The ability of the left to switch the argument to a SJW issue without realizing there's more than one discussion to be had is amazing.

Quick story that's going to a point.

I worked in middle management at a plastic facility for about a decade. Far and away the most reliable workers were the guys who were working there through a work release program. They always showed up, and they wanted to be basically anywhere but jail so they were always happy. Most of our guys would stick around after they were released, and we had a couple move up through the company.

From what I've read, one of the biggest challenges of people leaving jail is finding and keeping jobs when they were out and the challenges of paying off fines because of that. I've always thought that the justice system should be pushing more and more inmates into work release programs to help inmates become less likely to end up back in jail.

On a similar note (and more towards OPs point) I've kind of always been fascinated by what a prison could do if they tried to create a fully functioning business that existed parallel to the prison system. Using plastics as an example, there is plenty of low skilled positions that can be filled. My idea was to fill in the higher skilled positions in the company with outside help, and use people in a "work release" type program to fill in the gaps.

From a "prisoner" POV, you'd be setting them up to have a higher percentage chance of succeeding when they got out of prison by already having a job lined up. Much easier to line up housing if you do as well. It also gives them the ability to gain skills (if they want) to move up in said company or leverage into a better job. They could/would also get paid more in the program than what jails currently pay inmates.


From a company POV (and more towards OPs) point, you'd have an uptick in workers who would a) show up and b) you could pay $7.25HR instead of market rate while they are in prison. This decrease in cost could be used to help increase profit in the company that could help pay off the costs of paying for the jail.


just my 2c on a way that would be beneficial to those involved

This sounds good, except for the "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" question on most employment and housing applications.

I've talked with a lot of hiring offices, and, as long as the applicant is honest and the crime doesn't affect the job (ie someone convicted of stealing working on a cash register), no one cares as long as the applicant is qualified. I'm sure that's partially just my experience and partially the level of job typically being applied for, but from a job POV experience has been much more important than criminal history in my experience.

From a housing POV...I dunno. There's a really good thread in BFI that would have more info on what land lords typically would allow. But I was mostly working from an angle of "what makes inmates more likely to succeed" than anything else, and I think having a job locked up/an income certainly does that.


I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I'm guessing that you were implying that the prisons are overcrowded/people go to prison for petty ****. Not going to get a disagreement from me on that. But even if that was true, there still needs to be a better system to reacclimate people who go to jail or the cycle will continue.

Agreed. It seems barbaric to make those found guilty of a crime to pay for any part of their living expenses. We should continue to have all those costs paid by the victims of their crimes and the community at large.

One should look at total institutionalization rate to find numbers that compare across countries. Total institutionalization sums incarcerated and those committed to mental instiutions. In the US post Reagan there is much less of the latter, and a surprisingly high percentage of those incarcerated have mental problems (this is also related to incarcerating drug users). In other countries the same population is not incarcerated, but it is intitutionalized.

Not trying to defend the US, but trying to say that it is too simplistic to look at the incarceration rate in a vacuum, ignoring in particular the care of mental health and those with well below average intelligence.

Of course one should also question the use of prisons in lieu of proper care for the mentally ill, low intelligence, and drug addicts.

I live in Europe. Where I live violent crime rates are 1/10 of what they were where I lived in the US, and incarceration rates even lower. It's far, far safer on the street and in general, and one notices it as a positive aspect of daily life that compensates for many other problems.

Didn't read through it all but healthcare is one of the main high costs of prison, just as outside of prison. Americans are habiting and eating themselves sick and when they get to prison that doesn't stop. I spent 4 years in prison and can tell you the food isn't loaded with antioxidants or vitamins. Its mostly flour and sugar. Both are believed to be the driving force behind heart disease and diabetes and some research suggests cancers as well.

A large percentage of the population is drug addicts coming off the street with their ills and lack of taking care of themselves. So they enter sick and there isn't much to offer to help them regain their health outside of abstinence from drugs. Prison is mostly a sedentary lifestyle unless you go out of your way to be active.

So lack of movement and bad health habits make a high cost health care soup and prison is the perfect microcosm for that. You can't make enough cheap wooden furniture to cover those costs.

While the above is true and should always been kept in mind, I'm thinking more about the type of inmate who likely deserved to be incarcerated (e.g. was busted for a string of burglaries to support an opioid addiction), but with post-prison job skills and a place to live would likely not be a high risk to community safety--yet, may have difficulty being able to find a job and an apartment due to being a felon.

However, I do agree that prisoners should be given skills training, since the typical ex-con is going to do better post-prison with job market skills.

