Re:Upgrade your jail cell for a price
by ThrustVectoring on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:01PM
(#13835425)
Incentives matter. If you allow prisons to charge for improved prisoner experience, you make the default prison experience the BATNA for negotiating how much money you give the folks running the prison.
Like, if you pay ransoms when terrorists take Americans hostage, you're funding kidnap-Americans-and-ransom-them businesses. If you pay prisons for more humane treatment, you're funding imprison-people-and-threaten-them-with-inhumane-conditions businesses.
IMO, it should be illegal for prisons to get money from prisoners. There's a bunch of really shitty things that inevitably happen. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of-inmate-...
> we simply can't afford it
We can. By simply releasing basically every prisoner. Literally less than 1% are truly such threats to society as to require the kind of sequestration that only prison can provide.
EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via taxation,] seems to offset that.