At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard (latimes.com)
The cost of imprisoning each of California's 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year, the AP reported. From the article: That's enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer 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 (alternative source) because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation's highest -- and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69,000.
We'll pay to put people in prison, yet we won't pay to educate people. Maybe it's just me, but perhaps, just perhaps this nation has its priorities backwards.
Then maybe we could make college free for everyone.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
america's answer!
Future job prospects, especially in State Government or the Democratic party are much better!
California should privatize its corrections system. I bet with the free market in charge, they could get the per-inmate costs down to a year at Fresno Community College.
Is to start sending prisoners to college. After all, no one there understands how to integrate into society and follow the rules either.
Can you imagine how the Berkeley riots would have looked with a few hundred inmates involved as well?
But if you go to Harvard - especially the law and business school - you can become the ruling elite, break laws, and make millions doing so with impunity.
So, the most cost effective thing for society is to send these criminals to be among their own kind: send them to Harvard. They will fit right in!
What's beer gov?
#DeleteFacebook
Which is why focussing on education is so important. A lot of crime just goes away with education and opportunity.
If only we didn't turn everything that some legislator doesn't like into felonies...
Or California could stop trying to make prisons into luxury apartments that also provide top notch health care services. But noooo, that's not politically correct, and California can't do that.
... the majority of the prison population would have never committed a crime to begin with.
Ha! Great comment.
According to TFA they are doing more early releases. What could possibly go wrong?
Send them back into the world with 20% of the prison cost as UBI. It's enough for basic rent and food.
they can't get a job or pay of student loans, so they should just commit a crime and then they can generate revenue when they go to jail
goes to education. Most of the money spent at a private prison goes to the people running the prison. Our priorities are just fine, provided you run a private prison and/or own stock in one.
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And more all the time.
If you're a black lesbian transsexual Jew you'll get a full scholarship, for sure. Than it cost $0.
If all of us would stop electing officials who don't mind paying $1.5 trillion for F35s when maybe we could make college free for everyone.
No place on the planet does that.
If college is free, it has _strict_ academic standards to get and stay in.
And that makes complete sense, why should we send disruptive and/or unengaged students to college? Waste of time and money.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Imagine an organization responsible for/responding to folks between, say, 15-21 years of age, who recommend what should be done with/for/to a particular person, and that recommendation might include, for example, a scholarship/rejection/death by hanging by Brown, or ...
Wow putting 1 in 40 people in prison in the US isn't working out well?
Who could possible predict that privatisation of prisons combined with high recidivism (65%) would be expensive, and mandatory minimums.... crazy. what a waste of talent and labour for stupidly excessive punishments "as an example to others"
Cap: thickens
While we pay too much to keep people in prison. (And spiteful people seem to want to keep them there.) The changes in California are not unreasonable. They show a 6% yearly increase. Given that the prison population is shrinking, it's not surprising that the fixed costs that are built into the system are going to give a number that is higher than inflation, which is about 2% over that timespan.
Chris Mesterharm
The solution has already been demonstrated very well, it's called restorative justice.
When I found out the King County budget was exploding, it turned out a lot of that was for enforcement, trials, juries, and prison for people who were using MJ.
We slashed our budget by making MJ arrests the lowest enforcement priority in Seattle and Tacoma.
Then we legalized MJ and MMJ statewide.
California will soon do this as well.
It's a "crime" that is almost entirely enforced on black and brown folks even though most users and dealers are actually white.
And then they have prison records, so they can't work.
By pardoning everyone and removing these "convictions" from their records, we increase the GDP and get more people working and paying taxes.
Same for California. Same for Canada.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005
Is this one of those cases where the budget was fixed, and the number of inmates decreased, thereby making it look like the price of keeping an inmate increased? The summary itself says that the inmate population decreased by one-quarter, but at the same time the budget is the highest ever.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
maybe if California only pays for part of their sex reassignment surgery, that would save some money... Remember, it's not a penile colony...
