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I'd imagine the cost of arrests and incarceration are sunk costs though. It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest, or pay the prison $500/night p
by everdev 7y ago
I'd imagine the cost of arrests and incarceration are sunk costs though.
It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest, or pay the prison $500/night per inmate.
Does anyone know if these numbers were taken by adding up the costs of running a prison and police department and dividing by the number of arrests and inmates?
If so, it's a little disingenuous to make this argument.
Also, these cases are not about a 1:1 relationship of harm to society vs. cost of justice. If you let the crimes go, you'll have more people doing it because "everybody does it".
60 days in jail does seem pretty excessive though. If imagine tons of young kids or people in a rush would make a silly mistake.
- Taniwha 7y agobut if we didn't arrest all those people we wouldn't need as many police or as much prison space .... they're not sunk, just costs that can go away over time if you don't need to pay them
- k_sh 7y ago> It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest Not in a direct sense - but civil asset forfeiture and arrest/citation quotas do incentivize individual officers to take actions that benefit their department's budget and their annual review, respectively. > It's not like we [...] pay the prison $500/night per inmate In the case of private prisons (which house 8% of the US prison population[0]), a per-prisoner stipend is the most popular[1] business model. The government quite literally pays the prison company a fixed dollar amount per inmate-night, which the company then turns a profit on. [0]: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/comparing_correctional_costs.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/comparing_correc... [1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062215/business-model-private-prisons.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062215/busin...