We need to demand a publicly accessible audit. The fact prisons don't even have to accurately report the number of inmate deaths they have to anyone with decision making power highlights how crazy the situation currently is.
Federal prisons are starting the process of leaving private contracts which is great. We need to force all states to do the same. Personal freedom needs to be free from market pressures and money. In az there was recently an inmate management software update which was rushed for financial reasons. A whistleblower recently revealed the software is unable to handle certain laws causing people to stay imprisoned possibly 2x longer than the law requires.
Are the prisons in the article private prisons? I cannot find a definite answer, but it doesn't look like it.
If anything, it might be good to outsource these to private businesses to get costs under control from $500K/inmate.
Wouldn't an audit just increase costs even more? It usually goes like: let's audit the cost, then let's create a committee to explore why the audit we just did cost so much.
I mean, short term yes, but long term no. For half a million bucks an inmate, you have a lot of room to recover some money.
Googling pulls up a stat that 4000 people are incarcerated in NYC. If you could spend 1.9 million dollars and reduce expenses for a year by 1%, that pays for itself in the first year. At that scale and cost, any efficiencies pay for themselves fairly quickly.
Spending that kind of money per prisoner is absolutely staggering. It is equivalent to:
Each prisoner has their own $400 per night hotel room
Each prisoner has all their meals in the hotel restaurant with a $50 budget for each of their three meals per day
Each prisoner has $50 per day for sundries (toothpaste, uniforms etc)
Each prisoner has their own 100% dedicated guard, assuming four shifts on a 7-day fortnight rotation whose payroll costs are 50% above USA median wage
At the end of every single day, every prisoner celebrates by drinking a whole $100 bottle of champagne
Sorry for the formatting fail, here's a second try:
Spending that kind of money per prisoner is absolutely staggering. It is equivalent to:
> Each prisoner has their own $400 per night hotel room
> Each prisoner has all their meals in the hotel restaurant with a $50 budget for each of their three meals per day
> Each prisoner has $50 per day for sundries (toothpaste, uniforms etc) Each prisoner has their own 100% dedicated guard, assuming four shifts on a 7-day fortnight rotation whose payroll costs are 50% above USA median wage
> At the end of every single day, every prisoner celebrates by drinking a whole $100 bottle of champagne
...I wonder how many prisoners you could save money on by telling them if they stay in the local Marriott and don't leave ever, the government will pay all their bills.
If you actually did that you would induce a much higher number of prisoners, so I’m not sure we can make that kind of comparison since the costs would quickly become unmanageable.
I suspect the first thing that's needed is a publicly accessible breakdown of public spending. Really quickly I imagine it would be clear what needs to be explained or not.
You can see a department of corrections cost which is roughly the first document divided by incarcerated individuals, as well as an additional cost which is almost double the Department of Corrections cost, which is stated as: Fringe Benefits, Pensions, and Medical Services
If I had to make a guess Pensions seem pretty suspicious.
So working staff from the original document is 9,714, 600mil is pensions for 13.5k people, leaving something like 1.8 bil for those 9,714 employees, facilities, programs, training, etc. Which is roughly 185k per person.
That doesn't seem too terribly outrageous to me. Why are there so many staff despite decreasing jail population seems like the most pressing question, but nothing I've read so far shouts outrageous corruption.
I think I misunderstood pensions. I suppose it is much more like a 401k, so when it says pension, that's probably almost exactly a 401k deposit except to NYSCR:
Guess these things are rather hard to understand as a financial layman. I don't know which interpretation is correct, or if something else is more correct.
A pension pays you a fixed rate per year until you die. Very different from a 401k. And that is why all these government entities have such hefty pension responsibilities. It seems absolutely stupid. Like, just do the math. What did these people think were going to happen 50 years down the road?
For a number of years, it was a tactic for resolving impasses between labor and management. Labor would accept a lower salary in exchange for a pension -- funded by expected growth rather than an investment account.
Everybody wins. Workers get a safe retirement. Management gets to hold the line on salaries.
