisons.

cameldrv 8y ago

Prison is a huge problem. I'm not a criminologist or a psychologist, but there is a lot of truth to the fact that most people think and behave like the people that surround them. Our solution to crime is to surround you with exclusively convicted criminals for a few years. Worse, going to prison or even jail just wrecks your life. You lose your job, most likely your house, your family suffers hugely, and you have a black mark if you do try to get any legitimate job in the future. It requires a lot of resilience and ability to delay gratification to bounce back from that. Of course the lack of those characteristics is probably a big part of what landed the person in prison in the first place. Prison seems pretty bad. On the other hand, there has to be some sort of deterrent to committing crime, and for the worst cases, the public simply needs to be protected from some people. You see the lack of this in SF now. The police don't act in cases of smaller misdemeanors like shoplifting or car breakins, and so they're rampant. For people that have poor future orientation, prison isn't that great of a deterrent. If you're going to use punishment as a deterrent, it works much better if it's consistent and quickly follows the behavior to be extinguished. Being arrested and sentenced only with some probability, and perhaps days or months later just doesn't work all that well. If we take, for example, shoplifting, if potential shoplifters knew that the second they walked out the door of the store, with 100% probability, that they were going to get punched in the face and the stuff taken away from them, no one would ever do it. I think we need to come up with punishments that are less severe, more immediate, and more certain.

ericfrenkiel 8y ago
Like what exactly? You accurately describe the cause-and-effect of not prosecuting petty crime whatsoever and that prison is not a sufficient deterrent, so what would be “less severe, more immediate, and more ‘certain’” that would impel a miscreant to not commit a crime? Please provide a specific example.
- cameldrv 8y ago
  I don't know. That's why I say we need to come up with them. It's not easy to reconcile our values with the obvious ones. It's not easy to reconcile our values with the current criminal justice/prison system either though. My point is simply abolishing or greatly scaling back the current criminal justice/prison system without a replacement doesn't address the needs of society that the current system (poorly) serves. Without some mechanism to dissuade antisocial behavior, you get anarchy for a brief period, and then people start organizing vigilante groups, and then the vigilante group becomes the government.

jelliclesfarm 8y ago

Here is an article on why costs rise even when prisoner numbers have fallen in California : https://reason.com/archives/2017/06/09/prison-unions-punish-california-taxpayer https://reason.com/archives/2017/06/09/prison-unions-punish-... [..]The higher costs are driven by escalating pay and benefit packages negotiated by unions that represent prison guards and other staff. It's an example of how powerful public-sector unions keep the state from getting spending under control, even when the need for such spending plummets. That example comes from a new report by the Vera Institute for Justice. "Despite a decline in both its prison population and the number of prison staff, California's prison spending rose $560 million between 2010 and 2015, primarily because salary, pension and other employee and retiree benefits continued to increase, also a result of union-negotiated increases," explained the New York-based think tank that promotes criminal-justice reform.[..] [..]California is unusual from a national perspective, per the report. Thirteen states have reduced prison populations since 2010, but they've also cut their prison spending by $1.6 billion. Seven states have increased their populations, but have managed to decrease their prison spending, (by $254 million). Fifteen states have increased their prison populations and also increased their total prison spending by a half-billion dollars. California is in an ignominious group of 10 states that saw declines in the prison population since 2010, but which increased spending by $1.1 billion. Furthermore, California's spending increase accounts for more than half of that number. California has by far the costliest system of incarceration in the nation at more than $75,000 per inmate per year—more than triple the average cost of the 18 states with the least-costly rates.[..] [..]The study focuses on the 2010 to 2015 period, and some major prison-related laws—e.g., 2014's Proposition 47, which reduced many felonies to misdemeanors and resulted in further reductions of prison populations—got started toward the end of the study period. Yet, if anything, these disturbing spending trends only accelerated in the ensuing years. "Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates," wrote Don Thompson for The Associated Press. "Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13 percent." That's a whopping increase in a short period of time, and even more amazing given that state just raised gas taxes because it claims to be out of cash.[..]

Simulacra 8y ago

But in a weird sort of way, it's cheaper for the inmates who, upon possible release some day, will be at the very bottom of a very, very steep housing pyramid.