It's not about what criminals deserve, it's about how to make sure they stop being criminals. A broke ex-con without a support network is much more likely to return to crime just to survive. Helping them avoid that is a net gain to society as a whole, whether they deserve it or not.

Focusing on what people "deserve", instead of on what's best for society, is the reason the US has the worst health care in the western world while also spending more tax money on health care per capita than anyone else on the planet. We'd rather spend 10 dollars making sure no one ever gets more than their fair share than risk one dollar going to someone who doesn't "deserve" it.

Except they're not really "bad actors"

Most people in prison today are there because of "drug offenses" which usually means they got caught doing drugs themselves (not dealing drugs or being involved in drug induced crimes).

This is a REALLY common misconception.

Including "drug offenses" the U.S. incarceration rate is 693 per 100,000.

Excluding "drug offenses" the U.S. incarceration rate is still 625 per 100,000.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/releasing-drug-offender...

I agree with you that we should get the drug offenders out. But the characterizations that "most people are in prison for drug offenses" should be updated.

Is incarceration rate not somewhat deceptive though? A more interesting statistic would be how many of each 100,000 had ever spent time in prison.

From here on is only speculation and I'll do a deeper dive when I'm not on a phone. I'd like to see the rest of the statistics broken down by offense. Additionally I suspect that drug offenses would lead to repeated incarceration and perhaps eventually worse offenses.

Most violent offenses are committed in the context of existing relationships though, so there are certainly non-policy and certainly non-drug-policy ways to address crime in the United States.

The linked article is interesting but also slightly misrepresented. The 693 number is incarcerations without federal drug offenses. The change would be from 725/100k to 625/100k across state and federal, which is a slightly more significant change.

Note, you have a minor misquote of the statistic from the article; it's 725 per 100000:

> From BJS [Bureau of Justice Statistics], [...] an incarceration rate of about 725 people per 100,000 population.

> Suppose every federal drug offender were released today. That would cut the incarceration rate to about 693 inmates per 100,000 population. Suppose further that every drug offender in a state prison were also released. That would get the rate down to 625

This is linked elsewhere in the thread (as well as that FiveThirtyEight article), but it bears repeating here: as far as the federal incarceration rate goes, the number is actually 46% [1]. Which isn't a majority, but it's damn close — and way too high.

(It should go without saying that these are all simplistic lenses on a very complex, multifaceted problem, and in reality many parts of the justice system need reform.)

[1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

I think you are wrong about "the whole point of money" and do not believe that profit is a requirement for currency to function. Money has many simple purposes outside of profit.

Even taking your claim at face value, whether or not someone "deserves" to benefit from some profit-based exchange of labor for currency seems irrelevant. If work has a concrete value and someone is unable to receive fair compensation for that work, and all of the value is received by someone else who did not do the work, this is inherently unfair and unethical (and by definition, slavery).

The point of a medium of exchange (money) is to make it easy for there to be a coincidence of wants between people who might transact. It has nothing to do with whether you're a "good" or "bad" actor.

Well... sure, but it depends on how you look at it.

In a monetary society (as opposed to credit or barter (intermediary like you suggest) — monetary circuitist terminology), money is created as a debt/credit tuple to facilitate an intertemporal private contract (tit-for-tat), of which cash is a physical token representation. The etymology of “credit” is “faith”, “honor”, “merit” etc. That of debt, at least in some germanic languages (“schuld”) literally means “guilt” and has connotations of sin and atonement.

I don't think arguments from etymology are of much relevance in modern economics, to put it mildly.

All value derives from subjective meanings, so you actually couldn't be more wrong

Money is a tool, nothing more (ideologically). Calling on ideology to restrict potentially helpful uses of a tool is a dangerous path to tread.

No matter what crime someone's committed, they're still a person, and if our goal is more productive members of society, cutting people off from the main tool for goods exchange will not move us toward that goal.

Is it preferred to release two bad actors or to release two good actors? Being in prison is a punishment, but it is also rehabilitation (ideally).

> Most people who end up in prison were “bad actors” by definition.

Disagree. Majority of the offenders are there for non-violent drug offenses. It is also possible some of them are serving sentences for crimes that are no more crimes. California has liberalized marijuana but the prisoners are still in jail for the crimes that no more crimes.

False.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/releasing-drug-offender...

>Majority of the offenders are there for non-violent drug offenses.

I don't believe this is true.

If only we had access to some kind of worldwide network which would allows us t-

-found it.

https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

46% drug offenses, 6.8% immigration and we’re already past the 50% mark. That as they say, is a majority.

Edit: Looking at all populations state, federal, local yields: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html

Note: But the offense data oversimplifies how people interact with the criminal justice system. A person in prison for multiple offenses is reported only for the most serious offense so, for example, there are people in prison for “violent” offenses who might have also been convicted of a drug offense. Further, almost all convictions are the result of plea bargains, where people plead guilty to a lesser offense, perhaps of a different category or one that they may not have actually committed.

Why does this data disagree hugely with that?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/releasing-drug-offender...

It doesn't; it just lumps the federal and state incarceration rates together to draw its conclusion. From the FiveThirtyEight article:

> According to the Bureau of Prisons, there are 207,847 people incarcerated in federal prisons. Roughly half (48.6 percent) are in for drug offenses.

Additionally, the words "Bureau of Prisons" are actually a link to the same site GW150914 is citing (https://bop.gov/about/statistics/).

This doesn't count state systems, including those and it's ~20% drug offenses.