Or California could stop trying to make prisons into luxury apartments that also provide top notch health care services. But noooo, that's not politically correct, and California can't do that.
So, following The Constitution is politically correct now. Nice to know.
some people are in for the free doctors
Recidivism rates have not improved. So may of those released are likely to end up back in prison. Without addressing the underlying cause we shouldn't expect any change.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Prison guards' Union, for some weird reason, wields great power in California state legislature and the politicians generally just give them whatever they want.
College educated people had to be hired to design the F-35. So it's not a total waste. Arms industry represents about 2% of the nation's GDP and about 10% of the US's manufacturing output.
Obviously being the world leader in death and destruction doesn't sit well with some of us. But it is extremely profitable.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/theodorero101963.html
Prisons are a business, Anyone thinking otherwise is incredibly uneducated on how the USA does things in the legal system.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You assume that people who are in prison would be "unengaged" or "disruptive". If you solve whatever social or behavioral or economic problem that caused them to commit felonies then I'd argue you are part of the way there to education, graduation and meaningful employment. A very big "if" of course.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
No place on the planet does that.
If you mean planet earth, you are wrong. Facepalm.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Surely there must be some middle ground between "cruel and unusual punishment" and the costs TFA is talking about.
I think that is a great idea. Send all the criminals to Massachusetts. One way.
Side bet: I bet Mass switches from blue to red in a couple of elections after doing so.
Do we know the cost of criminals running freely? if a prisoner does more than 75000 damage in a year it would be worth it to keep them locked up still despite the cost.
A fraction of the space in a bare prison cell in an aging-and-already-paid-for prison cell + three basic mass-produced meals per day do NOT cost over $70K per year.
Here's what's REALLY happening:
Democrat governor Jerry "moonbeam" Brown and the Democrat super-majority legislature are pouring vast sums of cash into all the California agencies with unionized employees (whose unions pour cash into Democrat campaigns). The CA prison guards union is a vital element of the Democrat coalition here, right up there with the CalTrans wokers and right behind the teachers. We have prison guards who retire on $400K pensions.
A year at Harvard? Sheeit, $75k won't even cover 140 hours in a Bell 206-B3.
This *is* the apples vs. oranges thread, right?
AC
That university seems to generate a lot of criminals anyway, what's a few more?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That of course assumes that it is something solvable. Obviously not everyone in prison in some kind of hopeless case with no hope of redemption. That some people get out and turn their lives around disproves that quite easily, but there are some people who clearly can't function in society or be let out. The obvious examples like Charles Manson or serial rapists probably aren't "curable" by modern means. If it were that easy, we'd have already figured out how to cure things like ADD or schizophrenia.
The real question is where is the line drawn. We know that there's a group that can come out of prison and integrate into society without further problem and we know there's another group on the other side that are beyond hope and can't ever come out. But most people don't clearly fall into either group and we don't have a good way to quickly and accurate categorize them or a surefire way of ensuring that those we think can be helped can be helped such that there's no or almost no recidivism.
Coastal states like California and New York are flat out more expensive, so what did you expect? I'm sure there is some space in Wyoming to house these prisoners. Bonus: If they escape, there is nothing for miles.
When you have term limits, then politicians leave and lobbyists stay around. The lobbyists keep getting better at manipulating politicians, but just when the politicians learn to handle it, a new politician comes in.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And your point? Are you saying people who have to deal with anyone from the local pot dude to psychotic murderers should not be paid a reasonable wage? If you're from a rural area $150k might seem like a lot, but $150k is not much in California.
Or Yale?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The top of the pay scale isn't even half of what you claim.
Earlier this year four guards were injured in separate assaults. One guy got his face slashed in San Quentin.
You want that job for $45,000 a year living in the Bay Area?
