If there's one thing we don't need, it's a fiscal incentive for the government to jail people.

Prison is meant to be a punishment for crimes and (depending on who you ask) an opportunity for rehabilitation. Without the latter you're going to have way more of the former.

I'm not saying that inmates should have 24/7 free phone calls, free video calls, etc but price gouging a captive (no pun intended) audience isn't right either.

This, public or private, the root of the problem is that private companies and unions financially benefit from a larger prison population and both have money and political power to lobby effectively.

Remove the financial incentive that has bad effects and you get a better system.

Beside the points others made here that it isn't, and it shouldn't be, I'd like to invite you to think about the ethical and practical implications of punishing someone over, and over, and over again for years or even decades, for an action that usually took only a very, very small fraction of time compared to the length of "punishment". The very idea flies in the face of... well any kind of experience with people and how they learn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles

Personally, I think we've gone too far down the 'retributive' route without corresponding investments in rehabilitation, but a lot of Americans prefer to lock the door and throw away the key.

You can look at other societies where they spend more time rehabilitating offenders (e.g. Norway), and Norway does have lower crime rates, but which way does causation run? You can argue that rehabilitation lowers crime rates, or you can argue that low crime rates makes the society tolerant of relatively lenient punishment.

And if it turns out that retributive punishment does work effectively, are you willing to pay for increased crime rates just to find out that our current system is alright?

This type of what-if paralysis isn't rationally supportable. Some similar examples to show where the logic fails:

And if particle accelerators do produce black holes, are you willing to destroy the planet just to prove it?

And if it turns out Cthulhu does live on the moon, are you willing to unleash its wrath by visiting?

Instead of paranoid fear of worst-case hypotheticals, we should be using empirical evidence to guide decisions. We can look at other countries. We can look at differences between states and counties. We can conduct experiments in smaller areas and roll them out over time if they work. Or we can just have some basic human empathy.

Its funny how the goal that I wanted to work towards changed from that game to a successful life.

In some other countries prison is seen as a place for rehabilitation or at worst a way to protect the public from unstable individuals.

As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now.

Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down.

I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.

Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions.

I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.

So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens.

That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.

Using prisons as a warehouse for the mentally ill is another problem. These people should be handled differently than general population in a prison.

IMO, you go to prison to reflect on your choices, work on underlying issues and come out a stronger person. It's _very_ hard to do so with mentally ill roommates, rape, gangs, etc all around you.

I am a "victim" of an actual crime. My younger brother was hit by a car crossing the street. The driver was distracted and going >10 mph over the limit in a residential area. This individual had no insurance. No lawsuit was ever filed.

And the last people who should define punishments are victims of crimes, because our own instincts for revenge are wholly miscalibrated for modern society. I've had thousands of dollars of irreplaceable equipment stolen from me, some of which I designed myself, and yet I rationally accept that the perpetrators (never caught) shouldn't be strung up in the proverbial town square for all to see.

Until about two centuries ago, it was not all that common to imprison people as a punishment. It was mainly used to confine those awaiting trial, and to induce compliance (contempt of court, debtor prisons etc). Being convicted of an actual crime generally warranted some form or combination of fines, public shaming, corporal punishment, banishment, or execution.

Then, during the 17th century, the society had started to increasingly reject torture in general, and death penalty for relatively minor crimes (theft etc). Conveniently, that's also when European countries acquired sparsely populated lands that they wanted to settle ASAP, and so penal colonies were born, and replaced a significant chunk of previous death penalty convictions. That system eventually inspired the creation of proper prisons as we know them today.

Ironically, if you read about the prominent people behind the movement that made it happen, most of them subscribed to "prison as repentance" theory, rather than punishment. It's why it was seen as so progressive and radical for its day.

We all know how well that worked out.

Not in my experience. But that's just an anecdote and no doubt there is a lot of data backing your assertion. I also suspect that this is different for different countries.

The question should probably be: Why should any sane person in the prison industry be for it?

They basically are. See "commissions": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/prison-phone-comp...

This mentality is the outgrowth of "us-vs-them", but most people are closer to being "them" than they really know. If you've gotten behind the wheel of a car over the limit 3 or more times, in most states, you deserve to be prisoner.