Sounds like you are saying that if prisons served nutritious healthy foods the extra cost would be more than made up by less healthcare costs. Even more so if they offered some incentive to join and stick with exercise programs. Add in a program where they are encouraged to take some simple STEM classes and they will get out of prison superior to 90% of American white people.

The current system works like this. Take a person that may feel they are and could in reality be disenfranchised, lock them away with no or little programs to adjust their character (environment probably does more character harm than anything), subject them to random violence and intimidation from staff and their peers, then release them after several years with the hope that society is somehow safer.

True story. This story actually makes me mad to this day. Kind of a tangent but anyway.

When I was in Cumberland County jail in New Jersey in the 1990s this kid must of been 95-100 pounds. Country gullible white kid who I spoke to because we were one of about 7 white guys on a pod with 60 people. He told me he was abused by his father daily. Horrible abuse. Locked in closets, beat, I mean unimaginable abuse as a child. He started using drugs as an escape and ended up arrested for breaking in to a house to support his addiction.

Well we were on a pod called the “Terrordome”. It was for ages 16-24. I was there for 9 months and couldn’t tell you how many fights I was in. The white guys were targets until they made themselves too difficult to target. Me and one other white guy from New York fell in to that category. The rest were harassed every single day. The abused kid got it bad. The beatings he took would of made his child hood abuse seem like a walk in the park. He had his jaw broke, put in the infirmary two other times.

He eventually escaped through the duct work. Don’t ask me how but he did. So when he was caught he was charged with escape from a correctional facility which carries a 7 year sentence with no negotiating. It’s mandatory. He did what he had to do for his sanity because the staff turned their head to the violence as long as no one died. From the warden down. The system does not care.

Im sure when he went to state prison he became someone’s *****. It’s almost a guarantee.

This kid has been abused as a kid and now an adult. No one ever treated him like a human being.

That’s a very normal part of incarceration. There’s tons of those kids in there. Hardcore conservative types will say “well he shouldn’t of committed the crime” but when did this kid ever have a shot at normalcy? He coped with the life he was born in to with the resources he had available to him. It’s sad but he’s not unique. Americans in general generalize everything and that includes people that end up in the correctional system. There’s very little compassion or empathy in America.

So yes there should be incentivized programs in prison but not just with health. There’s a benefit to society as a whole to remember that not everyone in prison is a bad person. Many of them are victims themselves.

And the other reason for prison work, even though it isn't anywhere near as efficient as getting the State or a private contractor to do it is to keep them occupied from doing the harmful things like violence and drugs. Not to mention if the State or private contractors do it increases the risks of the prisoners coercing them or otherwise in the violence and drug wars that go inside of prisoners. So very much it is a thing where the State looks at the overall cost of what could happen if things go wrong (violence and the injury claims that may result) compared to the seemingly inefficient cost for the prisoners doing the work.

Incentivize people to go to prison because their existence in prison is better than out of prison?

I think it's more that people think the one discussion OP wants to have shouldn't be a discussion at all. It shouldn't exist in the first place.

It almost seems like OP is being deliberately obtuse in not seeing how ****ed up the US prison system is in the first place and just wants to see why it can't just cost less...

Like, really? That's the convo you want to have? I mean, the thread exists and we can have it, but it just seems weird to talk about inmates as though they're units of economic measure and nothing else with this sort of callous indifference...

Anyway, OP, the last part of your post about other countries...Other countries don't have the cost in the first place because they don't throw every Tom Dick and Harry into prison mindlessly. I would imagine UHC helps drive down cost as well, as well as their more robust welfare states.

Some of that "non cost" I just mentioned instead gets spent on rehabilitation and education instead of incarceration. I would imagine the ROI on a drug addict forced into rehab or a car thief who can't get a job given an education would be greater than if we just threw them into jail with the rest of the pieces of **** who both inhabit them and guard the cells (many of them are pieces of ****. Obviously not all).

The high cost, yes, you can probably blame liberals (gasp) I guess...Prisoner's rights and healthcare and food cost lots of money, especially if prison conditions are regulated more tightly and quality required to be a standard higher than would be otherwise if left to their own devices

There are probably many ways to increase productivity/reduce cost to private entities or the state, but wouldn't it just be a much better discussion to figure out how to make incarcerated individuals more productive after they get out of prison which benefits society more than a conversation about making them more productive for the entities which house them? One seems like a talk about exploitation and the other seems like a talk about promoting economic freedom and prosperity

Odd, isn't it? This has actually happened before.

Not just hardcore conservatives sadly. The lack of compassion for those who 'did the crime' is strong across the board. Taking your story at face value it's absolutely scandalous that he went to prison in the first place.

Plus it should be illegal to send people to prison if they wont be kept safe - that should be a no brainer.