Oops.
It might even have worked, if growth had continued the way it did in the 50s and 60s, where there was often 5% GDP growth. Then came the 80s. Things have leveled off at a reasonable 2% growth, but that's not enough to support all of these pensions. But the pension plans were promises, and not contingent on that.
So it's not quite as stupid as it sounded. But it's still pretty stupid. Everybody thought they were taking advantage of the other side.
1) Open and easily assessible accounting and tendering.
2) Auditors having ability to remove procurement staff that show they miss obviously 'better pricing'.
3) Spend less. I've pondered why prisons dont set up colonial type towns in remote locations for less than maximum security prisoners.
Make people work to provide their food and improve infrastructure. I imagine it would help develop many skills + better ready people to return to a world where they have to interact with people vs those high tension overcrowded prisons you see on TV. There'd still obviously be costs but you suspect something like this could be a massive per-prisoner cost.
Move prisoners out into the wilderness so it's even harder for them to maintain social (familial) connections they will rely on once they leave the prison system.
In an ideal world, maybe what you describe would work. In the punitive and unfair justice system that the US runs, you're just making prisoners' lives worse.
Yes it does seem way off the mark. Seems better to give the money to the individuals on promise of turning around their lives .. in non-violent cases. (I'm not totally serious here, just expressing that some/most criminals may choose to turn around their lives given funds like that.)
Admittedly I have a bias prompting these two questions, and I'm going to be upfront: I think incarceration in the US is intentionally punitive for profit and control, not responsive to any particular crime problem. That said...
I'm not good at finance, and I mean these questions sincerely:
1. What do you think would be an appropriate per-inmate budget?
2. What parts of the existing budget do you think are corrupt and could be reformed?
- - -
Third question, because well, I already laid my bias cards on the table:
Why is cost the concern? If there's rampant corruption in incarceration, why are you focused on the money spent and not the human toll of a corrupt prison system housing millions of human beings?
> 1. What do you think would be an appropriate per-inmate budget?
A better question is, exactly how is that $500k being spent?
> Why is cost the concern? If there's rampant corruption in incarceration, why are you focused on the money spent and not the human toll of a corrupt prison system housing millions of human beings?
$$ cost, corruption, and 'human toll' are all concerns, and in this case may well be related. Of those 3, $$ cost is the easiest to measure. If your goal is to solve any or all of the above problems, investigating $$ cost is likely to be the most tractable approach.
The average household income in the US is about $88,000. The average household size is about 2.5 people. So the average person in the US is maintained on about $35,000 per year. This doesn’t include the reduction due to taxes, but in principle on average the reduction in taxes is returned back in the form of the average government spending per person, so we can call that a wash.
The fact that it is more than 14 times more expensive to maintain a person in prison vs out of prison is immediately suspicious.
The average person isn’t being held in a cage against their will, explicitly a charge of society, ostensibly for the purpose of rehabilitation, and widely understood to be under heightened threat of violence.
Probably somewhere around $200,000/year as a high water mark. That works out to the average cost of maintaining one person, plus 2x the average household income, which seems like a good proxy for the fully-loaded cost of maintaining a full-time staff member and associated infrastructure. Economies of scale suggest to me that at scale it should be possible to support a ratio of staff:inmates that is less than 1:1.
It's a better question assuming that one's primary goal is to find a solution to the problem. OTOH if one is mainly interested in hand-wringing, then the question is pretty irrelevant.
Which problem? If you’re concerned about spending maybe that’s the right question to ask (I’m skeptical, a much more foundational question is why there are so many inmates). I’m still unclear on why that should be the focus of “the problem”.
Just so we’re clear, you think... housing and feeding and imprisoning and (I’m not gonna jump to conclusions about any other things you think are involved in keeping human beings in prison) should cost less than $15,000/year? If I’m understanding correctly, how do you think that’s achievable?
Well either it's achievable, or your minimum wage is so grossly low that you have much bigger problems than the costs of incarceration.