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/career_opportunities/por/pay.html
Pay and Benefits
Correctional Officer/Youth Correctional Officer
Range A = $3,050 (During Academy)
Range J = $3,774 (After Academy)
Range K = $6,389 (Top of Pay Scale)
Youth Correctional Counselor
Range A = $3,050 (During Academy)
Range J = $4,142 (After Academy)
Range K = $6,743 (Top of pay scale)
Name a place that has unlimited college for failing students?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I live in California and been listening to talk radio jockeys squawk about this for some time. Though MUCH of the cost goes to CalPERS (see state employee union) a large portion is spent on inmate healthcare which due to constant litigation examples being california prisons paying for sex reassignment surgery etc. the problem is inmates know to litigate the system to death, and instead of fighting the prison system rolls over and rolls over and rolls over. This is why California as a whole is so damn expensive, the state is trying to save anyone with complete irresponsibility when it comes to the bill
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/us/california-is-first-to-pay-for-prisoners-sex-reassignment-surgery.html?_r=0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Plata
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/
The US is a nation of opportunity, not stability. Most of the opportunities are offered to new immigrants to pursue positive advertising of the US brand, which is why most successful startups have 1st or 2nd generation immigrant people at the helm from an ivy league school. The US has one of the worst Social Mobility scores among the developed nations, and there is no evidence that will change in the future.
Great or even good politicians are RARE and we need to hang on to them as long as they remain good.
Entrenched crooks are also a problem; but gone are the days where crooks had to fight with honest people to get elected. The honest have a much harder fight to even get past the party-level corrupt filtering, then the race itself which has turned into reality TV... even the idiot running CNN thinks politics is a sport. It's also so nasty and dishonest that only cut throat social climbers and sociopaths are prepared to (or want to) enter the arena.
Idiocracy: Trump was just 1 step away from a WWE pornstar...
Isn't California in the middle of a multi-year effort to reduce the size of its prison population? And didn't they just pass a proposition to increase the number of non-violent offenders given parole?
Simple thought experiment. Suppose you had facilities for a million prisoners, and they were totally full. Then you reduce the number of prisoners to just one, maintaining the capacity to handle a million inmates. What would happen to your total prison spending? What would happen to your per inmate spending?
It seems pretty obvious to me that your total prison spending would drop, but your per-prisoner cost would be astronomical.
PPC = M + TFC/n
where:
PPC -- per prisoner cost
M -- marginal expenses for each prisoner (food, clothing, etc.)
TFC -- total fixed costs for the system (building maintenance, administrataion)
n -- number inmates in the system.
So right off the bat the taxpayers are paying less on prisons, but you can't instantaneously make all that excess capacity disappear. You'd expect a short term spike in per prisoner spending until you could start closing parts of each prison, or maybe even entire prisons.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are two summer research articles, both from the MTBI at Arizona, that come to mind:
Prison Reform Programs, and their Impact on Recidivism, and Minimizing recidivism by optimizing profit: a theoretical case study of incentivized reform in a Louisiana prison.
I'm aware the keyword here is 'theoretical', and there's a chance that the equations brought out by the research may have to be updated for other unseen problems, but I can't help but wonder if any of these articles have been put to good use.
Number of dollars per year divided by number of prisoners = cost per prisoner.
More dollars + less prisoners => more dollars per prisoner.
From the article:
Critics say with fewer inmates, the costs should be falling.
“Now that we’re incarcerating less, we haven’t ramped the system back down,” said Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-leaning California Budget & Policy Center. .... but we let go all the easy-going pot-heads. All we have left are the "Bad Hombres" which are more expensive to keep imprisoned.
A little math from a different angle...
If you take $11.4B and divide it between 12.8M households with a mean income per household of $61K, it means that we all spend 1.46% of our household income (or $890 per year on average per household) on maintaining our prisons. I wonder how Californians would feel about that if they knew?
Consider this:
If there's any state that can do a better job incarcerating people for less money, let's have CA send some prisoners there and have CA give the receiving state a little extra money for their trouble. Win-win? "Utah prisons: Yelp, 4 stars, 3 hots and a cot, nice views, but no vegan options for meals. At least it's better than California."