I know it's a deeply radical thought but how hard can it be to make being outside prison even better than inside it.

You lose all credibility the second you say the bolded. There will ALWAYS be people in prison, and the question the OP posed will thus always need to be asked, as long as the costs are that high.

Yeah but isn't the total cost of all this what matters at the end? The US prison population (and, thereabout, the related cost) could be cut in half and it would still be larger (relative to population) than all comparable western countries.



If you want to cut costs you should be allowed to think outside the box. And once you get to incarceration levels like Japan, you really wouldn't need to care that much anymore, as the possible gain from optimizing the use of prisoner labor is just so small.



My conclusion from the discussion so far is the only way to use prisoner labor large scale is to deploy prisoners to factories. How many do you need to make prisons cost-neutral? If, say, 25%-50% of the prisoners take part, this means shipping around 1/2 to 1 Million prisoners each work day. Wouldn't that be weird? I think it feels weird.

...

My post addressed that and you either missed the point of bolded, or chose not to read the rest of the post. Please stop making pointless comments and actually contribute to the thread.

Bolded wasn't some anarchist view. It was a forest for the trees type view. And my post entertained both the forest and the trees for the sake of OP's curiosity.

As OP, I'll say your post was utter garbage and completely useless. No one here has stated that we shouldn't reduce our prison population, or that the system isn't broken. You saw the word "prison" and decided to get on your soap box, even though you have nothing insightful to say about the actual issue this thread is about.

Why do you assume I'm indifferent to the welfare of prisoners? I've actually thought deeply about it, and there's endless content published about it that I can find easily. The aspect of why prisons are so expensive despite their use of essentially free labor is much harder to get info on, so I asked here. I thought about posting in the business forum instead, but since the answer may lie in legal hurdles and it seemed more likely someone in this forum had done a deep dive into our prison system or foreign systems, I thought this forum may be more useful.

Re: the economics of rising costs per prisoner, this is only a guess, but the baumol effect may be relevant. Compare prison employees to members of a string quartet:

There probably also hasn't been too much growth in labor productivity in prison guards and management.

Also I think it shouldn't be surprising that -- in a politics forum -- people pivot from the narrow economic question to the larger political issue of mass incarceration and whether it's justified, especially since as a political issue total costs probably seem more relevant than costs per prisoner. So it seems relevant to point out that if the concern is the costs of mass incarceration then putting less people in prison is probably a socially more useful solution than squeezing more forced productivity out of prisoners...

That baumol effect seems neither difficult to grasp nor relevant. I don't know, nor did I ask about, whether costs to house prisoners have risen. And over what time frame are you talking about—1826? I bet there has been significant growth in labor productivity in prisons since then: cameras, motions sensors, management software, automated gates for cells, anklet trackers. And the cost to build a similarly secure prison has gone down because of cheaper material costs and construction equipment; uniforms and shoes are cheaper now than ever.

I don't think it's surprising either that people inject off-topic garbage into threads here, but I think they should be rebuked when they do it. So if I were you I would have left in the last paragraph I wrote in my prior post about Teflondawg gatekeeping what topics are valid to discuss here, but it's your forum. And no **** that total prison costs would decrease were there fewer people in prison. I don't know why you and others feel compelled to point that out. And nobody said the solution was "squeezing more forced productivity out of prisoners"; the question was how it can cost 30k+ nationally and 75k in California to house prisoners when they are already working for fifty cents an hour. If you gave prisoners an hour off their sentence for every 20 T-shirts they sewed or 10 pounds of strawberries they picked, or gave them better food, extra phone time, or let them live in the wing with the other good workers, or countless other incentives you could give, many would be more motivated than the typical wage-slave in the private sector earning minimum wage. So far no one has given any enlightening reasons or numbers for why this isn't happening. I appreciate the responses that have been on point, but it still doesn't add up to me. Healthcare has been cited a few times, and I'm not sure if that's even included in the 30k/75k figures, although I suppose it is. I would guess the majority of prisoners are on or eligible for Medicaid when they're sent to prison, so if the state is saving money by taking them off Medicaid, then putting them on whatever the prison health plan is, that shouldn't make a difference ultimately to the cost to the state. I might guess most prisoners would be on food stamps too, actually, so there's another washed cost. And section 8 housing. Seriously, how can prison be costing the state this much, especially in light of fifty cent labor?

I don't know the answers to your questions, and I'm sorry if you feel some of the comments are irrelevant or uninteresting to you.

I think semigo saying your comments are irrelevant or uninteresting to him is the polite way of saying you are wrong. There have been huge advances in security technology and tactics that make your post about the baumol effect wrong when applied here.