You have people (mostly) locked in a building and you feed them 3 times a day. The biggest costs should be food, electricity, and labour (guards). Economies of scale bring the per-prisoner cost all the way down.
This is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a long time.
> Well either it's achievable, or your minimum wage is so grossly low that you have much bigger problems than the costs of incarceration.
This is pretty widely recognized as the case for anyone not ideologically predisposed to reject the basic arithmetic involved.
> You have people (mostly) locked in a building and you feed them 3 times a day. The biggest costs should be food, electricity, and labour (guards).
Even by the actual reality of prison standards, that’s abusive. What about medical and mental health costs? What about even meager efforts of rehabilitation? Are the guards actual professionals trained to keep the inmates safe (from one another, other guards)?
> Economies of scale bring the per-prisoner cost all the way down.
This is bonkers!!! Why are we talking about economies of scale at all? Our goal should be to eliminate the need to house people in bondage against their will, not to reap the economic benefits of increasing their numbers.
>You have people (mostly) locked in a building and you feed them 3 times a day. The biggest costs should be food, electricity, and labour (guards).
don't forget housing, which makes up 40% of the CPI. You're also vastly underestimating the cost of labor. One article[1] cites the current inmate-to-staff ratio as 4.4-to-1, and that's considered high. I suspect that prison staff make far more than the minimum wage so I expect the staffing costs alone to cost more than the yearly minimum wage.
If housing is that high, it's because there's corruption somewhere. You put up a prison building and it should stand for 50 years with not that much maintenance. Housing should be the lowest cost of all.
> 4.4-to-1
That's absurd! Only the most hard to handle convicts would need such a ratio. Easily fixed by separating prisoners into different prisons based on the crime, likelihood of violence, medical conditions, etc.
These are all costs that could be easily reduced if the US wasn't so corrupt.
>If housing is that high, it's because there's corruption somewhere. You put up a prison building and it should stand for 50 years with not that much maintenance. Housing should be the lowest cost of all.
Building a prison isn't the same as building a bunch of suburban houses with white picket fences. It has to be secure from breakout attempts. Since it's a self-contained facility you also need to build the support structures (eg. dining hall, rec area, admin offices, etc.) as well.
>Easily fixed by separating prisoners into different prisons based on the crime, likelihood of violence, medical conditions, etc.
They already do that. Ever heard of maximum/medium/low security prisons?
>These are all costs that could be easily reduced if the US wasn't so corrupt.
Can you present some figures here, other than just blindly asserting that it must be corruption?
Burn it to the ground and start over? In a world designed to divide us, everyone agrees that US politics is broken, ans massive corruption is the reason why.
It paints a very different picture than the headline as we have all read it.
One might interpret the headline as out of control spending. The break down of cost per inmate seems outrageous and supports that idea... but what really seems to have happened is a reduction of inmate population without a corresponding reduction in employees. I would guess things are most explained by not wanting to take away people's livelihoods and increase unemployment.
Is "prison population reduced by 50% while employees remain constant" anywhere near as outrageous of an interpretation?"
Should we fire 10% of the DOC workforce every year?
> Should we fire 10% of the DOC workforce every year?
If the inmate population is declining by that amount, then absolutely yes we should. We didn't hire them in the first place to "give jobs" or "reduce unemployment". We (ostensibly!) hired them to guard prisoners.
When there are fewer prisoners to guard, you need fewer guards. It would be much cheaper to cover their education costs for a different line of work if you're worried about taking people's livelihoods away. (Which is a totally reasonable concern)
It reminds me of the quote about giving ditch diggers spoons instead of shovels to create more jobs:
For what it's worth I agree, but I would personally have a hard time firing 1000 people, throwing a wrench in their lives. Especially during a pandemic and especially with poor social programs.
When I look at this I am not outraged by the spending. I am outraged by the lack of federal social programs that directly burden the department of corrections with things like health care and retirement. The federal government should be handling these and reaping the economies of scale benefits of doing so.
