so youre concerned that only the homeless people will volunteer to go to prison? that's what you meant by your first statement?

because if thats not the case then my statements track fine.

no one will volunteer to go to prison unless they are homeless and even they normally say no, it does happen.

I get that you are trying to strawman me here, but just ~10 posts ago I said that you will never end racism in this country if you do not abolish prisons. I would call that a little more than just telling people to stop being racist. But of course, that is only looking back 10 posts. But I know for a fact I have offered other necessary steps.

My concern is with creating a system that incentives lawbreaking, since that's the opposite of the purpose of prisons. If people are already trying to go to jail just for the free room and board, then adding additional perks to being in jail will encourage more people to do it. And that doesn't necessarily have to be only in the form of people deliberately trying to get arrested. It could also just lead to more people engaging in petty crime because they know that even if they got caught they'll just go to jail for a few months and earn thousands of dollars. There are any number of better ways to address homelessness and inequality than just giving tons of money to inmates while also spending a ton of money housing them. If regular people have to pay room and board out of their salary than an inmate earning the same pay ought to do the same.

What conversation are you having?

How do you get "starvation wages" from "people deserve basic welfare and on top of that they should have the opportunity to do social good for less than private-market minimums"?

I expressly stated that people should be entitled to welfare benefits - you responded by calling the post "gibberish". Now you're suggesting that I have no commitment to basic welfare because I am thinking about a social exception to a restriction imposed on for-profit enterprises?

What petty crime are you worried about people committing? I would say if you want to be serious about stopping "crime", as it were, then you need to address the causes of crime. You seem to be in the mindset that without laws and disincentives, people would just be awful, horrible creatures.

I think that is wrong, and I think if you fix a lot of the obvious, glaring structural problems in society, crime is not going to be a problem.

American prisons are some of the worst prisons in the developed world, with some of the harshest sentencing and also one of the few countries that still uses the death penalty. Yet we have easily the highest incarceration rate as well as recidivism rate of any developed country.

Clearly stopping "crime" is not about the "disincentives".

Let's drag out the general goals of criminal justice:

(1) deterrence
(2) incapacitation
(3) rehabilitation
(4) retribution


A prison is a facility that is supposed to accomplish all of these goals simultaneously.

What does it mean to "abolish prisons"? Does it mean to create wholly separate facilities for these various goals? Does it mean to abandon these goals? Does it mean to resolve these goals without the use of specific facilities at all?

Clearly these goals could be better served if the prison system were reformed, but what would total abandonment of the prison system look like?

There is not one answer to the question you are asking. Different views on prison abolition have different answers to this question.

I can link it again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement

Gives an overview of the ideas. But yeah, one example would be replacing prisons with rehabilitation facilities (which US prisons are not).

But, imo, it is important to remember what I was alluding to in previous posts. Stopping "crime", as it were, requires pulling a lot more levers than just prisons. Ending poverty is another big step, for instance.

the problem with rehabilitation as a broad solution to the problems with imprisonment is that the individual has to want to reform

or maybe you prefer the Black Cross anarchist solution - let the chips fall where they may... no opportunity for racism there!

this isn't a problem

I do agree with slighted whole heartedly that private/for-profit prisons are an abomination

People don't need to want to reform for rehab to work?

Or people not wanting to reform isn't an issue?

If there are people that truly "do not want to rehab" it is a very small group caused by one of two things

1) some other structural issue with society as a whole

2) an underlying mental health issue

The first one can obviously be addressed by fixing the structural issue. The second one is a whole separate issue from what we are talking about that would be handled by mental health programs.

Birdman is right ^

uh, no, he's not

plenty of people simply enjoy doing what they do - drugs, violence, theft

not sure the science is behind the assumption that an individual human's psychology/desire is quite so malleable

It currently costs up to 60000 per prisoner per year in some states

Would rehabilitation cost less?

mets, are you including the associated recidivist costs of policing, adjudication, property destruction, & victim therapy?

Back on the other topic

No i wouldn't collect welfare on purpose if i had a job paying more

But i once stayed on unemployment because it paid more than o was offered to do a temp job so it didn't make sense for me take the job

But I'm the exception i know

Since you're super duper worried about the cost of locking people up then let me tell you that independent studies have shown that if you stopped putting people in jail for possessing weed then the total sum spent on prisoners gets reduced, it's pretty sick. Too bad the conservatards are almost never genuine in their worries when they're among normal people so it's the good old game of waiting for a bunch of people to die before you can improve the world. Maybe if Trump was a recreational marijuana user then he wouldn't have raped his wife, who knows, man.

Individuals in Norway by and large seem to want to reform but much like how it is with healthcare, it could never work in the US because of reasons.

The cruelest prison is the unenlightened human mind!

My 5c

i) The most important part: prisons should never be run by anyone else than the States and/or Government. When a private organization runs a prison, its business model depends on the prisons being full. Therefore, for-profit prisons have no actual incentive to rehabilitate the inmate. Quite the opposite.

ii) People sentenced to life without parole (and, obviously, people sentenced to death, but I think those never work in prisons anyway) should never work in prisons. The reason they’re in prison is so that they are removed from society, not rehabilitated.

iii) For all other inmates: I believe they should have the choice to work in exchange of reduced sentencing, but only if they are paid a comparable sum that amfree citizen would receive for such work, even if that free citizen is more qualified than the inmate. Getting paid $2/h is nonsense for any kind of job, much less for being a firefighter.

iv) Furthermore, there should be organizations that specifically employ former inmates after they have been released, specifically in the lines of work in which those inmates were working in prisons. Any profit States and/or the Government make from inmate work should go towards such organizations.

Yes. Also people who don't mind being in prison.