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0 pointshumbledrone12y ago0 comments

> If the cost of keeping him out of it exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence

You do realize that it costs $40,000+ per year to incarcerate someone, right? So to meet your justification for imprisonment, this guy would have to be an excellent criminal. Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.

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eftpotrm12y ago

It costs USD40k per year per prisoner? Wow.

As I understand it's substantially more than 40k GBP per year per prisoner. If the American system is costing less in the order of half what we're paying it must be absolutely horrendous.

Which is a side point to the absurdity of whole-life mandatory sentencing. It's incredibly expensive and pure vengeance; there's no way the cost to society in cash or emotional harm terms is minimised by spending MILLIONS of dollars depriving these people of their liberty for decades. So why does the Land Of The Free do it? Short, often community based sentences with strong rehabilitation would be orders of magnitude cheaper and have a very similar effect on the ultimate crime rate.

stephen_g12y ago

Well, when you have the most prisoners in the world both by number and proportion of population, you'd hope it would be cheap!

thaumasiotes12y ago

> Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.

If we did this, I suspect we'd see a sharp rise in burglaries.

As to the figure itself, another commenter noted that the low end of prison costs seemed to be Lousisiana, in which operating a prison cost $13K / year. That would make the per-prisoner cost much, much lower than that.

fallinghawks12y ago

I may be missing something as I've just skimmed this thread, but 13K has got to be referring to the per-prisoner cost. Unless the prison has no utility consumption, no services, no food, and has one employee who's a part-time janitor.

thaumasiotes12y ago

As a second point, and speaking without knowledge, it's conceivable for a prison to be bringing in revenue such that it only operates at a loss of (for example) $13K annually.

thaumasiotes12y ago

Plausible. The other comment doesn't actually specify what kind of costs it's referring to; I initially thought it was per-prisoner costs and decided on second thought that $167k per prisoner per year in new york made no sense at all.

Food for a year is barely even noticeable in $13K; if they cost $5 / day to feed that would come in under $2K / year. Where's all the money going?

lmm12y ago

At a guess, staffing the prison. People are the most expensive part of most businesses.

willvarfar12y ago

why do you think there would be a sharp rise in burglaries?

thaumasiotes12y ago

Because I think people would be willing to do much more than just rob someone's house in order to get a $40K / year stipend for life.

Honestly, I didn't (and don't) expect that to be a controversial prediction.

drostie12y ago

Well, it's not without controversy, surely. You're (a) focusing on the very short term; presumably people would only commit one burglary under this model over their entire lifetime; and (b) you're not being generous to the original case but taking it at a very literalistic level. It would be more generous to the point to suggest that the $40k/year would be spread out to support low-income folks who might have otherwise needed it. So, about 1% of American adults are imprisoned (and about 2% are on some form of probation or parole). On the other hand, 16% of our population lives in poverty. So we might reasonably expect to instead reduce the prison population by, say, half, and kick back that money to the impoverished. The salient point is that this would give a (1/2) * 1% / 16% = 1/32 dilution of the money, so we're talking about giving all the poor people in the US $1k - $2k per year in order to reduce the rate of crime being committed. This makes their finances at least 5% better (the poverty line is about $20,000 for the 16% statstic).

So the more-generous question is, would being at least 5% better off financially reduce crime more than the 50%-shorter sentences for crime would increase it? I have no idea.

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eftpotrm12y ago

It costs USD40k per year per prisoner? Wow.

As I understand it's substantially more than 40k GBP per year per prisoner. If the American system is costing less in the order of half what we're paying it must be absolutely horrendous.

stephen_g12y ago

Well, when you have the most prisoners in the world both by number and proportion of population, you'd hope it would be cheap!

thaumasiotes12y ago

> Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.

If we did this, I suspect we'd see a sharp rise in burglaries.

fallinghawks12y ago

thaumasiotes12y ago

As a second point, and speaking without knowledge, it's conceivable for a prison to be bringing in revenue such that it only operates at a loss of (for example) $13K annually.

thaumasiotes12y ago

Food for a year is barely even noticeable in $13K; if they cost $5 / day to feed that would come in under $2K / year. Where's all the money going?

lmm12y ago

At a guess, staffing the prison. People are the most expensive part of most businesses.

willvarfar12y ago

why do you think there would be a sharp rise in burglaries?

thaumasiotes12y ago

Because I think people would be willing to do much more than just rob someone's house in order to get a $40K / year stipend for life.

Honestly, I didn't (and don't) expect that to be a controversial prediction.

drostie12y ago

So the more-generous question is, would being at least 5% better off financially reduce crime more than the 50%-shorter sentences for crime would increase it? I have no idea.

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