Comment by BlarfMcFlarf
Comment by BlarfMcFlarf 4 days ago
No. Prisons should cost society money. If you are taking away someone’s freedoms, there should be a high cost so you don’t do it flippantly when another solution will work.
Comment by BlarfMcFlarf 4 days ago
No. Prisons should cost society money. If you are taking away someone’s freedoms, there should be a high cost so you don’t do it flippantly when another solution will work.
Incredible for sure. To start with, it sounds like you think due process means that any kind or amount of punishment must be correct and reasonable, which. wow.
For starters this is just a complete non-comment. I mean there's no substance here.
And secondly, he has a good point. We don't want to make locking people up easy or cheap. It should be high-friction, it should take a long time, and it should cost the government lots and lots of money.
Why? Incentives. The government has no reason to prevent crime if locking people up is cheap. It's made even worse by the promise of cheap or free labor. Then, you run into issues where the government actually wants people to fail and do crime, so they can extract labor from them. We see this quite aggressively in some southern states like Georgia. A remnant of Jim Crow era America.
But, if prison is expensive, the government will be incentivized to put some of that money into crime prevention programs. Things like homeless shelters, food banks, job programs.
Are you concerned that if you make prison too expensive society might resort to capital punishment to reduce prison costs? Or we end up releasing prisoners who are legitimate dangers to society.
And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.