Two sectors of the economy that are inflating at a rapid rate: building infrastructure and hiring government workers. Yet these are precisely the two things that we need to do if the American gulag (more than 2 million inmates) is to continue expanding at the same rate as our population grows. “California prison compared to Harvard” describes the current cost of imprisoning an unwanted resident of the U.S. as $75,560 per year. Over the 50 years that someone might serve for a serious crime, that’s $3.8 million. The retail cost of euthanasia and cremation for a dog is about $500. If the cost of building and running prisons continues to rise I wonder at what point public support for the death penalty, purely on economic grounds, will rise (currently it is on a downward trend).
Are people willing to pay $250 million in taxes, for example, to keep a convicted murderer or rapist in prison for “life without parole”? (more than the cost of a Boeing 787) Presumably not. So somewhere between $3.8 million and $250 million is the point at which the public will say “We can’t do this anymore”?
If reducing penalties for crime convictions is not acceptable and lifetime incarceration becomes unacceptably expensive, what alternative is there to executing people convicted of serious crimes?
Last I checked, the cost of executing someone in the US was a lot higher than prison. Not to mention that no country, even China, executes anything close to the number of murder convicts in the US. Not remotely practical, let alone ethical, and I say that as a pretty committed supporter of CP.
In terms of reducing cost, shouldn’t we be thinking of better ways to manage convicts outside of prison? With 5G networks and mobile devices we should be able to closely monitor people without needing to cage them 24/7. No question prisons are needed for people unable to control violent impulses but prisons are full of people who fall short of that.
I support the DEATH PENALTY, as well as RAPID and PUBLIC EXECUTION. Bring back the gallows. The due process should be changed such that the condemned must die within 6 months of sentencing unless granted a new trial, clemency or pardon. A country which lacks the death penalty lacks justice. A country that lacks rapid and public execution is not enjoying the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
As Colin pointed out, the cost of executing somebody is usually higher than incarceration for life, because of the costs associated with the appeals process. Dwight wants to do away with appeals; I suppose the fact that more than 10% of initial death penalty convictions between 1973 and 2013 were overturned (not pardoned, not reduced, but actually found not guilty on appeal) (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/17/most-death-penalty-sentences-are-overturned-heres-why-that-matters) is the cost of doing business for folks like him.
Anyway, who said reducing penalties for crime convictions is unacceptable? The top Google results for “is prison an effective deterrent for crime” are ambiguous at best. Prison does keep violent felons out of society, but most inmates aren’t imprisoned for violent offenses. Whatever we want prisons to accomplish, whether it be deterrence, rehabilitation, or just retribution, it doesn’t seem to work or be cost effective.
Stop putting people in prison for drug-related offenses. If legalization isn’t to your taste, we can at least bring back public flogging as an alternative to prison for drug offenders.
Colin: Your tech idea is an interesting one. The government could push the cost of imprisonment back onto families (as was previously the case). Say that they have to keep the convict in a room with no more than X minutes per day of social time and Y minutes per day of outdoor time in the yard. Then enforce the limits with software and sensors. Not really what the AI pioneers were hoping for…
Dwight: It takes about 3 years here in Massachusetts for a family court to get through trial and determine a plaintiff’s profits from a 1-year marriage. It can be two years to determine the profitability of a one-night sexual encounter with a married dentist. I don’t see how it would be practical to put executions on a fast track.
Alex: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-more-expensive-the-death-penalty-is-2015-1 says that death penalty cases cost an extra $1.15 million in legal fees. So if an execution in California reduces time in prison by 15 years or more, the overall cost should be lower than the standard alternative of life in prison. As noted in the original post, there is tremendous inflation in constructing physical buildings, such as prisons, and hiring government workers, such a prison guards. There is also a lot of inflation in health care costs (currently $20,000 per year per inmate in California; see http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/10/prison-health-care-costs-and-quality ) and, presumably, the costs go up a lot for elderly “life-without-parole” inmates.
(This is not to say that I personally am an advocate for the death penalty. I’m wondering only at what point Americans become more enthusiastic about it due to perceived financial savings.)
Alex:
Overturning a verdict does not mean not guilty. It means that there was a legal issue for overturning the verdict. A “not guilty” finding is present in trial, not in appeal.
About 38% of all cases, since 1976 have been overturned on appeal. About 0.4% have a finding of actually innocent.
If all sanctions were stopped do you think crimes would rise? Of course. Therefore sanctions deter some.
Responsible judges would result in the death penalty costing no more or less than life without parole.
Kurt Vonnegut addressed the problem of ever-increasing improsnment in his novel Galapagos. The inspiration for Vonnegut’s fictional author, Kilgore Trout; Philip Jose Farmer, writing under the pen name Kilgore Trout, also addressed the problem of incarceration in a chapter of Venus On A Half Shell (though the chapter about the planet where everyone had tails is my favorite.)
Both came to the same conclusion — eventually everything will be criminalized, we will all be in jail, and even the warden, judges, and guards will be trustees.
Historically speaking:
Prisons were chiefly for those awaiting trial and debtors.
Fines, flogging, and pillorying were the chief punishments for misdemeanours.
Felons were hung.
The penitentiary, where criminals were to learn penitence for their sunins through seclusion and honest labor, is largely a Quaker innovation, if I am not mistaken. Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan gives a good account of a robber baron’s stay in such a penitentiary.
I had a buddy in high school whose dad did federal time for selling bull sperm contaminated with blue tongue disease.