I read that graph as tracking the ratio over a decade. Yeah, during the pandemic, by all means freeze normal labor calculations and whatnot. But in the period from 2010 to 2019, as the population was slowly declining, there should have been layoffs (or, at least no new recruitment?). Somehow the staffing levels need to be grounded in reality.
And I'm with you. I could never be the axe man. But then again I could also never be a prison guard, so there's that :)
250k/inmate/year still seems high and that would be worst case putting 100% of expense to there wages so yes it'd still be outrageous (outside of the outrage of a constant level of workforce for that long).
It’s a shame the article doesn’t offer any hints as to why. I’m sure that we can point the finger at lobbyists and grift, but a big spike in 2020 probably is COVID related?
A lot of police work is not security work. That is the fundamental disconnect. People tend to want basic security protections. Do they really care if someone is secretly taking drugs if it doesn't lead to security threatening behaviors? Only a very small moralizing and authoritarian few.
The conditions? America has great conditions. The standard of living is high, life expectancy has gone up over time, we have numerous safety nets like SNAP, and our innovations have vastly improved quality of life for all income levels.
The conditions are not good enough for those who are grossly irresponsible, or desire luxuries they can’t afford. That includes people wanting to live in expensive and desirable locations that don’t match their ability to generate income. But people aren’t entitled to every luxury they desire. I feel like this basic personal responsibility has been ignored in our recent political discourse.
Because a substantial portion of crimes aren’t desperate attempts at survival, I’m not convinced that abolishing prisons or police will do anything except expose the rest of us to a chaotic and unsafe life. If we want to explore that direction we have to vote to fund small contained experiments that we can expand if they work, without jumping straight to defunding or abolishing services that keep us safe.
As an aside - we may disagree about the effectiveness or level of safety nets, and that’s a fair conversation to hold on its own. However immigrants from humble beginnings regularly manage to make it here without resorting to criminality. I feel like it’s not the conditions at play, but other factors, such as individual choices and behaviors and culture.
Every reasonable person understands the need to reform the entire "justice system", from the police officer to the prosecutor's office to the legislature, but its not useful to ignore reality and pretend we live in a fantasy world where there aren't murderers, rapists and child molesters roaming around. A country of hundreds of millions of people is never going to be a utopian place without the need for laws, people who enforce the laws or places to put people who break the laws. Those who say we should abolish prisons and/or police either don't really mean "abolish", or aren't serious people with a grasp of objective reality. Those in the former category should drop the "abolish" rhetoric and say what they mean (whether that's reform, restructure, downsize). Those in the latter category are not mentally fit to be included in the debate.
At face value I agree, but any time the answer seems easy or obvious, its worth pondering complexities. The following questions are not meant to prove a point or be answered, the purpose is to showcase complexity:
What if corrections costs are not due to malfeasance or inefficiency, but due to it being a jobs program for relatively unskilled labor? If we applied skilled labor to the problem, how would we deal with the displaced unskilled labor? What is the opportunity cost of training people for rehabilitating criminals rather than improving our professionals mental health/productivity or STEM training? Is the rehabilitation cost worth more than paying teachers more?
It doesn't take long living in San Francisco to have your window bashed in or bike stolen. What would you do with those people? What would you do with unrepentant murderers and rapists? What would you do for people who derive social standing through violence? Clearly police and prison is useful to society. Clearly it would be ideal to turn criminals into tax paying, law abiding citizens.
There is a cold blooded cost/benefit analysis that can be made. There is probably a rehabilitation cost that can be measured. If cost_of_rehabilitation > total_estimated_future_tax_revenues is it worth it? If we added several more factors to the equation, maybe good_will_cost, cost_of_incarceration, opportunity_cost, etc, I think everyone will agree there is a potential model that can be applied to the problem, even if it doesn't feel good to be so objective.
I don't think we have a recipe for what rehabilitation looks like. Is it ethical to perform "rehabilitation" experiments on prisoners? What is the plan for training and the labor cost increase for skilled labor? What is the plan for creating a rehabilitation program?
> Now you see what abolish prisons and police is.