I don't want to discuss the morals of prison labor, but as long as the constitution explicitly allow penal labor, why not make the best use of it? From little I know from penal labor system in US, it seems most of the benefits from penal labor goes to private business who gets labor contract below market. Can the system be overhauled to pay the prisoners near market pay? It seems there's benefit on both sides. The prison system can alleviate the cost of running the system, and the prisoners can have opportunity to learn trade and a chance to leave prison with some savings by allowing them a percentage of their pay. I don't have much knowledge about penal labor or even prison system in general, but it seems like it should be feasible at least.
It's still cheaper, and possibly more productive than sending them to congress.
And so many quality-of-life and medical inventions are a result of our military research.
I mean unlimited FREE college, obviously.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Name a place that has unlimited college for failing students?
Austria, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Argentina, Uruguay, Finland, Germany... those are the ones I know, the attending is free the study materials not always, so if you don't progress in your career you will be losing money and time. Most universities and careers have some kind of admision test but usually it's only the first two years that are overcrowded.
This comparison is stupid.
Contrary to popular belief: Harvard's true tuition is based on your family's income/assets, it's not fixed like standard schools. I get that the "list price" is $69K, but that's not the "cost" if your family isn't earning ~$250K/year. Harvard has "need-based" scholarship programs that can reduce the true cost to zero or near zero. The point is, if your academics can get you into Harvard College, they don't want you to worry about the price, they want you to attend. Oh, and they disallow student loans. https://college.harvard.edu/fi...
From the Harvard site (linked): "In fact, approximately 70 percent of our students receive some form of aid, and about 60 percent receive need–based scholarships and pay an average of $12,000 per year. Twenty percent of parents pay nothing. No loans required."
Here's a calculator: https://college.harvard.edu/fi...
In other words, the "genius" who made this comparison isn't Harvard material - and is trying to say "it's expensive to house our inmates" by assuming Harvard is expensive. The truth is, it's not.
If s/he had done some research, s/he could should have said "Cost of a Porsche Boxster S", or something else that is actually "expensive" instead of making the poor people think they've got no chance of affording Harvard if they can get in.
Sloppy journalism.
-SM
Go Crimson!
In countries that have FREE college, you can fail as much as you want, it still free. Subjects and classes may expire if you don't get the next one after some years tho.
Put them all in Nancy Pelosi's house!
She loves diversity.
I know for a fact that it isn't true for Germany. Don't make grades in HS, no college. Don't make grades for one semester in college, find yourself bouncing down the stairs, on your ass. Germany needs ditch diggers too.
Paying for permastudents to party is far beyond reasonable.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Again, name one.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I realize tat the snowflakes are going to call me a Trump fascist, but maybe it is time that these prisoners only get basic cable and not all of the premium channels.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You're already giving people a free education: it's just that the skills and habits that people learn in prison at present are unlikely to benefit society as a whole. Now imagine that you could redirect some of that money to educating prisoners to divert them from a future life of still more crime rather than brutalising them and increasing the chance that they'll commit further crime on release.
compared to RI
Send them to Thailand or better to Russia.
If the crime was violent enough to get 5 years of it - pack a flight of them and send over, I don't think it will cost more than $50k for 5 years.
An additional benefit - potential inmates will think twice before committing a crime as a sweaty hot prison in Thailand or a freaking cold one in Russia aren't as good as Californian ones.
A 10x10' barb-wire plot, tent and cot in the scorpion/rattlesnake infested desert. 2-Gallons of grey-water, bread-roll & chicken-dog each day. One fag for every 300-Lbs of rocks cracked. Nothing else. Nada nothing nix. No visitors no communication no toys.
Many of the people imprisoned in the US are there for nonviolent drug charges. Pile of dead bodies, my ass.
Not only could we pay for college tuition, but we could also power the entire nation via solar-tower-power. Not only that, but it could be completely built by prisoners.
Of course, it doesn't cost anything like $75 grand to keep a prisoner locked up and fed for a year. This is just a case of a $600 hammer, and the scam here is the money being paid into bureaucrat's salaries, pension padding, etc.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Pay each felon 75K not to do any crime.