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish addresses the development of prisons, school, and factories, as tools of control. The chief insight he provides is that the all serve the same purpose of controlling the masses.
What is the correlation between education, poverty and incarceration? Maybe investing in education is cost effective. Some of the Nordic countries have ridiculously liberal prison sentences and less crime. Our system doesn’t seem to be an effective deterant.
@Senorpablo Since our prisons are packed full of tall white Nordic Americans it makes sense to look at Nordic solutions designed by and for Nordic people.
Could there be a correlation between race and crime?
You cannot place a price on life. Besides, I know of no man in this world who has the “right” to tell another man he doesn’t get to live any more.
War hasn’t become too expensive, why should prisons?
Stockholm Syndrome: The one thing about the Norway prison fantasy that I think would work is the simplification of the rules. The average IQ in prisons is quite low, simpler rules would be more effective.
Senorpablo: Stand by for 20-30 years and let’s see what their prisons are like then.
@stockholm & @tony, you’re right, why rely on 30 years of data and outstanding results from Norway. Wouldn’t want science to jeapordize our #1 incarnation rate in the world. Keep doing what we’re doing…
Senorpablo: I’m not sure that individual elements of Nordic society can be plucked out for use here. Consider the Nordic family law system. A plaintiff in the U.S. who has sex with a dentist can bank $100,000 per year in child support tax-free. The same plaintiff in Sweden gets $2,000 per year (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International ).
https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21700686-after-prospering-quietly-150-years-scandinavian-americans-and-their-ancestral-lands says that Swedish-Americans are not typical “According to a study from the Institute of Economic Affairs, Swedish-Americans are considerably richer than the average American—as are other Scandinavian-Americans. The poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry is only 6.7%, half the national average. … Their success in America seems solidly grounded in old national virtues. They have more trust in each other and in government; they tend to obey rules (leading to many jokes about “squareheads” and “dumb blondes”). The Protestant work ethic is strong: in Minneapolis in particular, the number of Lutheran churches is striking. Scandinavian-Americans also display a keen civic sense, whether in shovelling snow or helping elderly neighbours, from which everyone benefits.”
What is the rate of incarceration for Swedish- or Norwegian-Americans? I don’t doubt that it is higher than the rate in Sweden or Norway (since we just love to imprison people and throw away the key). What is the rate of crimes committed by Danish- and Finnish-Americans? If our crime and imprisonment rates are not being driven by immigrants from Nordic countries I am not sure that social ideas imported from Nordic countries will be effective.
Because norway is not the same as the US. Something that works there may not work here. It’s not “science” because you have not controlled for all other variables.
Do you honeslty believe our “No. 1 incarceration rate” is because we just enjoy locking people up? Is it possible that maybe other countries that have as much crime as we do or more just don’t have the infrastructure that we have to lock people up?
I say wait 20-30 years because crime has been falling in the US, so numbers will start to go down a little. We’ll also probably(hopefully) stop incarcerating non-violent drug offenders at some point soon.
In the meantime, crime is skyrocketing in Europe, so other developed nations will have their incarceration rates will have to catch up. Developing nations will also be rising in incarceration rates as they get more money to build prison infrastructure.
Philg, while interesting, are any of those cultural metrics relevant to recitivism rates?
Tony, if by “infrastructure,” you mean a general willingness to spend more money per year locking people up than paying teachers, then we agree. Beyond that, I’ll stick with actual results rather than your, its awful here, but it wont look as awful x years from now when its awful elsewhere, speculation.
The Nordic countries have some very untraditional and unintuitive approaches to education and are getting great results in that arena as well.
Senorpablo: Focusing on recidivism is interesting. I found https://mic.com/articles/109138/sweden-has-done-for-its-prisoners-what-the-u-s-won-t#.ZQ6gqSNdG that says the rate is 40 percent in Sweden. https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welcome.aspx says that it is about 76 percent in the U.S. overall.
The same article says “Even more remarkable than this is the use of “open prisons” in the region. Prisoners at open prisons stay in housing that often resembles college dorms, have access to accessories such as televisions and sound systems and are able to commute to a job and visit families while electronically monitored.”
We sort of have that in New Jersey. They built a special prison for men who can’t demonstrated that they have paid court-ordered child support amounts (can be in the $millions as there is no limit on the profitability of children in NJ and there are plenty of Wall Street workers who are fat targets). They can go out and work during the day time and then come back to prison for curfew and sleep. See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/PostDivorceLitigation for a reference.
Philg, Norway claims 20% recidivism. Along the proposition that their justice system only works for Nordic people, wouldn’t there necessarily be a reciprocal whereby we could determine which cultures/ethnicities are prone to crime based on metrics from their native countries? Italians, Irish, Germans, Nigerians, etc?
Senorpablo: Those are not real world results. Those are with an entirely different population. The average American prisoner is RADICALLY different. It’s apples and oranges. If the Nordics believe that making their prisons as nice as motel room magically stops people from re-offending, how about we offer to give them the population of San Quentin to incarcerate? I’m betting they won’t take that experiment.
The Nordic countries are made up of an extremely homogeneous population, of an ethnicity that has a culture that encourages family, tight communities and hard work. They have a higher average IQ than much of the world. These are some of the major factors in predicting crime rates and poverty rates. At least, this used to be the case. In very recent years they have imported massive numbers of immigrants who may or may not have those qualities. That’s why I am saying “we’ll see”.
Now, like you, I am in favor of trying to see what we can learn from them and maybe copy some of those policies. What I think is ridiculous, is expecting to copy-paste and get the same results.