This phrase is meant to be provocative and energize a certain set of ideals (specifically being anti-authority). It doesn't appeal to moderates at all. The fact NPR and every other news source had to break it down for begrudging acceptance really hurts it's message. The message is justice for all, and if police are above the law, then there is no justice. If the color of your skin puts you at a higher chance of persecution, then there is no justice. If the culture someone grows up in is too poor or disadvantaged to meet basic needs for money or respect, and crime is the only or easiest way to fulfill them, then there is no justice.
Our implementations of prison and police are poor. There is a very clear cultural problem. They need reform, not abolition. This phrase hinders reform because it's literal meaning is far from what it means when someone says it.
The fact NPR and every other news source had to break it down for begrudging acceptance really hurts it's message.
Not necessarily. Provocative statements can drive engagement by the extremes without costing you the moderates. This has worked really well for the right wing in the US, whose moderates flocked to a candidate who often offended them and worked against their stated priorities, rather than vote for a moderate candidate from the other party.
Moderation is good governance but often bad politics. It's boring, and people can't be enthusiastic about it.
The left and right are not symmetric with respect to that, and it's hard to tell whether "defund the police" is a slogan that usefully shifts the Overton window or merely demoralizes the center-left. It is certain, though, that it doesn't really matter what it does to the center-right: they are very unlikely to vote for even the most centrist candidate from the nominally left wing party.
So you could say that the fact that NPR has to explain it is more useful than more moderate measures that would get less airtime. It's nearly impossible to quantify that, but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, either.
One of the chief takeaways of the 19th century (not just in the United States, but around the world) seems to be lost on us today: slavery is expensive.
What we have here is a system wherein cheap labor is provided to the war machine, but the accoutrements of the bondage are exorbitant, so these costs are spread across society. It's the economics of the fugitive slave laws all over again.
Andrew Yang made a related point about the $1k/month Freedom Dividend (UBI). if you're in prison, you don't get it. more incentive to stay out and easier given the guaranteed income of at least $1k/mo.
I don't recall Yang making that specific point; I'm interested in a link if you have one handy.
It seems awful to me to give the state an even greater incentive to enslave people, and also deeply inequitable to incarcerated folks, given that so few even had a trial.
The whole point of the article is they were spending ~42,000$ per month per inmate. If they were instead spending 1,000$ per month per person, they could afford to be paying that to ten times as many people and still be spending a quarter of what they are now.
Plus with the added bonus of (hopefully) less crime.
I'm not claiming those numbers are accurate, but as presented, it's a saving to keep people out of jail, not a cost.
Besides, right now there's obviously a financial incentive to keep people out of jail, yet here we are, with the US having the highest portion of their population in jail of any country in the world. The financial incentive to the state obviously isn't working now.
Does it really incentivize the state to incarcerate more people? Surely it costs more than 1k/month to keep someone in prison even in more cost-efficient locales.
The state obviously already has incentives to create pools of extremely cheap labor. Saving $1,000 is not much extra I'll grant, but it's still an additional incentive in the wrong direction.
Society is spending a lot of money (far too much money) to keep dangerous people outside of society. That New York can't do this competently or cost-effectively does not mean that society would be better off if these people were put back on the street.
A larger question is whether anyone can warehouse prisoners cost effectively. That's when you start thinking about exile, banishment to a remote island, or other mechanisms of expelling dangerous/undesirable people without actually locking them up in a small room for years. This latter point is indeed not necessary to protect society and seems to be unnecessarily costly. The problem is that no other society is likely to accept New York's criminal classes -- we have run out of Australias. In a world without Australias, another option might be to pay some other country to take them, revoking their US citizenship and preventing re-entry for a certain number of years equal to the time of their sentence (or permanently in the case of murder). That would be much cheaper than keeping them in prison, and I'm sure you could find a number of countries willing to take them for 10% of what New York spends per year, as many nations have a GDP per capita far less than 50K/year, and would even be able to furnish a decent quality of life for half that and keep the rest for themselves.