They'll get an education in how to become a real criminal President, banker or surveillance tech startup founder, and California saves some cash. Two birds, one stone.
Better luck next reincarnation. Thanks for playing!
What do you say to someone who has been huffing toluene for a decade? They're done.
On another vein: In the world of finite seats *, educating one person has an opportunity cost of not educating another, possibly more than one...
Big part of why so much of college's population is kids. The oldsters students are there as sorta-teachers, like yeast in dough. The fact is that 'years of use' has a lot to do with how 'socially useful' education is, so younger is better. Arguing that a 45 year old, released felon, is the best use of a university seat isn't going to be easy.
Also in the picture: For profit schools with 'infinite seats', that will take anyone. Buyer beware.
* when I was in college, most classes had empty seats. But there was always a bunch of underclassmen courses that filled the fucking room, multiple times (people sat on the stairs, first couple of classes, but the class was half empty by the end) at the start of each semester. Limited the student supply to downstream classes. Teacher effort also counts, you just can't stuff extra kids into programs for free. Then again, average university professor effort is not 100%, but changing that?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Or California could stop trying to make prisons into luxury apartments that also provide top notch health care services. But noooo, that's not politically correct, and California can't do that.
That budget could do as you say (in the ridiculous situation that doesn't exist where it's desired) but it's not what is happening. It's going in profit. The taxpayers are being scammed by the prison owners.
it's to keep 'undesirables' out of your neighborhood. Simply put if you've got a group of poor people odds are good at least one's got drugs on them (both to cope with poverty and to cope with mental illnesses that go untreated in the poor). Our drug laws mean guilt by association. If you get pulled over with drugs in your car because a friend has pot they take your car.
This works wonders to keep the poor in their place. They don't wander into the rich neighborhoods to use their parks, schools and other (much nicer) public facilities. They don't try to buy houses anywhere near the well to do. It's the prefect way to enforce the class divide without talking about it. If you look up the history of illegal drugs they were uniformly used for this purpose. Pot let us kick Migrant Mexican workers out. Opium let us crack down on the Chinese. Etc, etc.
and solidarity. While the rest of the electorate is worried their guns'll get taken away or that their wife/daughter might someday need an abortion to survive they vote one and only one way. It's the same reason folks over 65 are powerful. So long as you don't fuck with their medicare you can set fire to the rest of the world.
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"where it's desired" should be "even if it was desired".
The reality of prisons not being your ridiculous suggestion of luxury penthouses should show how utterly stupid the post blaming the "product" and not the supplier was anyway.
The prisons are just being used as a way to overcharge the taxpayer.
Make a law that you can only donate to a candidate directly and only if you can personally vote for them. Then limit the amount you can donate to something along the lines of $500 dollars or less. Punish violations by banning any and all people from holding public office. Then require anyone who holds an office above dog catcher to retire from public life after their term is served. Problem solved.
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Well, we can expect them to reoffend sooner than usual. See? That's change!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
With the helmet so heavy that it can kill people who eject (and a long list of other things) I'm not so sure about that.
I suppose MBAs come from college as well.
What do you say to someone who has been huffing toluene for a decade? They're done.
Doubtful that represents the majority of inmates
Big part of why so much of college's population is kids. The oldsters students are there as sorta-teachers, like yeast in dough. The fact is that 'years of use' has a lot to do with how 'socially useful' education is, so younger is better. Arguing that a 45 year old, released felon, is the best use of a university seat isn't going to be easy.
So we failed a generation. There is a way to clean this up, but it is expensive and runs against the anti-welfare sentimate in our culture.
Also in the picture: For profit schools with 'infinite seats', that will take anyone. Buyer beware.
Standardization and transparency
You didn't even read the question you quoted and responded to. I'm not so sure I'd stand behind the quality of your education.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The answer is private prisons in the Deep South. Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi prisons where low wage labor is more plentiful.
But most people don't clearly fall into either group and we don't have a good way to quickly and accurate categorize them or a surefire way of ensuring that those we think can be helped can be helped such that there's no or almost no recidivism.