This kind of assumption about prisoners is unhelpful. Not everyone who goes to jail is "dangerous". Laws are made based on the lowest common denominator, not universal demarcations between goodies vs baddies.
Ex-con here, got in trouble about a decade ago (non-violent crime) when I was in my early 30s. Did my year inside and didn't even get into any fights. Turns out most prisoners are actually fairly reasonable if you don't go causing trouble with them. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, that's all you have to do.
I kind of found prison beneficial, in that it gave me time to reflect on how I had been shooting myself in the foot, and what I should do to be a better person in future. And I haven't been in any trouble since leaving.
But was it the optimal way for me to learn the lessons I needed to learn? I'm not sure about the answer to that question, but I can tell you what would have been a really stupid idea: pack me off to some corrupt 3rd world country for a year without easy ways for friends and family to visit me and support my transition back out into the community after release.
> This kind of assumption about prisoners is unhelpful.
It is a category error to call my statement helpful or unhelpful, since it's not my intention to help further any kind of agenda other than basic realism.
People, when they sit down in a bar, want some assurance that the person sitting next to them didn't get into a fight and smash a broken bottle into their neighbor's face. People taking their kids to school would like to know that their teacher didn't sleep with the kids. People sleeping in their homes at night would like to know that there isn't someone breaking and entering into their homes. People saving for their retirement would like to know that someone isn't running off with their pension. Someone running a business would like to know that there aren't burglars walking around that break into shops at night and steal their inventory. Everyone wants those who do this gone, gone from the group. Some may also want them punished, but I'm not being emotional here. Others fantasize about reforming people, when there is scant evidence that this is possible, but one way or another, society needs to purge itself of its criminal classes.
Note that not all of the above are "violent", but for society to work there needs to be cooperation, and for cooperation to work there needs to be trust. In order to maintain a steady state in which you can trust your neighbors well enough to be part of an advanced high-trust society, certain people who abuse that trust need to be removed from society, because not everyone is or can be trustworthy. In fact, it matters not at all who they are or why they did what they did. All that matters is their impact on social trust and their suitability for being part of the cooperating group. Hence my suggestion that we try to find some other group for them, rather than locking them up in a little room.
If you do not do that, you simply lose the high-trust society. Now there are men with shotguns guarding the entrance to every store. Bars around every window. And the whole society becomes a type of dysfunctional prison for everyone. Enormous costs are borne by everyone when we lose social trust, and it is the desire to avoid these costs that is the reason why we kick people out that we no longer trust to be peaceful, law abiding members of the group. There are many societies which don't have this trust, and very few of us would want to live there. There you often see the wealthy hiring their own private security and maintaining their own separate little bubble while everyone else is subject to the vagaries of a low-trust society. As the US becomes more "liberal" in attitudes, the same thing is happening here, except home prices effectively segregate into bubbles of high and low trust. Gated communities are becoming much more popular.
Those of us who still believe that a high trust society is possible in the US value being able to walk down the street without being assaulted, or that we don't need to live in a gated community with constant armed patrols, we don't want to program our cars to avoid low income areas. And this luxury should be afforded to everyone, not just those who can afford to self-segregate into high income bubbles. But in order have a high trust society, we have to expel a certain subset. It doesn't particularly matter if you don't like that this is a basic trade off.
> Not everyone who goes to jail is "dangerous"
There is a huge focus on violence, as if it's OK to say, burn down buildings, loot pension funds, or break into homes as long as no one gets hurt physically. The arsonist or conman need to be removed from a cooperating society just as much as the man who assaults people in bars. A lot more than a lack of violence is required in order for cooperation to be possible. Before deciding whether theft should be grounds for removal from society, go to a place where theft is very common and see how you enjoy living there. Look at the enormous security costs that must be paid by everyone. Look at the suspicious treatment everyone receives. Then decide whether removing people who serially steal is a worthwhile goal.
Now in terms of whether our laws have this right, that's a question for a debate on judicial reform, not prison reform. If you want to make the case that a certain type of crime doesn't warrant a prison sentence, that's fine by me, but IMO this is off-topic.