We don't care. We set minimum mandatory sentences and take away the ability for judges to actually use discretion. The prisons know who the at risk prisoners are and who aren't. The low risk prisoners are the ones working in the cafeteria, workshops, etc... The prisons don't have the ability to release them early nor do they have an incentive as these low risk prisoners are cheap and safe to house.
Well, the base assumption is that threatening people enough and punishing them makes them into good people. This is a fundamentalist religious idea. It does not work at all in actual reality, but fundamentalists are incapable of understanding cause-effect relationships or that their ideas and methods may not work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...so let's just put criminals out on the streets. What could possibly go wrong?
It did not cost the nation's founders $70K+ per year to house a prisoner. They provided no electric lights, no heating, no air conditioning, no telephones, no radio, no TV, no basketball courts, no weight rooms, no dentists, etc and, as the AUTHORS of the Constitution, THEY more than anybody else certainly knew what they meant about "cruel and unusual punishment".
Just how does throwing a gang member into a cage with 3 other gang members and tossing in a breakfast bar an a couple of bologna sandwiches per prisoner per day = $70K+ per year???? If there are 4 prisoners in a cell, then we are being asked to believe that this ONE CELL (whose construction was paid for long ago and which is not subject to taxation) is costing $280K per year!!!!!! Something tells me the governor of California and his political allies are spending an enourmous heap of money elsewhere, or the reporter is lying to push an agenda of unleashing a wave of criminals upon society.
That's because we bitch about a judge who uses that discretion because they gave a 'light sentence'.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to send prisoners to China, India, or Africa? For a lot less than $75k per man/year, they would build prisons and guard the prisoners. Anyone who escapes is stuck in the middle of a foreign country, unlikely to return to the US. Maximum security would be in Alaska, guarded by Eskimos and polar bears.
High crime, high taxes, high cost of living, high cost of _public_ education, high pollution in big cities, classic big government everywhere. Lefties are ruining everything.
Knowingly exposing others to HIV should no longer be a felony, state Senate says
And has a greater return on investment.
I've spend a lot of time reading religious material. Their attitude to prison is that all prisoners are evil vile people and the scum of the earth, an the only possible hope for their reform is to find salvation in Jesus and be cleaned of their sins. Therefore all money spent on prisoner education and rehabilitation is wasted, because only Jesus can make someone into a good person.
Their main concerns are 1. Making sure prisons have plenty of chaplains who can convert people. 2. Protecting the religious freedom of the chaplains to preach without government control, especially if they want to preach about how evil homosexuals are. 3. Making sure that the filthy heathen Muslims don't get their own preachers in to turn prisoners into terrorists.
In short: They do not believe in rehabilitation, except via conversion.
Also note that, with the exception of people who convert while in prison, they regard prisons as having exactly zero Christian population: No true Christian would ever end up in prison, and anyone who claims to be a Christian but still ends up in prison is simply lying about their faith.
Prisons are the late stage capitalism's wet dream. Captive customer base and externalized acquisition costs.
No wonder the USA is ahead in prisoners per capita (but fret not: Turkey is doing pretty well these days and China'll eventually catch up; the only missing piece for those two is to privatize their jail system too).
Parable of the broken window
It is time to start cost cutting. ...
Bring back death penalty.
Yes, i am talking about corrupted officials, pimps, drug dealers, false advertisers,
Honest murderers my wait for second turn.
Meh. Airforce pilots are expendable now that we have relatively cheap drones controlled from comfortable offices in the US.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Then do not eject. Coward.
Basically every european country has free colleges/universities.
And ofc you need to have the appropriated high school degree (Abitur) to get accepted, that is a no brainer.
And you likely knew that, so about what do you want to argue?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well F-35's are being produced and sold and not destroyed. So it's not a real broken window fallacy.
We could argue that keeping schools open just to give teachers a job is equivalent to the broken window.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think that is probably a pretty common issue. I know it is similar where I am. At one point they were part of my union, which was silly because every time there was a strike vote (no matter what it was) they would vote 99.9% to go on strike. They knew that they would all be for the most part classified as essential workers and not be allowed to strike anyway. Meaning all the rest of us would have to go out to win them them benefits. They are still in a related union, but at least don't vote with us anymore. There was a recent vote like a year or so ago, and management was going to start installing management types from other business areas as prison guards (or that was the threat). I can only imagine how disastrous that would have been (though I think some of us were secretly hoping some of our management might have to do it and see what "happens"). At any rate, of course that didn't happen and they got what they want, which is what they always do. Which is why it is so expensive and why they all have such high salaries. That isn't to say they don't have some legitimate grievances (like safety, and numbers, and facilities, etc...), but salary isn't really one of them. Don't get me wrong, not an easy or fun job, with danger and stress, they should be compensated fairly... that said the pendulum swings. I've always been a bit critical of industries that have "unions" but who more less legally can't strike, seems a bit silly (Prison guards, Police, Fire, Nurses, doctors, teachers to a certain extent politically as parents can deal with children)... It is kind of a slap in the face to other unions struggling to get that 0.5, 1 or 2% inflationary increase when some of these other are getting unsustainable 6 and 8% increases year over year. At any rate it is mostly political cowardice, most would pass the buck to the next guy and them blame them for not being able to balance the budget.
Sheriff Joe put prisoners in tents. If it is good enough for our soldiers, it is good enough for criminals.
Put them on a Vegan diet. The Cali liberals should approve of that.
Get them working, learn a trade or cleaning common areas.
Boot the "undocumented" back to their own country.
I know for a fact that is true for Argentina.
That's one place.
It's true that seems a waste of resources. But now I'm interested to know the per graduate cost (taking into account all the resources invested). And I'm doubious if the spending in basic investigation should be excluded or not...
I don't have the numbers right now
Such is the price of mandatory-minimum vengeance policies, paid out to the private sector.
Norway is a small homogenous country. It does not have as many people walking across its borders.
The article mentions areas with gangs. We should deport our gang bangers to Norway.
Lets see how well they deal with a few million hard cores that don't speak the language.
We can start with first time offenders and see if it works for them.
Seriously. Many Harvard graduates are in prison :)
Take away some of their "stuff" Cut out cable, internet, exercise equipment, and what other crap they get. Put the able bodied ones on chain gangs out cleaning up the roadways, cutting the weeds. Make prison more like the movie "Cool Hand Luke" and maybe people would be less inclined to break the law. A lot of prisoners get "cleaned up" beefed up in prison, get out, commit more crimes, strung out on dope go back in, clean up again, and repeat the process. Make it where they DON'T want to go to prison, maybe, just maybe a few of them will stay out of trouble.
What generation did we fail? Not the ones whining right now, they are just 'at that age' where they realize the world is a messy place. The dumb ones adopt dumb philosophies (socialism/communism/anarcho syndicalism) out of denial.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Subject germane.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
That's because California prison guards make a lot more than Harvard professors, and can retire with full benefits much earlier. Also, no PhD needed. No BA needed. GED will do.
may be I misunderstood. the first Christian went to prison, then a few more in his lifetime. what was your point?
I spend less than $6000 per year for rent, utilities, and food. So for the cost of one year in prison I could live for 12 years without working. I wonder how many of those criminals would be in jail if we had some sort of minimum basic income in the US. Not that I am claiming such a system is viable, but it sounds like in the case of the prisoners it would be much cheaper.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Indeed. These people are completely messed up and do not know it. Probably the only way to exceed "deeply stupid" is "deeply religious".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You shouldn't speak about the document. You clearly haven't read it.
Just another day in Paradise
I thought the left didn't like stereotypes...oh, the irony.
Just another day in Paradise
And so many quality-of-life and medical inventions are a result of our military research.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or believe what you said. So, just for starters, there's radar, duct tape, jet engines, and oh yeah...the Internet.
Just another day in Paradise
It's quite a different education, though!