> A lot more than a lack of violence is required in order for cooperation to be possible.
You predicated everything you said on the dangerousness of criminals. Now it seems like you're backpedalling.
Overall, your response shows a tendency towards hyperbole. How to manage crime is a complicated topic; you seem prone to catastrophising the worst, and this catastrophising leads to unrealistic conclusions like "let's pack them all away and make them a problem for some other country."
There are lots of things we would like to trust about people around us. Eg, we would like to trust that we can make mistakes in life and that there is a way to come back from those mistakes.
No, I said "dangerous", not violent, and specifically those who are a threat to the public order. You interpreted that to mean only "violent", but I include arsonists, burglars, those who sexually assault, and those who steal pension funds as "dangerous to society", just as much as those who assault and kill.
This is completely obvious to most people. Others talk about "peaceful protests" when a city is burned to the ground and think there is some magical line that allows one to destroy a person's home and livelihood but as long as no one is punched, then it's OK and no prison time is needed.
The primary goal of the penitentiary system is to reform criminals and to reintegrate them into society as productive members. A reformed criminal is worth infinitely more than a person who you sent away and who is now contributing zero. We should focus on improving this high-level function of prisons, rather than look for new australias.
But as far as NYC goes: yes, 500k is a lot. NY taxpayers should look into why it costs so much.
I don't think people agree on the primary goal. Most people think there is an element of justice and repaying a debt to society. Also keeping them off the streets so they can't do more harm. Certainly rehabilitation comes into play as well, but I don't think society would accept pure rehabilitation, even if the data supported it.
For example, imagine if data shows the best way to rehabilitate any criminal is to give them 1mil. Imagine the uproar from the families of murder or rape victims at the policy. We just wouldn't accept it.
I don’t think that’s the goal or at least not a primary goal. I would say the main goal is to contain criminals so the rest of society can live without impact from their harmful actions. The second goal, for me at least, is to create consequences that are very real and difficult to bear, to deter other would-be criminals. The next goal down might be reform or rehabilitation, but as a taxpayer I am just as happy to contain the problem if it is cheaper to do so. I’m not sure I’m missing anything with the “zero productiveness” you’re talking about.
That's the goal on paper. In practise it seems like it's mostly a 'make the problem go away' facility as people going in don't generally come out 'better'. And once you've been, you're tainted for life. So does it make anything better? Does it 'reform' anyone? So far it seems to be mostly punishment and control and nothing else.
My take is that a lot of the people jailed, aren't that dangerous.
Issues with Education, Mental Health, Crappy Families, Substance abuse etc all seem to wash up in the criminal justice system - like somebody being lazy with their exception handling.
If I had to guess why it's not working, it's that every cog in the system is doing the job they've been asked to do (police are arresting, prosecutors are sentencing, jailers are filling shiny jails etc). There's no single person responsible for the system, who's in a position to change it. You'd think a politician might try - but all opposing sides will take a pop at 'soft on crime' if they try. Mercy/Pragmatism doesn't play well.
Similar to those giant soviet factories - there's one way to do it, it's always been done this way and each worker will add a cog to keep those shitty tractors coming off the production line. Nobody will be rewarded for solving the problem.
Actually, maybe that's the answer - free-market rehabilitation. At sentencing put fulfilment of sentence out to tender - with cash payable on results. 50% up front, then 10% a year after release until they re-offend (or die).
There's a sci-fi novel I read recently that puts criminals on islands that are inaccessible by any means other than air. The worst sentences are sent there for life in exile, to fend for themselves.
Other lesser crimes are kept in your normal prison.
Federal prisons are starting the process of leaving private contracts which is great. We need to force all states to do the same. Personal freedom needs to be free from market pressures and money. In az there was recently an inmate management software update which was rushed for financial reasons. A whistleblower recently revealed the software is unable to handle certain laws causing people to stay imprisoned possibly 2x longer than the law requires.